Waves roadmap 2017

Waves network has reached a certain degree of maturity, we have around 10k transactions daily, people have created dozens of tokens, mainstream business projects are launching ICO’s, gateways to to the “real” world of fiat currencies are being implemented. I think this is a right moment to formulate our message once again and highlight the directions in which we’re moving.

Let’s not mince words — we’re a mass adoption coin. Our goal is to take open blockchains mainstream and offer a stable platform for business and community usage. We believe in the legitimacy of open blockchains, they can and will be incorporated in current economical and societal reality, fixing and improving it.

We work with law firms and regulators to make Waves blockchain a go-to place for business in need of a new layer of transparency and efficiency. A number of directions has been pursued when trying to apply open blockchains to various business areas, but only two use cases truly shine now — it is value transfer on blockchain and crowdfunding/crowdinvesting. Bitcoin itself provided the first truly decentralized way to transfer value, and ICO schemes that emerged within cryptocurrency community are booming now and are about to disrupt the world of venture investing.

It’s really important to help these fledging opportunities go mainstream. We work with licensed financial companies and regulators to enable fiat transfer on the blockchain. This is a new dimension for cross boarder payments and local transfers, with proper regular oversight it could disrupt the current banking infrastructure.

Fiat gateways are the entry point from real world into the Waves blockchain. When there you can issue your custom blockchain token literally in two clicks, and you can use it as a CAT, Custom Application Token, as a part of functionality of your application. It might be a gaming app with internal currency, loyalty reward program with bonus tokens, some kind of crypto vouchers… You can also do an ICO, selling your CATs to investors and financing your platform development through the crowdsale. This is a new way to raise funds, and CATs are essentially a new class of securities.

Securities laws are rather strict across the world, so you need to take special care with compliance here. We’re developing a centralized platform, Tokenomica.com, which is going to work on top of the Waves blockchain, and provide 100% compliant legal framework for different types of token crowdsales, including private equity crowdsales. We’re working with top legal firms on this, and we are pleased with their commitment and interest in this new emerging business. Blockchains are becoming mainstream, and the feedback we get from legal companies is really encouraging.

To implement so many business features on the blockchain you need to have it ready for scaling and high throughput. We’re moving into that direction too, implementing an approach that allows to efficiently reduce local state storage having thousands of different tokens transferred across the network without a substantial overhead. On top of that we’re implementing throughput scalability approaches that allow to use the system bandwidth more efficiently and potentially can support tens of thousands of transactions per minute.

To make a blockchain system really flexible and multi-faceted you need to have some kind of smart contract functionality. Current approaches might be great in theory but practically they face lots of issues with scalability and economic incentives. There’s another approach to smart contracts that can be pursued — namely a generalization of non-Turing complete Bitcoin scripting, which allows for all scripts with finite execution times.

This approach could cover almost all current use cases of smart contracts, and, at the same time, could allow for anonymity implementation similar to Monero. Transaction anonymization is important not only for dark markets but also for legit business, existing in the environment of competition.

When taken together all these pieces form a holistic picture of a complete environment that covers most of the real world scenarios and in which you can exist without leaving it. Tokens and legality, fiat transfer and smart contracts — you have it all. Our goal is to build and nourish the ecosystem that is going to meet the demand of real world business, robust and compliant.