Waves Lab, a Moscow-based incubator for new projects on the Waves platform, has announced a total budget of 1 million WAVES for future participants, as the first tranche of entrants launch their applications. The commitment, reportedly worth approximately $9 million after the recent cryptocurrency sell-off across the board, aims to place Waves Lab on a long-term footing and ensure many more promising entrants accepted to the programme.

“We want to provide an opportunity to invest for both types of investors — traditional institutional ones and crypto-investors in blockchain-based projects. Our mission is to bring the most successful venture investment technologies into a new generation of projects. We are inspired by our partnership with Waves, and believe that the incubator is an excellent opportunity for start-up projects to get a competent advice and unique experience”, shared Waves Lab investor Artyom Inyutin, PhD, Founding Partner at TMT Crypto Fund, an investment fund focused on blockchain driven startups and aiming to implement venture success into the next generation of blockchain economy.

The first set of participants includes Simdaq, a social trading platform; MyTrackNet, a blockchain-based geo-tracking application; Viso, a hybrid e-payments/cryptocurrency payment platform; and Likey, a one-stop-shop for loyalty programmes.

“We are happy to be a part of Waves Lab. Waves community is very strong and this gives unfair advantage for those who build business with Waves. Simdaq is very much community focused and it’s great to see Waves Lab that will help the project like ours. We look forward for future cooperation,” commented Simdaq CEO Evgeniy Dubovoy.

Teams will receive advice, PR, ICO marketing support and technical assistance, as well as endorsement and contacts within the wider Waves community. The first pre-ICO is already in process, with MyTrackNet reportedly having collected $540,000; the pre-ICO will end on 31 January.

“We started MyTrackNet with a vision and passion but without the necessary funding to build a big project like this. Waves Lab was a great help for us, not only in terms of the funding but also for the lightning-fast blockchain platform,” indicated MyTrackNet CEO Dimitrios Moschos. “Waves has almost instant transactions, a factor which is very important to run a project like MyTrackNet. The people behind the Waves platform are a major factor for our success, providing their knowledge and help in the process of our pre-ICO and more generally for our project.”

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Existing partners of Waves platform also opined about Waves Lab:

“The incubator focused on cryptocurrencies-based startups is a great idea because of Waves’ deep expertise of this market and its investors. Traditional acceleration programs don’t have enough experience to work with blockchain focused projects and communities just yet, in spite of it being a great opportunity to receive fundings and develop business of startups,” stated RAWG COO Dasha Lyalin, a blockchain based service for gamers, “So we are sure that it will be a great success for our partners and we will be happy to have a synergy with residents of Waves Lab.”

Founded in 2016 by CEO Alexander Ivanov, Waves Platform is a global public blockchain platform seeking to reinvent the DNA of entrepreneurship around the world by providing a shared infrastructure, offering easy-to-use, highly functional tools to make blockchain available to every person or organisation that can benefit from it. The Waves Platform is primarily designed to support the issuance, trade and exchange of digital assets or tokens using blockchain technology. It is supposed to use Proof-of-Stake as its consensus algorithm. Waves Platform completed its own ICO in June 2016, said to have garnered more than $16 million (30,000 BTC).

The Russian-headquartered platform recently began to expand its global international footprint with a permanent presence in Amsterdam, thanks to its recent strategic partnership with Primalbase. In December Waves noted that its Berlin office was already opened and a team would be following soon. Additional new offices are slated (February 2018), Singapore (Q1 2018) and New York (Q2 2018).