Waves is one of those rare coins that has a real use and is actually being used, it's not just pie-in-the-sky promises of great future tech. It's also criminally overlooked, often for lesser coins. It surprises me that people who know a lot about cryptocurrencies have often never heard of it, and if they have it's usually just the name.

Waves is a bit like Steem in that the highlight of Waves is actually the wallet itself (or platform). I'm using the Waves Lite App on Chrome.

Let's take a closer look...

You may have noticed instantly that Waves isn't just for Waves, it's multi-currency, you could send Bitcoin to it. In fact it has it's own in-built decentralised exchange, and unlike other decentralised exchanges it's actually reasonably active. It's not Bittrex or Poloniex busy but it's about as busy as the Steemit internal market with trades taking place about once or twice a minute. Day traders might find it a bit of a snoozefest but it's definitely usable for trading. It's hardly The London Mile but it's not a ghost town either.

I also expect exchanges like this to get a lot busier when traders finally get sick of exit scams, restrictive limits and government snooping from centralised exchanges.

To select a different currency pair you have to type them manually and select them from the drop down box, but that's a bit of a pain in the arse to be honest, hopefully they fix that in future updates. There are some "favourites" you can click on to the right though.

Leasing

Another great thing about Waves is it's easy proof-of-stake system. I don't have much as you can see, I just bought a little to try it out, but even with this tiny amount I can "mine" by leasing it out to a node, in fact I did.

It's pretty pointless with this small amount, but as you can see it could pay quite well with a decent amount, this is 1 week's worth as a test run.

Plus you also get other rewards in the form of node tokens which can be sold on the exchange or kept for higher rewards. As well as this; Waves regularly takes a snapshot of your wallet and airdrops more into the community, all of this makes HODLing Waves in the wallet a no-brainer really.

Here's those tokens I talked about...

This is the second part of the leasing reward, sent to me by the WavesGo node. You can also create your own tokens at the click of a button (and the price of 1 Waves)

There's a lot more to learn about this platform I could do a follow-up on this in the future...