WAVES Weekly No. 7

This week  sees heavy testing of full nodes on testnet. Within hours of announcing  the bounty programme, over new 100 nodes were active. The Waves team is  extremely grateful to the community for stepping up and helping with  this extremely important process.Assets are being coded in parallel with full nodes, and both should now launch at the same time.

Waves AMA

Sasha held an AMA (ask me anything) on Core Radio last Saturday. You can listen again at https://soundcloud.com/coremediaradio/waves or read the transcript at http://coremedia.info/index.php/waves-news/item/295-wavesplatform-core-radio-show-transcript-with-sasha-ivanov.This  wide-ranging interview covered many aspects of Waves’ technology and  larger ecosystem. Some of these will be familiar to the community,  others less so. These include:

Fiat transfer and crowd-funding

This  is the flagship product of the Waves platform, and will be the first  feature to launch. Custom tokens will allow banks and financial  institutions to issue fiat tokens on the blockchain, backed by real  value and within the organisations’ own regulatory jurisdiction. In  turn, this enables crowd-funding in fiat, rather than solely in bitcoin,  as has been the norm to date in the crypto world (including for Waves  itself). Traditional crowd-funding will benefit from lower fees thanks  to the decentralised platform.

Plug-ins

Waves’  two-tier architecture allows for custom transaction types. Third-party  plug-ins will allow developers to create their own features, such as  regular or mass payments (such as are required for dividend payments).  The aim is to attract many such developers who will add value and  functionality to the network.

Messaging

Waves  will include an off-chain encrypted messaging system. It will use a  regular public/private key system, but information will not be stored on  the blockchain, as it is with some other systems (unless this is  specifically required). This approach is more secure and avoids  unnecessary bloat.

APIs

The  API client will be a code plug-in that can be installed quickly and  easily. As with everything else, the idea is to make this as accessible  as possible. Additionally, by employing a plug-in for the API, Waves  will avoid issues of changing the APIs and breaking back-compatibility,  which is critical for confidence and business adoption.

Smart(er) contracts

Waves  will ultimately launch its own version of smart contracts, with key  differences from Ethereum’s implementation. ‘We will be running smart  contracts only on full nodes — only certain nodes will be running smart  contracts — while the other nodes will check the validity of the  execution. They won’t need to execute the smart contracts themselves. We  won’t have scalability issues or security issues. Things such as the  DAO hack won’t be possible with us. All the contracts will be  “sandboxed”… Actual money transfer will not be carried out through smart  contracts.’

Incent

We  are pleased to announce a new partnership! Merchant directory and  crypto business hub BitScan is launching a new blockchain-based  loyalty/rewards programme called Incent on the Waves platform. BitScan will hold its crowdfund in October,  and the first businesses will go live in the new year. Having  market-tested the idea, BitScan has already established interest from  several businesses, subject to completion of the software, and is  actively pursuing relationships with further merchants. You can read the  Incent white paper, test the proof-of-concept wallet and find out more  at http://incent.bitscan.com/

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