On the crest of Waves / Monthly digest / May 2021
By: Waves Tech
Tags: Digest, Nft, Waves, Blockchain, Defi

Hi Waves community,

We are thrilled to introduce the May issue of our monthly digest, from which you’ll learn about the Waves ecosystem’s major news and updates.

May wasn’t a very good month for the crypto community. Following several months of growth, bitcoin’s exchange rate dipped, dragging with it the entire crypto sector. However, we at Waves Tech have always been focused on tech advancements and mass adoption of blockchain solutions rather than market speculation.

Therefore, despite any fluctuations in the markets, we are staying focused on our projects and products, continually improving them, adding functionalities and launching new innovative solutions. In May, we crossed several major milestones, while projects in the Waves ecosystem saw significant progress.

Regardless of short-term market downturns, we are gradually moving towards our goal of building a decentralized future, and we are glad that you’re riding along with us!

And now — to the latest news and updates!

Pushing the boundaries

Over the last few weeks, projects in the Waves ecosystem have hit several major milestones, proving that they are moving steadily towards wider blockchain adoption, deeper liquidity and more sophisticated tech.

Liquidity of the USDN pool on Curve, a major liquidity pool platform on Ethereum, recently hit the $500 mln mark, making the pool the platform’s fourth largest one by volume and the most profitable pool by APY, which has reached 45%.

As USDN gains popularity across the industry, BondAppétit recently added a new pool featuring USDN, in which it was paired against the platform’s governance token, BAG. The USDN/BAG pool has shown an impressive APY.

Algorithmic trading on Waves.Exchange is breaking records as limits run out in minutes every day. Therefore the BTC limit has recently been raised to BTC 20 and ETH has been added, offering users a profitability of about 125%.

Meanwhile, the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi assets on Waves reached $2 bln in early May.

In another testimony to Waves projects’ gaining traction in the DeFi space, the AMM service Swop.fi has been added to CoinGecko.

In a bid to stimulate wider adoption of USDN across the DeFi industry, the Neutrino stablecoin protocol has sponsored a Chainlink Price Feed for USDN/USD on the Ethereum mainnet.

Chainlink Price Feeds supply high-quality data with flash loan protection, enabling Ethereum-based money markets to leverage the USDN/USD Price Feed and offer support for USDN. For more on the Chainlink Price Feed sponsorship, see this post.

Lately, Waves progress has been acknowledged by crypto analysts. One example of that is this piece in The Currency Analytics.

Constant improvement

Even though the crypto space has apparently entered a bear market period, Waves Tech continues to concentrate on improving its products, focusing on long-term goals rather than current market fluctuations.

In early June, the highly-anticipated Waves node update — version 1.3 — was released on the mainnet, following a several-week testnet run.

Named Jumeirah after one of the main beaches in Dubai, version 1.3 made the Waves protocol user-friendlier, also offering unique opportunities to app developers in the DeFi space, such as gasless smart contracts with a cross-dApp call functionality. For more details of Waves Node 1.3 Jumeirah, check out this post.

The Neutrino protocol also rolled out an update, accommodating a proposal on DeFo fee change and redistribution, supported by the community. Fees for DeFo asset swaps were increased to 0.6%, and the proceeds will be distributed among NSBT stakers.

Meanwhile, Swop.fi continues to streamline its governance system. In addition to voting for pool weights, SWOP holders who staked their tokens are getting another tool to influence the project development: selecting new liquidity pools to be added.

For pools added based on user voting, special conditions will be available for SWOP yield farming. Those users who voted for the weight of a pool in the first week following its creation, will be able to reap the “first harvest” in SWOP in proportion to their votes in the second week. More on the “first harvest” feature is available here.

In line with latest trends

Although growth in the NFT segment has slowed, non-fungible tokens remain one of the hottest trends in the blockchain industry, and Waves Tech is happy to continue to contribute to the NFT hype. As you remember, in April, we launched the Duck Hunters game, centered around duck NFTs.

As we keep improving and streamlining the game, several exciting features were added in May, enabling users to buy, sell and breed digital ducks, making a profit on their collections.

The incubator allows users to swap their EGG tokens for the Duck Hunters game’s genesis ducks on wavesducks.com. Under a formula described in the Ducks Improvement Proposal (DIP), one NFT duck cost 1 EGG for the first users, and the price later increased.

The next step was the activation of the “breeding” functionality, facilitating the creation of unique NFT digital ducks by “breeding” genesis ducks. “Newly born” ducks inherit their parents’ genes, while a unique random combination of genes is possible, as well.

Users can collect EGG tokens for implementing various tasks in the Duck Hunters game’s rounds. Certainly, EGGs can be simply sold at the exchange, but players who hold on to their tokens have a chance of earning much more. One of the earning tools within the Duck Hunters game is the recently launched marketplace.

The marketplace will facilitate auctions for exclusive NFT ducks, enabling users to add unique NFTs to their collections. Using filters, collectors can place orders for NFTs with specific parameters, such as a specific color or a specific set of genes.

The next feature to be implemented is duck NFT farming with an APY of between 300% and 5,000%. The duck farming feature, explained in DIP-2, will enable a user to buy a “perch” in one of 4 colors at a tentative price of 1 EGG and put on it a duck of a matching color from their collection.

Overall, 15 Duck Hunters rounds have been held so far. Over 5,000 users have joined the game, generating more than 6,000 duck NFTs. Over 11,000 EGG tokens have been spent for hatching ducks, while EGG’s market capitalization has exceeded $5 mln. Five genesis ducks have been issued.

In focus: community power

We have repeatedly stressed how important our community is for us. The Waves community is truly awesome and its contribution to the development of Waves’ protocols and technologies is absolutely vital.

On our part, we’ve been doing our best to inform and educate our community, as well as engage its members in fun and exciting activities.

For instance, in recent weeks, we have run several rounds of the Duck Hunters game, in which Waves community members showed excellent commitment and creativity.

One example of a Duck Hunters game round, in which Waves community members’ creativity went through the roof, required quoting our April digest in a tweet with a comment on what news item was the most thrilling and why. We received lots of insightful and funny comments.

The winners of that round were:

In another community-centered Duck Hunters round, we asked users to post pictures featuring the Waves logo in their daily life. The response was immense, and we received numerous creative pictures.

Here are some examples.

Swop.fi has also been very active in community engagement in recent weeks, launching new governance tools that enable community members to have an impact on the service.

Most recently, functionality was launched enabling SWOP stakers to vote for adding new pools on Swop.fi and including them in the SWOP yield farming program. Based on user votes, several new pools, SWOP-WAVES, EGG-WAVES, ERG-USDN, NSBT-SWOP and TN-USDN have already been added. The project’s further plans involving community-driven pools are explained in this article.

As we aim to step up our communication with the community, Waves founder Sasha Ivanov will now do an AMA session every other week. His next AMA is scheduled to run on Twitter on Monday, June 21, at 2pm CET. You can ask your questions in advance, using this form and take part in the best question contest with prizes in EGG tokens.

By the way, not only Sasha gladly talks to the community. In May, Waves.Exchange and Waves Enterprise also did AMA sessions.

As we always think about our beloved community, more exciting and useful initiatives will be launched soon.

That’s it for now. We’ll be back with more Waves ecosystem news and updates next month. Stay tuned!