Inferno Analysis: Waves

TL;DR it’s going to be big. Wade in and start surfing or watch from the shore, the choice is yours.

 Introduction

Waves is a custom tokens platform that makes it very easy to launch, hold and trade blockchain tokens, all within the client. It’s fast, lightweight, has some extremely powerful features and is already seeing real-world adoption. The team has focused on tech throughout 2017 and is about to begin marketing their software and services in earnest with a view to fulfilling its ambition of becoming a mass-adoption platform: ‘blockchain for the people’. WAVES is currently trading around $7, giving it a market cap of $700 million.

 Disclaimer

Crypto investment is risky and the markets can be highly volatile. Do your own due diligence before buying. No responsibility is accepted for investment decisions made on the basis of this analysis.

 Background

Waves was launched back in 2016 after crowdfunding 30,000 BTC. Over the course of 2017 the team has grown to 50 people, responsible for everything from technical development to communications and business dev. Founded by Russian physicist Sasha Ivanov, Waves was coded from scratch in Scala and designed to overcome the major shortcomings of existing blockchain platforms, specifically speed, scalability and user-friendliness. In December 2017 Waves launched their flagship Client 1.0 as well as the Waves-NG protocol. These give both a stunning user experience and enormous capacity – Waves is the fastest open blockchain in the world, capable of supporting 6,000 transactions per minute.

 Existing features

• User-friendly wallet that is very clean and intuitive, similar to popular online banking/trading platforms.
• Lite client is secure and powerful but requires no blockchain download.
• Balance leasing to full nodes to earn revenues on WAVES balances. Advanced users can run a full node, typically on a VPS.
• Decentralised Exchange built into client. Unlike other DEXs, Waves’ approach enables real-time trading with blockchain settlement, giving the best of both worlds in terms of speed and security.
• Token launcher enables custom token creation in under a minute.
• Fiat and crypto gateways to enable trading of major currencies against tokens on DEX.
• Apps for mobile devices.
• Waves-NG is dramatically faster than other blockchains, enabling 100 tps (bitcoin manages around 5 tps, Ethereum up to 15 and Bitcoin Cash 30).
• Emphasis on compliance as a condition of growth. Partnerships with Deloitte and a growing number of national authorities.
• A number of real-world businesses are already using or showing an interest in Waves.

Upcoming features

• Smart contracts. Learning from Ethereum’s DAO and Parity issues, Waves will be adopting a different approach. Smart contracts will initially not be Turing complete, giving businesses a broad range of functionality without being open to the same vulnerabilities as Ethereum.
• Multi-sig addresses.
• Atomic swaps. This will allow different crypto to be traded directly against each other on the DEX, without gateways.

Strengths

• Very user friendly wallet and straightforward to launch and manage tokens, in contrast to Ethereum, which requires knowledge of smart contracts.
• Fast, high-capacity blockchain make it a rare contender for genuine adoption by businesses.
• Very strong dev team and an emphasis on working software before hype.
• Extremely well funded: most of the original 30,000 BTC raise is intact, thanks to the huge rise in value since the summer of 2016.
• Fixed (100 million WAVES) supply, no inflation.

Weaknesses

• Waves’ core team is located in Russia and so far, most partnerships announced have been in Russia/CIS. However, this is due to change in the coming year with ‘Waves hubs’ being established in blockchain-friendly locations around the world.
• Lack of visibility to date, though this is a product of their approach of creating working software before hype.
• It would have been good to see multi-sig implementation earlier for security reasons.

 Conclusion

Waves has extremely strong fundamentals. Now that the core tech is complete, marketing is about to start. The current value is an attractive price point for entry, having come off a high of $16-17 in December and bottomed out around the previous ATH ($6). Waves has been around for less than 2 years and still has a low market cap, with plenty of room for growth. For comparison Ethereum, which cannot in its current form sustain the same userbase, was announced two years earlier and launched one year earlier, yet has a market cap over a hundred times higher than WAVES.

 One-year outlook: Extremely promising

Assessment: Undervalued

Action: BUY

For more information, visit www.WavesPlatform.com.

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