Implement RLN Membership Management

Estimated date of completion: 30 Sep 2025

Resources Required for 2025H2:

2 nwaku engineer for 2 months
1 js-waku engineer for 2 months
1 core research for 1 month
Support from Vac/ACZ to get zerokit working in the browser.

Deliver a native RLN library with a deliberate API to manage RLN memberships, as well as proof verification and generation. This includes extracting RLN Relay as a relay plugin validation strategy, that can then be passed internally to nwaku node as any other strategy.

Once delivered, usage of Chat SDK of RLN becomes possible, with clear API to instantiate nwaku library with RLN, as well as API to manage RLN membership.

Introduce RLN proof generation and validation in the Browser. RLN API should be similar across all implementations.

Finally, migrate to Status network L2 testnet and improve UX issues discovered via dogfooding such as rate of RPC Calls.

FURPS

See deliverables.

Risks

Risk	(Accept, Own, Mitigation)
Not all required improvements are yet identified	Dogfooding of the H1 delivery will enable identification of needed improvements, meaning this milestone may change in term of scope and schedule.
Dependencies on Nim Web3 library	Previous upgrade of nim web3 libraries have lead to various issues. The dependencies of said library is increasing, meaning potential delay in development.
Uncertainty regarding zerokit and wasm in the browser	UX-related property are yet to be explored with the new RLN smart contract. WASM loading and execution may have considerable impact on UX. Collaboration with Vac/ACZ will be required to adapt zerokit for the browser.
Smart Contract Changes & Expertise	We expect functional extension of RLN smart contract to potentialy store multiple roots, and maybe other improvement depending on dogfooding. The Solidity knowledge in the team is limited/non-existent so we would need to rely on Vac-SC or upskill.
API Refactoring	Extracting RLN as a validation plugin may ensue some API refactoring that may take longer than initially estimated. A conservative estimate will be done.
FFI to FFI interaction	The intent will be to have RLN and Waku SDK as 2 separate libraries that can be initialized in any language (e.g Golang). The nim to nim via FFI may raise unforeseen issues .

Deliverables