A Moscow business incubator, in partnership with Waves, a decentralized platform for crowdfunding and community management, launched the second round of a fintech program to develop projects with blockchain technology, particularly for banks and fintech products. The focus is on Blockchain 2.0.

The Higher School of Economics in Moscow announced the second year of HSE(Pro)Fintech. Waves, a decentralized platform for crowdfunding, community management and National Settlement Depository, is the fintech’s section’s official partner.

The program develops projects for banks and their customers, investment systems, personal finance management systems, payments, peer-to-peer services, transfers and other fintech products.

Digital Asset Exchanges Struggle

Decentralized asset exchanges include the Counterparty, Nxt and BitShares platforms. None, however, have achieved significant traction, according to Waves.

One reason is they are small ecosystems. The assets traded had low liquidity and high spreads. Being decentralized platforms, there was not much accountability and a large portion of fraudulent and low-quality and assets.

Regulations were practically non-existent.

In addition, trading was slow on account of inherent block-time limitations of the blockchain, making it nearly impossible to attract legitimate new businesses and for these early decentralized exchanges to gain critical mass.

Also read: Counterparty brings Ethereum smart contracts to the bitcoin blockchain

Waves Releases Decentralized Exchange

Waves is working to address these problems with its DEX (decentralized exchange), which recently released on testnet. DEX allows any token to trade directly against any other token – as opposed to trading two tokens separately against a reference currency, as most other platforms require. It also features a new system that allows trades to execute in near real-time via a “Matcher,” which enables high-frequency trading but settled on the blockchain for security.

Additionally, fiat gateways are being developed to allow blockchain-based EUR, USD, CNY and other currency tokens. Gateways, which act as on- and off-ramps between traditional financial companies and a blockchain, oversee compliance in their regulatory jurisdictions. The Waves DEX is designed to enable speed, security, and compliance.

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