Beyond the core P2P protocol, Waku Relay, which forms the backbone of the Waku network, Waku nodes can offer additional services to lightweight nodes. These Waku Services include Waku Store (querying historical messages), Waku Filter (subscribing to specific message subsets), and Waku Lightpush (publishing messages to the network).

Currently, dApp developers using Waku must operate their own nodes to provide these services to their users. This increases maintenance effort and creates centralization risks. A Waku Service Marketplace could offer an alternative: instead of running infrastructure themselves, developers would pay independent providers to serve their users directly. This model reduces operational complexity while keeping the network decentralized.

In a marketplace model, service providers would compete based on reliability and cost. Since Waku Services operate off-chain, there is no direct cryptographic link between performance and payment. To prevent fraud, marketplace consumers would maintain a reputation system to track provider reliability, ensuring that those offering poor service do not receive new orders. Developers could select providers dynamically, optimizing for performance, redundancy, and pricing. Additionally, a sovereign usage model would be possible—users could bypass the dApp developer entirely, paying providers directly and choosing their own service setup.

Sustainable incentives are critical to making this work. Providers need fair compensation to maintain service availability, ensuring a robust and censorship-resistant network. This approach removes the need for centralized infrastructure while offering greater flexibility to both developers and users.

This talk will present the technical vision, explore implementation challenges, and discuss how such a marketplace could function. Community feedback is essential to refining the concept and evaluating its feasibility.