Many new digital currencies also act as a platform for running smart contracts, applications that run on the blockchain. Waves coin, as an example, hopes to set itself apart from the rest of the blockchain platforms by becoming an all-in-one blockchain that is very user-friendly. The organization’s main selling point is that it makes issuing, transferring and trading custom tokens easy.

Creating a token – Waves coin – is a simple as pushing a few buttons and paying a small fee. Once the tokens are created they can be easily transferred to others. It is also very simple to trade the customized tokens on the Waves decentralized exchange (DEX) which is built into the Waves wallet.

Waves wants to create a complete blockchain ecosystem targeted at real-world applications.

Ease of tokenization

Waves provides an easy method for companies to create a token, launch an initial coin offering (ICO), which is readily tradable on the Waves DEX. To date, their largest ICO was MobileGo, a company trying to tokenize the gaming industry. MobileGo’s ICO raised over $52 million USD (approximately $63 million CAD).

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The organization also recently partnered with Deloitte to help develop a legal framework for the tokenization of assets on the Waves blockchain. This move could be enticing to companies wishing to do ICOs and protect themselves legally.

The ease in which anyone can create a token has led to some interesting new ideas about what someone can tokenize. Boris Akimov, the founder of a blockchain product for farmers called LavkaLavka, is one of the first to use Waves to explore the idea of self-tokenization.

“In fact, this [tokenizing time]is a simple idea in principle. I have certain skills, knowledge and experience, as well as my time in which I apply them, which is what will be tokenized,” said Akimov in post on the Waves blog. “Token owners can receive the benefits of this experience for a period of time, depending on how many tokens they have.”

Decentralized exchange (DEX)

The Waves DEX has the ability to create gateways to existing digital currencies, which creates a very simple, ‘all-in-one’ DEX. Bitcoin, Ethereum and many other digital currencies can be traded directly in the Waves DEX. Their DEX also has fiat trading pairs for USD and EUR.

They also plan to integrate ERC-20 tokens to their DEX.

“Trustless ERC-20 gateways can be realized using atomic swaps based on our upcoming non-turing complete language.” according to a blog post by Sasha Ivanov, founder of Waves.

ERC-20 token trading inside the Waves wallet would lead them even closer to their goal of being a complete blockchain ecosystem.

Proof-of-stake mining

Consensus on the Waves Coin blockchain is provided by a proof-of-stake algorithm that can currently support 100 transactions per second. Ivanov claims this is the fastest blockchain in the industry.

Owners can participate in the consensus of the network by staking their Waves. Those who stake their tokens receive a percentage of new tokens, similar to a dividend from a stock.

One of the benefits of proof-of-stake over proof-of-work is there are less environmental concerns caused by the vast amounts of electricity that proof-of-work uses. The trade off with proof-of-stake is security, but Waves is confident their algorithm is robust enough to provide adequate security.

What’s next for Waves Coin

Waves recently announced a contest to help them name their smart contract programming language. The winner of the contest receives 1,000 waves, worth approximately $9,000 CAD.

The future roadmap includes a hardware wallet, the addition of ShapeShift, atomic swaps and off-chain messaging. In the upcoming months, development team hopes to tie together the many different facets into a further complete product. Their goal is to create one blockchain ecosystem that provides customers with every functionality they would ever need.

Image credit: Waves Coin logo

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