Waves: How to Stop Worrying and Start Making Tokens

The name "Waves" evokes associations with the sea or music, but in reality, it suits more solid metaphors like "constructor" or even "forge": this platform is designed to create your own digital assets. With Waves, you can issue your own token — and it's incredibly easy, it doesn't require any special knowledge, and only takes a couple of minutes. Of course, by itself, it is unlikely to interest anyone — but a successful crowdfunding campaign can give it a good start.

Waves against the wind

The project was founded in 2016 by businessman and developer Alexander Ivanov, who had previously worked on the NXT and Coinomat projects. A considerable amount was raised at the ICO, $16.4 million in bitcoins.

The Consensus Algorithm is the Leased Proof of Stake (LPoS), a modified version of the familiar proof of ownership. This means that the owner of even a small amount of coins can rent them out to a larger (and therefore capable of creating blocks) nodes, thereby receiving his or her share of the reward. Previously, the system operated two tokens at once —- the main WAVES and the secondary MRT, which was used for mining rewards, but its support was recently discontinued.

Initially, tokens issued via Waves were traded on its own DEX exchange. But in December 2019, it was relaunched as a hybrid waves.exchange, which combines the benefits of decentralization, such as hack resistance, with the functionality of the usual centralized services. At the moment, direct purchases of BTC, WAVES, and USDN are available on the exchanger's website, as well as staking for the latter two. At the same time, the "blockchain-agnostic" platform Gravity Hub was launched, which is a separate blockchain oracle without its own token, which solves the problem of communication between different protocols and decentralized applications.

On August 14, it became known about the Gravity Hub-based collaboration between Waves Enterprise and TRON Foundation. Three days earlier, a similar agreement with Ontology had ceased to be a secret, and thus the interaction between their blockchains became possible. And in October, with the launch of the modified version of the RIDE language, developers had the opportunity to create decentralized applications based on Waves.

At the moment, the development of the ecosystem is expectedly aimed at increasing the number of nodes, expanding functionality for developers, and stimulating work on promising projects through grants and other types of support.

In January of this year, the Waves Association, a non-profit organization, began operations in Frankfurt am Main. The press release dedicated to this event was filled with vague wordings: "public benefit goals", "accelerating the implementation of the Web 3.0 paradigm". But, apparently, this has quite a familiar goal of expanding the market coverage.

Strength in numbers

Maybe the growth of the WAVES price does not strike the imagination with four-digit values, but it can't be called moderate either. As so, at the beginning of the year one token was worth $1.02 and $1.53 on August 1, then on August 17, the price rose to $4.60. However, it should be noted that the growth was followed by a correction. At the time of this writing, the rate is $ 3.17.

In general, Waves creates more than a serious impression, and the activity of the project creators deserves praise, as the full list of partnership agreements and third-party projects is really huge. However, the crypto market is fickle and competition is very high, and even the most stable-looking projects can drown due to management mistakes or the appearance of a better analogue. But so far Waves is unlikely to be in any danger.

Image courtesy of Invest in Blockchain