Making WAVES part 1 & part 2.
By: Waves Tech
Tags: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Fintech

WAVES is a bold new 2.0 initiative. I catch up with its founder to learn more.

Katsushika Hokusai. The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

Sasha Ivanov runs the Coinomat instant exchange service and is the founder of several other projects in the crypto world. I’ve known Sasha for a couple of years, and worked with him personally on a couple of projects over the past year, and there are few people who have such a reputation for consistently delivering, both technically and from a business perspective. So it’s a pleasure to be able to announce he will shortly be launching his own 2.0 crypto platform: WAVES.

Q: You’ve been in crypto for 3 years and a member of Nxt almost since the beginning. What made you want to start your own platform?

A: I came to the Nxt ecosystem at the time when its market capitalization and interest from crypto community reached its peak. Unfortunately it all went downhill from there. The reasons for this are various — poor initial distribution, lack of vision on part of the developers team, some poor choices regarding system architecture. But I never doubted the viability of a colored coins platform on an independent blockchain. Custom blockchain tokens can be used in very many ways, their potential has only just been tapped into. So I want to pick up where Nxt seems to have left off, by building the ultimate colored coins platform, focusing on crowdfunding, fiat tokens, and community projects.

Q: Why the name WAVES?

A: Humanity had discovered gravitational waves a couple weeks before I decided to build the platform, so it was a natural choice for me. WAVES symbolizes the interaction which emerges in communities — gravitational energy which brings people together, energy of attraction and cooperation.

Its name inspired by the recent discovery of gravitational waves, this new platform promises to be something impressive

Q: Crypto has really diversified in the last couple of years — there are protocols out there for just about everything. Anonymity, smart contracts, 2.0, storage, proof-of-audit, blockchain-as-a-service… What will WAVES’ unique selling point be?

A: We’re focusing on mass adoption. It might seem to be a little pretentious, but our focus is exactly that — we’re building the system with a very flat learning curve, with interfaces familiar from online banking and trading experiences, integrated fiat currencies, and with the main user client being just a browser plugin. After the plugin installation a user has a decentralized kickstarter/payment system functionality right in ther browser!

Q: Crypto can still be pretty libertarian/anarchic. Your view is that we will only change the banking system by working with it. Can you say a little more about your vision for WAVES in that respect?

A: We do not support the crypto-anarchy stance, an ‘us-against-them’ approach. Banks are here to stay for the foreseeable future. The current trend in blockchain technology is permissioned blockchains, and this is what we find to be disconcerting. http://bitscan.com/articles/why-permissioned-ledgers-terrify-me We need to offer the established financial system open blockchains to work on, and not let them ‘privatize’ blockchain technology.

Q: What are the key features from a technical perspective, and why did you make those choices?

A: We chose a two-tier architecture, with the main user client being a lightweight browser plug-in, storing no blockchain and connecting to full nodes for most network interaction. We do not think that this brings excessive centralization; the most important fact is that any user can set up and run a full node, so the platform is open and non-permissioned.

We chose Proof-of-Stake as a consensus protocol. It’s my personal belief that in the long run the proof-of-work model won’t survive and will be replaced by a more cost-effective approach. PoS is an algorithm that has proven to be sufficiently stable, and much more elegant that PoW.

We chose the Scorex platform as a basis for our backend. It is a lightweight cryptocurrency platform, written from scratch, with a very clean code and strict modular approach. We will be able to add all necessary features much faster this way.

WAVES won’t seek to create a new form of money: it will aim to change the way existing money is handled and business conducted

Q: Overall, what specific problems are you seeking to solve — both technically and practically?

A: Technically we want to do for colored coins what Ethereum did for bitcoin scripting: develop it to its full potential. Also a light clients / full node approach seems to be important for general blockchain technology adoption, since it can provide familiar interfaces and simple installation procedures for the end user, at the same time as maintaining full network decentralization.

Another thing which we will be working on is the first reputation system on the blockchain. It should be a great breakthrough for blockchain technologies, providing some sort of decentralized AML/KYC, and making WAVES crowdfunding functionality safe and resistant to abuse and fraud.

Q: It seems to be a good climate for launching ICOs right now. LISK recently raised over 14,000 BTC from almost 4,000 participants. What do you think has changed in the last few months?

A: Of course Ethereum’s success trickles down to the whole of crypto ecosystem. New players are coming to crypto, big business is starting to see huge potential behind it. And this is just the beginning. We should all thank Ethereum for what they are doing, we really appreciate that, and we want to add to their approach, not to compete with it.

Q: You have a lot of assets and services on the Nxt blockchain right now. Will you be moving these across to WAVES, and if so, how?

A: YES! WAVES is going to be the ultimate asset platform, and we’ll move all our assets there. To that end a simple burn protocol will be used, which enables transfers between Nxt and WAVES blockchains. Also in our plans is the creation of common asset standard for all blockchains, and bi-directional asset transfer with BitcoinDark blockchain.

Q: You’ve got a pretty tight release schedule, which means that the WAVES platform will be up and running by the end of the summer. Where do you see things by this point in 2017?

A: We want to have dozens of successful campaigns taking place on the WAVES platform, established payment providers working on the WAVES blockchain, and the reputation system effectively preventing abuse and fraud. And a market cap of around $100 million :)

Q: How can I keep up-to-date and invest in the ICO?

A: Please visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on Twitter or join our Slack group!

Source: http://bitscan.com/articles/making-waves-part-1 http://bitscan.com/articles/making-waves-part-2

Author: Cassius.