Last week has seen a number of updates that show how the different elements in the Waves ecosystem will fit together and some of the benefits this will bring.

Waves Community Token and WBTC

The next tranche of WCT was distributed on the basis of WAVES balances, averaged over the daily snapshots from the previous month. A total of 1 million WCT tokens were sent to holders in February. There is still 70% of WCT supply to be distributed over the next 7 months.

Shortly afterwards, another round of Waves bitcoin tokens (WBTC) were sent to WCT holders. These now appear under the homepage of the client, in the Bitcoin tab, and will shortly be withdrawable to a bitcoin address using the built-in Waves <> Bitcoin gateway. In the meantime, holders can send them to Tidex, where they can be exchanged 1:1 for BTC. A number of Waves tokens have recently been added to Tidex, as well as new WAVES pairs for existing currencies that already trade against BTC.

Tech Updates

The Waves mobile app, BTC gateway and decentralized exchange, aka Matcher, are currently in heavy testing and being prepared for their initial releases.

Additionally, we expect to see LPoS (leased proof-of-stake) released on mainnet in March. The first code was merged into the master branch of the git repository today. This will allow all WAVES holders to lease their mining power to full nodes and receive rewards from transaction fees.

Crowdfunding News

Some major news comes in the form of GameCredits’ recent announcement. GameCredits is launching a mobile game store. This will be powered by the GameCredits (GAME) currency, enabling gamers to avoid the frictions that currently impact the transfer of money into, between and out of in-game economies. Several hundred game developers have already signed up to use this.

The MobileGo crowdsale will fund marketing for this platform. A proportion of revenues will be used to buy back tokens, whilst all of the activity on MobileGo will also feed through into the GAME economy.

There are several ways in which this will benefit Waves. MobileGo will exist as a token on both the Waves and Ethereum blockchains. Tokens bought with BTC, WAVES and GAME will be hosted on Waves, whilst those bought with ETH will be hosted on Ethereum. As with any CAT, this will immediately bring transaction volumes to Waves. Secondly, the ICO deposit tech created by Incent will be used for the crowdfund, with Incent being distributed as rewards to MobileGo investors — again increasing transaction volumes on Waves, as well as directly benefiting Incent holders through increased market demand.

Lastly, MobileGo will be the first ICO to use a new piece of ‘blockswap’ technology that allows tokens to exist simultaneously on both the Ethereum and Waves blockchains, and to travel between them trustlessly. This raises many new possibilities for dual-blockchain projects, enabling developers to use the unique functionality of both in the same project. It is encouraging to see synergies being built between Waves, Ethereum and GameCredits in this way.

In other crowdfunding news, ChronoBank’s ICO has ended. The project raised the equivalent of $5.4 million, including 385,963 WAVES. Labour Hour tokens will be issued on the Waves blockchain, amongst others, and a ChronoWaves wallet is in development.

Waves Nodes, Lite Client and Faucet

If you would like to run a full node, please download the latest mainnet release at https://github.com/wavesplatform/Waves/releases/. Anyone can run a node, but you will need at least 10,000 WAVES to generate blocks. You can read the installation guide here.

For regular users the Lite client can be downloaded from https://wavesplatform.com. Do not download the client from other sources for security reasons. (Please be aware that there have been issues with fake github repositories, as well as fake Twitter accounts and Slack identities.) Alternatively, the standalone Chrome app will automatically update as new versions are released.

Waves faucet, funded and developed by the community member Sphearis, can be found here http://www.wavesdrop.com/.

Waves Weekly Crypto Round-up

In episode #19, we hear from Sasha, as well as giving our regular market round-up.

Press and Articles

ICOnomy 0: How to run an ICO

Bitcoin Or Bust: Taking British Banking Out Of Exchanges (Forbes)

Can the Blockchain Scale? (Due)

Tidex Aiming to Use Waves “Matcher” Technology. A New Exchange with Zero-fee

Open blockchain Waves targets manufacturing with ‘Kickstarter on tokens’

Waves Community Token (Waves blog)

How to Mine Waves?

Multimedia

Improving Authenticated Dynamic Dictionaries (Real World Crypto 2017 video)

How Not Knowing Waves…(Interview)