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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