WAVES Weekly No. 6

New Website and ICO Site Withdrawals

Firstly, we strongly encourage those investors who have not yet withdrawn their balances from the ICO site to do so as soon as possible. The new website has been launched and the original crowdfunding site will be disabled next week. If you have not done so already, please log in, save your Waves address on the ICO site, confirm through email and wait for your tokens to be transferred to your local wallet (or directly to an exchange, if you prefer).

The Waves lite client can be downloaded from our website, and you can find instructions on how to create a new account here.

The ICO website will not be maintained beyond next week. After this point, withdrawals will only be processed manually and at less frequent intervals.

LPoS White Paper

The white paper for Waves’ Leased Proof of Stake consensus system is now in its review stage, pending release to the wider community. LPoS is the lynchpin of the Waves network, allowing for fast (ten seconds) block times, whilst remaining far more energy efficient than proof-of-work mining systems. 

LPoS builds on the standard PoS implementation by allowing users to lease their balances to other nodes, fine-tuning the Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) approach used by BitShares and others. Ensuring a clearly-defined set of active nodes reduces latency and increases block capacity. The essence of this approach is the limited pool of full-nodes taking care of transaction processing in the network. Having unlimited numbers of stakers changes the system dynamics drastically, so in a production-ready system it makes sense to maintain a balance between decentralization and usability. The Waves network seeks to establish a relatively large number of active nodes without unnecessarily sacrificing performance.

This approach will be complemented by the addition of a centralised order-matching service. This will match buyers and sellers via a central server on a near-instant basis, whilst the trades themselves will be cleared on the blockchain for security and transparency. The Matcher is obliged to execute the order submitted to it if it can be matched by an order from another node — it cannot prevent the trade being executed. This scheme mimics the way centralized exchanges work, the only exception being that the Matcher does not control users’ funds.

Asset Specification Update

The asset specification has been updated on Github. A new scheme for asset exchanges has been created. You can see the changes from the previous version here.

Full nodes

After several weeks of testing and a number of bugs addressed, full node code is now almost ready and will be released as soon as possible, allowing all users to run their own nodes.

As most users appreciate, this is a critical step, since it forms the foundation for everything that follows — including our custom tokens implementation. With a secure and stable public network, development can proceed more rapidly. Full decentralisation of the Waves network is also a necessary and desirable step for proper security and confidence in the platform. The experiences of numerous other cryptocurrencies demonstrate that this step cannot be rushed, and if done wrong can have serious consequences. We therefore look forward to the successful launch of a large number of staking nodes, and thank you for your participation in the Waves project!

You can always find the latest version of the client at https://wavesplatform.com and https://wavestalk.org.