Block by block: building a complete blockchain ecosystem

Text by Sasha Ivanov, Waves Platform CEO & Founder

Being in the blockchain space for around 4 years by now I have seen various stages of its development, from being some kind of a curiosity for nerds and cryptoanarchists to an almost industry-grade adoption. It is incredible that it took such a short amount of time, in other industries such developments can take a life-time. But the blockchain concept is so disruptive that it just blows you out of the water and speeds up your life forever.

So now we are close to some kind of mainstream adoption. Everybody knows about blockchain, many people thinking about how to use it in their businesses, many buy cryptotokens looking for profits, governments world wide are struggling with regulation. Interest is huge, the technology is incredibly promising, the question is can we obtain anything from it right here right now?

And when you consider this question carefully you realize that not so much can be done on the blockchain now. Different projects are going into different directions, some amazing things are being worked on, but all you can really do on open blockchains now is ICO’s and value transfer.

The goal of Waves platform has always been a creation of a blockchain ecosystem targeted at real world applications, addressing the most poignant issues of the ecosystem and providing the “right here right now solution”. We are getting closer to this goal every day.

The basis of the Waves ecosystem is the Waves blockchain. This is PoS algorithm chain that can support up to 100 tx per second currently, thanks to recently implemented Waves-NG protocol, which makes it the fastest blockchain in production currently. Coupled with very cheap transactions and a unique feature of paying tx fees in custom tokens Waves blockchain becomes the optimal solution for a whole range of applications that require blockchains but can’t really use them due to low throughput or high transaction fees. Loyalty programs, payment solutions, gaming applications can get all the features they need on the Waves blockchain.

Waves client offers probably the easiest way to issue your own custom blockchain token. It takes you one for form to fill out and one click, and in a couple seconds you have your very own cryptotoken. But it’s not enough to issue your own token, probably it’s important to be able to trade it. Waves offers an integrated decentralized exchange, which supports all the tokens issued on the Wave blockchain, including fiat tokens and tokens backed by other cryptocurrencies.

Currently DEX offers the fastest decentralized trading solution. Its architecture combines the best of the both worlds — speed of centralization (there is a centralized matching service, that brings trading orders together) and security of the blockchain (the actual value transfer takes place on the blockchain and is verified through consensus algorithm). When you trade on waves DEX manually you won’t see any difference between DEX and a centralized exchange, combination of almost instant transactions due to Waves NG and DEX speed makes decentralized trading experience almost indistinguishable from the centralized one.

AND, you can trade not only Waves on Waves DEX. Our goal is a creation of a complete ecosystem, that’s why it is possible to trade fiat (EUR USD TYR) currently and cryptocurrencies (BTC ETH LTC ZCASH, many others are upcoming)
What about ERC20 tokens you might ask? The reply to this question leads us to our upcoming developments, a very important part of the future compete technical part of our ecosystem — smart contracts. We approach in our usual way, trying to make it as usable as possible right from the start. Our first stage of smart contracts implementation will be provide a unique approach the problem — this will be the first realization of an upgrade to bitcoin scripting, non-turing complete smart contracts language that can be called bitcoin scripting on steroids.

You can do so much with a generalization of this approach stemming right from Bitcoin — atomic swaps, oracles, multisig… Turing-completeness might be distracting developers from tapping into the full potential of non-turing complete approach. For example trustless ERC 20 gateways can be realized using atomic swaps based on our upcoming non-turing complete language.

Once its done users will be able to trade ERC20 tokens on our DEX, which sports the lowest transaction fees and fastest transactions among all the decentralized trading solutions. Waves holdings will be secured with multi-party multisig, with flexible spending conditions. It will be possible to realize oracles and feed external data into the Waves chain. And that’s just a small part of what could be done with the upcoming smart contracts language.

Our tech is meant to tie in seamlessly into the real world. Another example of this blocklchain voting application we are working on now. It will provide trustless and verifiable voting mechanism for decentralized voting, which can be used for a host of applications, starting from voting on certain features of Waves blockchain to business due diligence of ICO’s on Waves platform, and voting for third-party services such as shareholders voting or regional or municipal voting.

Very important part of Waves ecosystem is ICO’s that are taking place on Waves platform. We’re trying our best to incentivize responsible token sales. To that end we launched in partnership with Deloitte Bettertokens.org, Swiss association which is going to provide guidelines and standards for tokenization and token sale campaigns, including business due diligence which should protect investors from bad players. Decentralized voting on Waves blockchain is going to provide a decentralized rating agency mechanism, an approach that can upend business due diligence in general, making it more transparent and less prone to manipulation.

Besides we incentivize good ICO’s on Waves through running our waveslabs.org incubator, which provides not only funding but also marketing support, advisory, best practices recommendations and basically everything you need to run a successful tokensale and integrate a utility token into your product. With hundreds of millions of dollars raised using Waves tokens Waveslabs team has excellent expertise and provides an optimal solution for all responsible projects with clear vision and competent team.

After projects complete their token sale many of them don’t realize that they have to provide post-ICO support to their tokens at exchanges. Liquiditywave.org is a mechanism to streamline the relations between the market makers and token issuers, providing a clear defined procedure supporting liquidity on the decentralized Waves exchange.

There are bigger tokensale issuers that never forget what they should do at all stages of their project. For them we launch a platform which can be called the first investment bank on the blockchain. We have been working with Singapore regulators and Baker&McKenzie legal firm for about half a year to provide the first fully compliant ICO platform in Singapore. There’s a several projects now that are going to be launched as Tokenomika projects. The idea is to provide a one stop shop for bigger token sales, a place where big enterprise projects can obtain everything they need — legal support, technical solution, marketing and advisory services.

I hope it’s clear to see that all of our products and services are neatly connected, one product ties in into the other, creating a complete ecosystem where any project can get everything they need from a blockchain and services on top of it. In upcoming months you are going to witness the process of different parts of the puzzle coming together and creating a beautiful picture of an ecosystem you would never have to leave.

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