I had first heard about Waves in 2017, although it had launched in June 2016, and have been following it closely ever since. Over this time, a lot has happened with Waves and I would like to share some of my learnings with you.

An Introduction To Waves

Waves is a proof of stake blockchain and cryptocurrency which allows you to create and launch your own customised tokens. The platform also enables users to trade via an in-built DEX. It also has in-built crowdfunding functionalities, and even integrated fiat currency gateways like USD/EUR/CNY in the wallet itself. All this, along with other aspects of the platform, enables Waves to offer users, businesses and developers a suite of feature-rich tools on a swift and secure platform. This will make life easier for startups and open up a new era of community-backed projects built on speed, trust, quick functionality and security on the blockchain.

At present, Waves is ranked #41 on coinmarketcap with a circulating supply of 100,000,000 Waves and a market cap of $270,377,000. Waves was recently listed on Huobi Pro on June 22nd with WAVES/BTC and WAVES/ETH trading pairs. You can sign up on Huobi Pro to track Waves and trade it on the secondary market here. At the time of this writing it is currently trading at 0.000442 BTC or $2.69 USD

Let’s Take A Deep DIve into Waves

Through the Waves platform, you can launch ICOs and fund your projects from around the world. The icing on the cake is that this isn’t a tedious and time consuming process - you can literally launch a token in a minute flat, without all the hassle and the process is less time consuming as compared to Ethereum.

Key Features That Are Making Waves (Pun Intended)

Waves NG - LPoS:

With the newly-launched Wave-NG LPoS (Leased Proof of Stake) consensus mechanism, Waves has become the fastest blockchain with a mind-boggling capacity of 6000 tx per second. In addition to that, all this is done on-chain. Waves NG was first time implemented on Waves blockchain in the last quarter of 2017 and was very well received by the community. And why not… 6000 tx per second is indeed truly impressive.

LPoS (Leased Proof of Stake) Consensus Mechanism Explained:

Unlike bitcoin which uses Proof of Work where miners are rewarded for securing the network with new blocks of coins, or a regular proof-of-stake approach such as NEO, in which staking nodes are rewarded in proportion to their coin balances, Waves has implemented a consensus system called Leased Proof of Stake (LPoS).

The network is secured by active nodes, which require a balance of at least 10,000 WAVES to generate blocks. Whilst anyone can run a mining node if they have this amount, it is possible for users to lease or lend their balance to a node, giving them additional ‘weight’ in the network. The extra rewards earned by the node are then shared with those who have leased balances to them, and nodes will naturally compete to offer leasers the best deal. Leased WAVES remain in the full control of the account holder, and can be transferred or exchanged at any point.

Further to this, all Waves were forged in the genesis block, you will not receive a Waves reward for creating a new block, but in order to make forging more profitable the Waves platform created a token called Miners Reward Token (MRT). You will receive all transaction fees and a predetermined amount of MRT for every new block you created. As a Waves token, MRT can be transferred and traded freely on Waves’ decentralised exchange (DEX).

WavesDex:

2018 is the year of the decentralised exchange in my opinion. And WavesDex is one of the best Dexes out there. Built on the Waves blockchain, WavesDex is a decentralized exchanged which allows users to trade their BTC ETH and other coins in exchange for Waves (or any other asset token issued on the Waves platform). What’s awesome is that it has fiat gateways like EUR, USD etc for the fiat currency lovers. WavesDex can be used on the Waves client accessible on desktop, mobile as well as standalone versions. You can find them all here: https://wavesplatform.com/product.

By trading on a centralized exchange, you risk losing your funds in the event of hacking, the main advantage of WavesDex is that the money is always stored in your wallet, and the match only compares orders. This means that you retain complete control over your funds when trading them on our decentralised exchange.

Tokenisation

Crowdfunding is a breeze on Waves. You can make your own custom tokens or cryptocurrencies in one minute on the Waves platform. Now that’s fast! For doing this, you will require a minimum of 1 WAVES token to do so. After this you get to decide on the token name, supply, decimal places etc. All aspects are in your hands and the process is easy and seamless.

Fiat Gateways

WavesDex has Fiat Gateways such as USD/EUR/CNY will allow you to exchange any token issued on the Waves platform (or any other cryptocurrency like BTC/ETH) for “real” money, which can be deposited in a bank.

Future of Waves and Use Cases

There are a ton of use cases some of which are upcoming and some of which are already in production.

To begin with there’s Waves lab. Waves Lab is a blockchain technology incubator that focuses on pre-ICO projects and teams. Waves Lab is a focused startup incubator for talented visionaries creating disruptive solutions to real-world problems using the Waves Platform infrastructure. It is truly a path-breaking initiative and is sure to steer Waves in a positive direction.

Other projects and use cases include:

Tokenomica – A transparent venture capital organization.

Upcoin – A political engagement initiative.

ZrCoin – A green manufacturing technology business.

MobileGo – A marketing drive for a mobile gaming platform.

EncryptoTel – A secure telecommunications infrastructure company.

Incent – A blockchain loyalty scheme.

In addition to these, there are many more innovations that I’m surely looking forward to. A brief look at their roadmap will give you a good indication of the where the project is headed and what you can expect going forward.

Key Milestones:

Early in the year, waves launched their decentralised exchange (DEX), which has seen increasing activity as it becomes established as a popular trading platform. Seven-figure daily volumes are now the norm.

Q2 saw them launching balance leasing, announcing a partnership with Microsoft Azure, and releasing their first iteration of Waves mobile wallet. DEX functionality was added to this in the summer, along with the announcement of collaboration with Deloitte, which is aimed at shaping the regulatory framework around blockchain and ICOs, and ensuring token sales on Waves meet best practice.

The latter part of 2017 saw the first iteration of Waves platform, with the Waves Client 1.0 launched at a special event in Amsterdam. The event was hosted in the Primalbase offices, and over the coming months Waves plans to expand our presence around the world as the company opens new offices in London, Singapore and New York. The Waves team will be establishing permanent bases in each of these locations, due to close partnerships with Primalbase .

The flagship 1.0 release entailed a complete overhaul of the client, including a totally new look and feel for the DEX, as well as coinciding with a rebrand and new logo. Behind the scenes, the Waves-NG protocol was activated, bringing a massive increase in transaction capacity to the network and enabling Waves to scale and become a truly mass-market blockchain platform.

An update of the iOS and Android apps to reflect the new look and feel of the desktop wallet, and to allow users to access all of the functionality of the 1.0 client.

2017 saw many ICOs take place on Waves, including the very successful MobileGo, ZrCoin and EncryptoTel projects. Upwards of $150 million has been collected using the platform, with a list of new projects lined up for 2018. Other highlights for the year include Tokenomica — “JP Morgan for the crypto world”, which has just received a green light from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, enabling fully-compliant ICOs; a Liquidity Fund for DEX and airdrop of the Liquid token to WCT and WAVES holders; the first Turkish Lira (TRY) gateway; and the Waves Lab, a blockchain incubator that will offer seed funding, legal advice and marketing assistance to Waves entrepreneurs.

Personally, Tokenomica is one project which will soon be launching which I’m particularly excited about.This is an organisation that will enable compliant crowdfunds and share offerings on the blockchain, with full KYC where necessary. This is expected to be a big use case for Waves, and one that will bring many new users to their ecosystem. I’m also looking forward to the release of Blockchain OS 2.0: the second iteration of the Waves reworked client. Multisignature transactions and a blockchain messaging system that is in the works are some other features I’m looking forward to.

A Look At The Waves Team

Sasha Ivanov – CEO and Founder

Sasha is a physicist by education and has been involved in payment systems software development. With blockchain technology, he launched the first instant cryptocurrency exchange coinomat.com.

Martin Spodymek – Head Community Manager

Martin supports Waves for tech support and marketing. He is an engineer and is fascinated by blockchain technology and cryptography as a whole.

Alexey Kiselev – Back End Developer

Alexey graduated from Moscow State Technical University and a passionate programmer.

Sergey Ishchenko – Front End Developer

Sergey is a software engineer who specialises in Java with over ten years of experience. His primary responsibility on the Waves project is the Lite Client development and Distributed Team Coordination.

You can see the Waves team list here on Linkedin.

The Final Verdict

All in all, and as you can tell by now, the future looks very promising for Waves. I would like to add a disclaimer here that I do not own any Waves, but I will surely be looking forward to investing after getting myself up to speed with all the latest offerings and developments. I feel the price is at an attractive level and supply is good too. I’ve been a long-time follower of Waves so I might be a bit biased, but I believe that this project has merits that are hard to ignore and I will soon be looking to make some positions by getting my hands on some tokens at Huobi Pro. If you too would like to purchase some Waves on Huobi Pro, feel free to sign up here. I hope you liked this article, feel free to drop a comment with your thoughts about Waves and crypto in general. You can also find out more information about Waves and Huobi as well, in the links below.

Cheers!

Huobi Pro Official Community and Social Media Channels:

Website: huobi.pro

Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/huobipro/

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/Huobi_Pro

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/huobipro/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/Huobipro

Medium: https://medium.com/@huobipro

Waves Resources:

Website: https://wavesplatform.com/

Join Wavescommunity: http://wavescommunity.com/

Join Waves News channel: https://t.me/wavesnews

Join Waves Twitter: http://twitter.com/wavesplatform

Join Waves Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wavesplatform/