The recent interview with Lootz on Core Media Radio gives a large amount of up-to-date information about Waves’ tech, developments and timelines.
Conferences and Meet-ups
As the Waves platform nears a state of readiness for mass-user adoption and mainstream business applications, we are broadly switching the focus from tech to business development. Although development will of course continue, the key elements of the platform are now almost complete, which allows us to concentrate more on business relationships.
We are also gaining attention through conferences and other events. The coming week will see another Moscow blockchain developers meet-up, hosted on 20 January at the Digital October Center, where Waves has its offices. Later in the month, there will be a ‘State of Bitcoin’ conference in Moscow with a number of major banks and other institutions.
Waves will have a presence at Blockchain Expo, a convention of more than 1,500 people active in the cryptocurrency world at London’s Olympia, to be held on 23-24 January. Sasha and members of the team will attend to network with some of the biggest names and projects in the blockchain and payments processing world. This will be part of the larger London Blockchain Week, in which Sasha will be participating in panel discussions and other activities.
DEX and Gateways
Waves’ decentralised exchange (DEX) is functional and being tested. Buy/sell orders can be created and placed in the OrderBook via the API on testnet. The backend is essentially ready now, with only a few minor known bugs to be fixed to improve the API. As ever, community members are invited to help with testing and bounties are available for successful bug hunters. The priority now is to create a user-friendly frontend for integration into the lite client.
Alongside this, the first gateways are being created. The bitcoin gateway will be first (via Coinomat), with current estimates being launch at the end of the month or beginning of February. After this will be a Euro gateway through a payments partner. These will allow users to swap BTC and Euros for secure tokens that are 100% backed by their respective currencies, which can then be traded on Waves DEX. USD come by further down the line. Once we have established the proof of concept and tested it thoroughly, responsibility for fiat gateways can be outsourced to larger financial organisations.
Additionally, work is continuing on LPoS, Waves’ leased proof-of-stake algorithm. As well as being able to lease WAVES, it will ultimately be possible to lease CATs too. In the future, Waves will implement smart contracts. Every mainstream blockchain platform needs some form of smart contracts, but Ethereum has taught us that caution is necessary. Likely Waves will use some form of non-Turing-complete scripting.
You can find out more about our first scaling strategy and coming tech updates in this post.
WCT Distribution
The first tranche of Waves Community Tokens (WCT) was distributed to WAVES holders on Monday. You can find out more about WCT here. Please remember for future (monthly) distributions that only WAVES held off-exchange are eligible. Ownership of WCT will be the basis for the coming BTC distribution from the Byteball windfall. These bitcoin tokens will be withdrawable as BTC through the coming bitcoin gateway.
Waves Challenge
Our Waves challenge is still running. We have a first prize of 1,000 WAVES, plus Waves t-shirts and stickers for runners-up. Read this post for more details.
WAVES WEEKLY 26