A note about ‘marketing’
We want to make Waves one of the pre-eminent blockchain platforms over the coming year. Achieving that will require not only robust and powerful technology but judicious marketing. Thanks to the enthusiasm and generosity of our community, Waves has a large but not unlimited budget for this — and certainly nothing like the budgets of major tech companies.
Ask any domestic feline and you’ll find there’s more than one way to skin a cat. So here’s one viable strategy for marketing. There’s plenty of room for nuance and refinement, but this is a starting point to let the community know one broad direction we’re working in.
A crypto platform and toolkit
Waves is a custom blockchain tokens platform. It’s designed for mass adoption from the outset. That’s why we’ve spent the time and effort creating a user interface that is straightforward and familiar, and why scalability has been a concern right from the start. We didn’t want either usability or block capacity issues to stop end users from trying it out. In due course we hope and expect people will use Waves directly for activities such as remittance and crowdfunding, so having a client that is ready to go and can handle the load is a big deal.
Arguably more important, though, are the businesses that will use Waves to realise their own visions. These won’t necessarily use our ‘official’ client — they will create their own using the APIs that have been developed to make it easy for third parties to access Waves functionality and build it into their own applications. Initiatives like Incent, for example, will have their own smartphone wallet to allow users to send and receive Incent tokens, and to buy/sell them. But they won’t need advanced functionality like creating new assets and many of the other features in the Waves client. Waves’ API is a versatile toolkit that will allow them to do this with a minimum of effort.
Business adoption
Over the past few months Waves’ ‘marketing’ has generally taken the form of articles on various sites, both mainstream and crypto-focused, as well as our updates specifically to the crypto community via weekly newsletters and the Waves Weekly Crypto Roundup film — which is gaining an increasingly large following. These get the general idea of Waves out into the world and mean that there’s some general information available for anyone interested in finding out more. It helps people locate it in the general crypto landscape, and it’s good for SEO, since one of the purposes of it is to lead people back to WavesPlatform.com, where they can download the client and connect with us. Although this is helpful as a starting point and keeps the crypto world informed (from its core participants to its fringes in the broader fintech space), there’s a limit to how much it can achieve. It might draw more people towards the funnel, but it’s still above it and it’s still only one funnel.
Ultimately we want Waves to be not only an application that people can use directly for remittance and so on, but one that sits behind dozens or hundreds of third-party applications — a ‘Waves Inside’ initiative, in the same way that Intel chips power millions of PCs, smartphones (including the iPhone) and other devices. What will give Waves long-term value is not a relative handful of crypto speculators but high transaction volumes that place demand on WAVES and make it profitable to run a node.
Just one iPhone equivalent will make a big difference, but better would be dozens of small- and mid-level businesses. We hope and anticipate that many or most of these businesses will want to run their own Waves nodes — to maintain the security of the network they rely on, to process transactions quickly, and to earn rewards through staking (including the fees generated by their own transactions). Bear in mind, too, that the current threshold for mining with a full node is 10,000 WAVES. Every time a business sets up a Waves node, 10,000 WAVES will be locked and taken off the market for the long term. (In due course, as the network grows, that number will probably need to change. As the price of WAVES rises, the entry cost of running a node — and attacking the network — will also rise, and if it is not reduced then a theoretical maximum of 10,000 nodes could operate with the fixed WAVES supply of 100 million.)
It will make sense for businesses crowdfunding on the Waves platform to secure a tranche of WAVES when they do so in order to run a node and enjoy the returns from this, as well as benefiting from any future price rise predicated on reduced available supply and increased demand. The first crowdfunds on Waves have done just this — including Incent, which collected over 1 million WAVES and is now running no fewer than four nodes (one each in London, New York, San Francisco and Singapore).
At this point, it should become clear that it will only take a handful of solid businesses with a forward-thinking mentality and commitment to Waves’ success and market demand for WAVES will be significant.
Off-the-peg business support
The question then becomes, how do we attract suitable businesses and give them what they need to achieve long-term success, since the success of the broader Waves platform depends on the success of those that use it?
Promotion is one part of this, and we can work together with businesses to profile them in articles/updates and give them publicity in our weekly film, as we already have done — Incent, Darcrus and ChronoBank being three examples. But that’s really entry-level stuff, no more than would be expected as a bare minimum (if you’re going to profile crypto projects, like WWCR does, you might as well profile Waves-related ones).
Beyond that, offering a set of services to help promising crypto businesses crowdfund money for development and their own marketing will ensure as many of the best initiatives as possible get a good start. Then, once the crowdfund is finished and the token distributed, any project needs at least one good exchange so that the token can be traded. Reliable price discovery is critical, and projects like Incent need to be able to buy tokens off the open market to send to customers. Without this functionality there is a real problem. Waves’ decentralised exchange (DEX) will enable this — any token will be able to trade against any other. Along with any other supporting exchanges, that means we can give new Waves businesses everything they need to get off to a flying start: blockchain infrastructure and token facilities, tech support, crowdfunding assistance and advice, exchange listing, and awareness within our growing community.
A self-contained ecosystem
The intention is to build a self-contained ecosystem in which Waves is not beholden to or reliant on anyone to fulfil its aims. In a world built on the promises and benefits of disintermediation, it’s an unpleasant irony that exchanges have become the new gatekeepers. We cannot afford for this to be repeated across other areas. Whilst we will work with as many third-party partners as we can, then, we will make sure that Waves has everything it needs for its projects to succeed, should they need our help (equally, as an open platform, businesses are welcome to use our APIs and functionality without any further contact or collaboration).
Hopefully this will give an overview of how things may evolve in the Waves ecosystem. There will be many other initiatives and partnerships, both from the Waves grassroots and arising from more institutional connections. But the approach outlined above is one major strand of how we hope to drive Waves adoption, bringing in new businesses and in each case placing demand on the market through increased transaction throughput and locking WAVES in active nodes. Given that much of this is in beta or active discussion, and we have numerous organisations looking to start projects with us, it should be an exciting 2017.
Happy new year from everyone at Waves!
