Investigating the Top 50 Cryptocurrencies, Part 33/50: WAVES

Waves is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange platform with a full-featured wallet app attached.

_{weird logo, lol}

The idea is simple enough: Waves is a platform where any business can issue digital tokens. People can buy and sell these tokens through a decentralized exchange, holding their own keys at all times. This defends against hacks that centralized exchanges are vulnerable to.

Waves is building a usable, simple version of an important technology protocol. They are focused on building a good platform and I think there’s a lot of potential in what they are doing.

This project turned a lot of heads when it was first announced in March 2016. By now it has earned a steady spot in the top 30 of digital tokens.

About This Series + Disclaimer

This post is part of a new series where I investigate each of the top 50 coins by marketcap (based on coinmarketcap.com's rankings on October 11, 2017). My goal is to help steem’s userbase become the most knowledgable blockchain community in the world.

Disclaimer: I am not an investment expert and will not be providing investment advice. I will teach you about the top 50 coins, and you can do what you want with that info.

Accessing Token Utility

What utility does a token have? Putting aside speculative uses, there are two obvious reasons to get involved in a digital token economy:

(1) You are a business and you want to issue a token. For example, you could run a digital blog and want to create an SMT or WAVES token to reward the people who leave insightful comments.

(2) You are a consumer / service user and want to use a feature that requires you to hold tokens. For example, if you want to upvote other users on Steemit, you need to hold SP.

(3/bonus) A more advanced use case: Use tokens as a way to issue dividends. For example, you could do what Siacoin does by having two tokens: One inflationary token that people hold to use the network (paying network fees), and a second non-inflationary token where the network fees are paid out as a dividend.

Whatever the case may be - there is a large and increasing number of reasons to use blockchain for your business. Waves is trying to act as an accessible platform where any business can issue a token.

That makes Waves a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform! We were just looking at another one of those in the last Token Investigation post, about Stratis. The difference between Waves and Stratis is this: Stratis wants to sell their services to other businesses in a faux-centralized way, whereas Waves is more of a true decentralized platform.

If you believe in laissez-faire style capitalism, if you want to build your own business and use the most accessible/decentralized protocols possible in the process… Waves is a good token issuance protocol to consider for that.

WAVES Lite Wallet Client

The wallet looks pretty good! I didn’t actually load up any money into it (I’ve got too many of these test wallets downloaded as it is, lol) - but here are a few screenshots of how the application looks. Installation and registration were super easy.

Token Distribution

There is a startlingly low amount of information available on the token distribution model for Waves. It’s really weird, most blockchain teams keep this info somewhere easy to find.

Digging way back into the blog, I was able to find this old post from March 2016 which lays out the structure of the token distribution. Here is that info, straight from the blog:

This is a reasonably generous distribution plan, with only 15% being withheld for the developers’ uses and a large 85% going out to the buyers in the ICO. I like to see it being done this way, in contrast to some other ICOs which are much more centralized.

I still can’t find any information on the inflation rate or distribution model for new tokens, if any are to be issued. That’s really weird. IDK what’s up with it.

The Team

The biggest name attached to this project is Sasha Ivanov, the founder.

_{Source: crunchbase.com}

Sasha was formally trained as a physicist before moving on to work on financial payment systems for the internet. Prior to Waves, he launched a “fiat blockchain token” called coinoUSD and a “tradable cryptocurrency index” called coinoindex.

As part of the lack of visible information on this project, I’m not sure who else is on the team. This isn’t too surprising because some blockchain projects make a point to protect the anonymity of the developers.

Market History

It was a slow and steady rise to higher valuations for Waves. After the ICO in mid-2016, it had climbed its way to the $3 to $5 range by late 2017…

…then the bitcoin pump of December 2017 happened, and now all bets are off. This token is currently on the tail end of a huge pump and there’s no saying what will come next. Your guess is as good as mine regarding where Waves’ value (and the general cryptocurrency space’s value) goes in the next few weeks.

Final Thoughts

Waves seems like a good platform for people to issue assets on. There isn’t too much that makes this platform unique, but it is definitely one of the frontrunners in the decentralized exchange space.

In this news bubble, we mostly hear about BitShares as the exchange to watch. Waves is even more valuable (by market cap) and it has a great wallet / desktop client. I’d say that anybody who likes BTS should keep an eye on Waves too.

2018 should be a great year for decentralized exchanges in general. I wouldn’t be surprised if Waves continues to grow as a part of that.

What do you think of the Waves platform?