Waves: Q&A

Philipp Eryushev — CMO

1. Waves specs and how this translates to English for non-crypto speakers?

Waves is a proof-of-stake system, which means there’s no expensive or environmentally unsustainable mining, as there is in bitcoin. There’s a fixed supply of coins — 100 million — with no inflation. Waves was designed to make the most in-demand functionality easy to access, so that businesses would be able to integrate blockchain into their models with very low overheads.

2. What makes Waves unique, better than the other coins and why will it thrive?

There are several reasons and properties:

Very powerful features, but with a very user-friendly wallet design

No blockchain download necessary for everyday users

Very high scalability and throughput

Easy token creation and management

Fast decentralised exchange, with a UX similar to regular centralised crypto exchanges

A large and enthusiastic community!

3. How will Waves simplify the usage of crypto for mass adoption?

Waves is a toolkit. It offers powerful functionality, including token creation and peer-to-peer trading on the built-in decentralised exchange (DEX). All of that is accessible through APIs. That means people can use it directly, via the Waves wallet, and that developers can build their own Waves-powered applications too. The UX is very clean and elegant, and we’ve considerably reduced the barriers to entry for businesses.

4. How will Waves simplify the usage of smart contracts?

Ethereum’s smart contracts are very powerful, but dangerously so — as we’ve seen multiple times, mistakes and ambiguity are ruthlessly punished. Waves is taking an iterative approach. We’re releasing non-Turing complete contracts for simple tasks such as account controls, multi-sig, and so on. Then releasing more powerful smart contracts later this year. But we’re also removing much of the ambiguity and attack vectors of Ethereum by structuring our smart contract language differently, and ensuring you always know how much it will cost to execute a contract.

5. How will Waves tackle scalability? How will it stack up versus the rest?

Waves is already the fastest blockchain platform in existence. It uses the Waves-NG consensus algorithm and is capable of processing around 6,000 transactions per minute, which is an order of magnitude more than most other blockchains. Instead of miners being selected retrospectively and only then packaging pending transactions in a block, with Waves the next miner is chosen in advance and transactions added to the blockchain almost immediately. Waves-NG can probably be optimised for 1,000 tx/s, and side chains will be implemented in the future to further increase this.

6. How different is Waves from your closest competitor?

Waves is often compared to Ethereum, because both platforms are popular for launching new tokens, although they take very different approaches and do different things. Ethereum uses smart contracts to create new tokens, which are complex, expensive and can go horribly wrong if they’re not programmed correctly. Waves supports token creation in the core, so it’s a very fast, low-cost and straightforward process.

Beyond that, it’s very fast and easy to distribute tokens using Waves, and again it costs very little (again thanks to Waves-NG). Waves is becoming more and more popular for airdrops for that reason.

7. Who is behind Waves and can you talk a bit about their backgrounds?

Waves founder and CEO Sasha Ivanov is a graduate of Moscow State University and Leipzig University in Germany. From 2008–09 he was involved in programming bots to trade on the international forex markets, making use of artificial neural networks, later working on trading operations and neural network trading systems for banks. In 2016 he founded the Waves custom tokens blockchain platform, crowdfunding 29,445 BTC (around $16 million at the time).

8. How was/is Waves funded, can you tell a bit about the background story?

Waves was crowdfunded with 30,000 BTC — then around $16 million — back in 2016. It was launched in response to the clear market need for an enterprise-ready blockchain platform. At the time, there were no crypto platforms that offered the features that businesses needed. Waves prioritised speed and throughput, user experience, and straightforward, powerful token functionality. Further features like smart contracts and atomic swaps are being built on those foundations.

9. Does Waves have a marketing plan or strategy and can you explain it a bit?

We are focused on two things right now: delivering our current roadmap according to our plan, and encouraging developers to build their own projects with the help of our technology. Besides all the hard work that has taken place around our decentralised exchange — making it the best DEX on the market right now — we are strongly focused on the underlying technology. Most importantly, we are working on Turing-complete smart contracts that will unleash the full power of our platform to developers. We have a series of initiatives to help new and promising projects make their visions become reality, such as the Waves Lab incubator, a series of global events aimed at introducing developers to our technology, and lots of other new stuff that is in the works. So stay tuned: a lot of big news is coming soon.

10. What will the governance of Waves will be like by 2020?

Waves is introducing voting on the back of its smart contracts, and so it will become easier to conduct blockchain votes as part of our platform’s governance. This will ultimately extend to new token initiatives, too. Instead of there being centralised monitoring of new assets, the community as a whole will undertake a kind of collective due diligence around each new token sale. This will be extremely helpful for the community and for token issuers, since they will be able to gauge confidence in their projects and adjust them as necessary — and the community will be warned off obvious scams.

11. How will the Waves DEX differentiate itself amidst the surge of new DEX’s planned for deploying and existing, CryptoBridge, BarterDEX, Decred DEX and others?

Waves DEX uses both centralised and decentralised technologies, gaining the benefits of both. Centralised matchers ensure that trades are executed in near-real time, but blockchain settlement means funds are absolutely safe — security is dealt with by the Waves ledger. It’s a very promising approach that makes the DEX similar in style and performance to existing centralised exchanges.

12. Can you talk a bit about current network statistics and growth analysis (how is the volume on the DEX doing, number of funded wallets and number of transactions on the network)?

Currently we got the following stats:

>310,000 active wallets in total

6,323,342 USD — DEX average daily volume in June

≈16,000 tokens created in total

1,821,030 transactions in June

13. Does Waves have plans to branch out into other countries?

We already are! Waves’ summer roadshow has taken the team all around the world. And our ambassadors’ programme is designed to establish and build thriving Waves communities in those key blockchain hubs.

14. How is the Waves ambassador program coming along?

It’s been going great! In June we’ve organised 14 meetups in Canada, Russia, Algeria, Nigeria, Venezuela, Spain, Portugal, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Austria and Turkey, with 300 attendees.