Welcome to our first monthly review! This is an opportunity to catch up with all of the latest news and developments concerning the Waves platform over the past month. We’re including a recap of technical updates, new business partnerships, crowd sales, media attention, competitions, community initiatives and social events.
Enjoy the read, and look out for the next review at the beginning of March!
Developer and product news
We have built a new node using LevelDB. This is currently only on testnet, but will be released for mainnet next week. This approach addresses some issues for node storage. Moving to LevelDB saves disk space, so the node is faster and consumes less memory. We have been able to reduce the recommended minimum amount of RAM from 4 to 2 GB. The amount of data stored for testnet has decreased from 90GB to 17GB, and for mainnet from 34GB to 7GB.
In January, we also developed the Desktop App, fixed a number of bugs in the beta client, and upgraded the website, with pages for mining, leasing and feedback. In addition, we have added unique links for pairs in the DEX. Lastly, on the transaction page it is possible to download all transactions as a CSV.
For the future: we are continuing to work on smart contracts and a mass pay transaction. The client will be adapted for mobile.
Partnerships, exchanges & integrations
Astana International Financial Centre
The memorandum of cooperation was signed at the CryptoHQ event, within the framework of the World Economic Forum currently being held in Davos (Switzerland), at which Waves also has a presence. The goal of the partnership is the creation of an advanced ecosystem for financial technologies using the latest blockchain technologies.
RewardMob
eSports is a popular and rapidly-growing phenomenon, with the mobile market experiencing incredible expansion in the course of 2017. Mobile gaming is now a $100+ billion sector with over 2 billion active players. However, various problems associated with integrating rewards with the traditional financial world have prevented eSports from reaching its full potential — something that RewardMob aims to fix with a blockchain token hosted on the Waves platform.
Group-IB
We have received many reports about pages in social media that are claiming to give away WAVES bonuses. We want to be very clear that this is a scam. We take these fraudulent pages seriously and are actively taking steps to address this issue, including working with cybersecurity firm Group-IB, a global leader in combating high-tech crime and online fraud.
Digilira (Turkish Lira gateway)
Thanks to the size and enthusiasm of our Turkish community, Waves has now opened a gateway for Turkish Lira (TRY), in partnership with Digilira.com. As with all of the existing Waves gateways, fiat tokens are backed 1:1 with the currency, so every WTRY token issued and traded in the lite client can be redeemed for one lira through the gateway.
BCEX exchange
BCEX, a Chinese exchange based in Canada, listed the WAVES token on 11 January, with trading started on 12 January. Trading take place against the USD, via the exchange’s own licensed gateway.
For the future: we have begun work on integration for cold wallets, we are organising the launch of new fiat gateways, and we are negotiating integration for transaction processing for online stores.
Waves Lab
Simdaq
The first major Waves ICO of the year has ended on January 26th, reaching its hard cap in just 28 hours thanks to a partnership with the Waves Lab incubator. Simdaq, a community trading platform, managed to raise $5 million in a little over a day. The project aims to democratise crypto trading, which is notoriously risky, by sharing insights and information, as well as allowing community members to back-test strategies using historical data and even create trading bots using their own algorithms.
MyTrackNet
The pre-ICO for MyTrackNet, a blockchain-based geo-tracking application, ended on 31 January. The pre-ICO was successfully facilitated by the Waves Lab under the terms of the competition for Waves start-ups held by Waves Lab, which MyTrackNet won. A total of $625,000 was collected from the current target of $700,000.
Stories
More about the Waves rebrand
Waves was launched over 18 months now, and in that time it has come a long way. We have built a platform from scratch, researched and implemented new technologies, accessed new markets and business partners and begun to push out into the mainstream userbase that, as “blockchain for the people”, was always our target audience. As a part of that, we decided to rebrand, updating the look and feel of everything we do and across all the ways in which we engage with our users.
For the future: Waves Ecosystem
Publications
Inc: Forget Bitcoin. These Startups Will Help Your Company Make Its Own Digital Currency
Waves, an open blockchain platform based in Moscow, allows anyone to create and launch a new token in less than a minute with only a few clicks, says Sasha Ivanov, a serial cryptocurrency entrepreneur and the founder of Waves. Clients first download the Waves wallet, a Chrome browser plug-in. After creating an account and buying one Waves token, (currently valued at about $10), they click on the token creation tab, name the coin, add a description, decide the total volume of coins to issue, and set it to launch. The coin immediately becomes available on the Waves exchange, where investors can buy and trade it.
The Korea Times: Blockchain tech will prevail soon
Blockchain, a decentralized system used for exchanges of virtual money such as bitcoin, still hasn’t scratched the surface but it will become a mainstream platform soon, according to Alexander Ivanov, the founder of a distributed exchange called Waves. “This will happen over the course of the next two to five years. It will be like the internet _ a curiosity at first, with some clunky websites in the 1990s and very basic e-commerce. Now, though, you cannot imagine a business not having a website,” he said in an e-mail interview.
Finance Magnates: Waves Lab Begins Operations with a Budget of $9 Million
Waves has announced a budget of one million Waves tokens (approximately $9 million) for the first group of startups making use of its new incubator, Waves Lab, according to a Waves press release. The startups have now launched their applications. Waves is a blockchain platform which aims to “reinvent the DNA of entrepreneurship”. It allows users to create their own cryptocurrencies, which are transacted for a fee paid in Waves tokens. There is a fixed supply of 100 million of these tokens.
Community
Contest — Guess the SEED and Win 500 WAVES!
We’ve created a unique ContestCoin token and are holding it in this Waves wallet: 3PK8iuzF64q47tFQSBadHCBCUs1npbKttxf. This wallet was created in the normal way, with a multi-word SEED. Follow Waves News and Announcements channel on Telegram — each day, we will secretly release a word from the SEED to the followers of that channel, until the whole SEED has been published. Contestants will need to find all of the words and use the completed SEED to access the wallet holding the prize token.
Scam alerts
We’ve received many reports and claims about a Facebook page giving away Waves Bonuses. This is not our page, all Waves Platform official social pages and communication channels are listed on the Waves Platform Website: https://wavesplatform.com. Also, Waves Team would never ask you for your password or seed phrase. Please be careful and avoid inputting your wallet information on any non-waves resources.
Twitter: We reached 100K followers
Boxmining: Interview with Sasha Ivanov
For the future: Waves Weekly comes back. Waves community club will be launched.
Events
World Economic Forum in Davos
Alexander Ivanov, Waves CEO and founder, discussed “Russia and the Global Digital Agenda” in a panel session with other technology experts at the the World Economic Forum. He noted the huge hype around blockchain in Russia — the convergence of several factors, including the high quality of software engineers and the wide range of use cases. As a result, Russia is a great testing ground for blockchain, due to the much-needed efficiencies and transparency it can bring. He agreed with the other panellists that Russia could — and likely would — become the global leader of the blockchain space.
For the future: we are planning a series of meetups in the US (San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University and Los Angeles) and Europe (Vienna, Berlin and Amsterdam).
Business Meeting in Ede, Netherlands
On 23 January we organised our first Business Meetup of 2018 in Ede, a town around 90 km from Amsterdam. Thanks to a partnership with the Ruig Bar, where the event was held, participants were even able to pay for drinks and snacks in WAVES! Around 25 guests attended the meetup. The evening started with a presentation about news and developments from 2017, delivered by Jarno Hogeweg and Rob van de Camp from WavesNode.net (Dutch Waves office) and Pavel Soldatkin (Moscow Waves Office). After that, there was an informal Q&A and networking session.
Team
We have strengthened our product team, with two product designers and another front-end developer. We have also hired two Scala developers for the backend team.
For the future: we’re on the lookout for Regional Managers (Japan, Korea, USA, EU).
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