The Waves (WAVES)] platform has been launched back in 2016 via an ICO by Russian founder Sasha Ivanov and has been aiming to become a complete blockchain ecosystem for the token economy with the help of a fast and scalable blockchain and several tools aiming to help developers issue tokens and build on the platform.
Waves has been gaining adoption recently as not only are hundreds of developers launching their projects on the platform, but several major exchanges including Huobi.Pro have been adding them for trading meaning that the project is opening towards a bigger, global market. The Waves listing on Huobi.Pro achieved a WAVES/BTC and a WAVES/ETH pairing on the exchange.
To introduce the platform, we have to look at its main features first to understand why it is a potential competitor to Ethereum and the recently launched EOS as well.
The WAVES Network
➢ The WAVES platform is running on the Waves-NG Protocol
The Waves-NG protocol manages up to 100 transactions/sec or 6,000 transactions per minute. This is an order of magnitude faster compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum, while still maintaining decentralization unlike on EOS where in order to gain a fast network the founder compromised with 21 block producers. Waves-NG is an implementation of Bitcoin-NG (a Bitcoin scaling proposal), which allows block producers or miners to gain the right to forge microblocks, which will be followed up by producing a series of them instead of mining one single block at a time.
➢ Smart contracts on WAVES
Waves launched a smart contract capability on the platform's testnet back on the 4th of May. The first release of smart contracts that will hit the main net soon will be non-turing complete and only after that has been well tested will a turing complete version follow. Even though turing complete smart contracts are preferred, the non-turing version is fully secure and the users can't make mistakes on them and the contracts will never fulfill incorrectly.
Smart contracts will bring various use cases and features to the platform: multisignature wallets with 2FA, atomic swaps that make instant trade off-exchange a possibility, 'token freeze' that allows tokens to be released only after certain criteria is met and decentralized applications or dApps for short.
➢ Voting and governance on WAVES
The implementation of voting and decentralized governance is especially important on distributed systems where consensus is key to make changes to the network itself. WAVES has implemented such voting and there are already proposals such as 'Data Transactions', 'Burn any Token', 'Fee Sponsorship' and 'Fair PoS' that are being voted on by the holders.
➢LPoS
The WAVES network is currently running a Leased Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm based on NXT's PoS, which allows users to pool their funds together in order to get a more steady flow of passive income.
The WAVES client
➢ DEX
The waves wallet will run a state of the art decentralized exchange, which lets users securely trade with each other while also only paying the low fees of the network transactions. Users can trade trade all of the WAVES tokens here together with all major cryptocurrency pairings like WAVES/BTC, ETH/BTC, BCC/BTC, ZEC/BTC. Unlike the Ethereum DEXs, this exchange allows non-Waves currencies as well.
➢ Token Launcher
Every user has the ability to launch his or her own token for only 1 WAVES. The process only takes a minute.
➢ Cypto and Fiat Gateways
The wallet has the ability to serve as a crypto gateway for WAVES, BTC, ETH, ZCASH, LTC and also fiat money like EUR, USD and TRY. Fiat gateways are possible because Waves has setup a centralized gateway, where the fia money can be sent to the user's own deposit address with a SEPA transfer and the user recieves wEURO or wUSD. Every token is pegged on a 1:1 basis like how stablecoins such as USDT or TUSD work.
➢ Leasing
Leasing can be managed through the client and users have the ability to gain rewards from the transaction fees. This is especially crucial as with the number of users of the DEX and the network growing, the income from the transaction fees will be growing as well.
Future developments
As already mentioned one of the main features that will be introduced are turing complete smart contracts and the decentralized exchange that will feature non-Waves tokens, but development won't stop there. Hardware wallet integration (ledger, trezor) is coming in the near future, which is well awaited by the community for secure storage of funds. Another thing to look forward to is the Vostok Airdrop. 3% of the total number of coins will be airdropped to WAVES holders. The Vostok project is using the WAVES-NG technology and builds a private blockchain platform for financial institutions and large enterprises with the help of lead of Sasha Ivanov. Sasha will lead both platforms since Waves and Vostok have a different purpose.
Our take on the platform
The platform offers one of the most easy to use wallets for novice investors and traders and is currently the only one to integrate a fiat gateway. This makes the platform especially attractive for future ICOs as they can build on an ecosystem that features tokenization capabilities, trading capabilities and a gateway to mainstream investors.
Investors can skip going through centralized exchanges and cope with long verification times to get their fiat into the blockchain economy to invest into new tokens. This makes their investments less hassle free and could also free the way for capital from more restricted countries.
In terms of technology the Waves-NG implementation offers perfect future proof scalability, this is the reason why Vostok will implement it for their enterprise sollutions.
Price-wise WAVES is at a good buying spot as the bear market has affected almost every top asset heavily even though crypto is here to stay and mainstream media is already focusing popular platforms. So if you were watching WAVES, now would be a good time to start averaging in considering the ATH was $17 and both previous bounces peaked around $8 while we are currently hovering at $2.5.
We expect similar prices to the previous peaks during the next market cycle, but always do your own research before investing!
If you are looking to purchase WAVES you can head over to Huobi.Pro.
Disclaimer: The author of the article doesn't own any Waves, but simply did throughout research and found the project interesting