Fourth Batch of Waves Labs Grants Distributed

We are glad to announce the fourth batch of projects to be supported under the Waves Grants program.

We launched our grant program six months ago, and it has already proven to be a huge success. Waves Grants funding has facilitated the development of a number of promising projects and useful solutions, attracting many talented developers capable of proposing and implementing interesting ideas. To date, more than 160 applications have been submitted.

At Waves Labs, we are keen to support as many Waves-based projects as we can. We are constantly working on new batches of grants. You can learn how the grant program works in detail by checking out this article.

We’d like to remind you that the same project can be eligible for several grants, covering various stages of its development. Projects that have been selected for one of the first batches of grants can therefore receive support again in the future. In line with this approach, the fourth batch of funding includes several developers who collected grants in previous rounds. New grants will be disbursed for new projects, as well as the further development of existing ones.

Our ultimate goal is to build out a sustainable ecosystem of working businesses and top-quality products, based on Waves technologies. This naturally implies supporting the most promising projects at all stages of their development.

The fourth batch of grants, with a total value of 34,500 WAVES, will be disbursed to nine projects. You can find out more about the selected projects below!

Recipient: Wavescap

Grant amount: 5,000 WAVES

The grant will be spent on the development of Wavescap, which aims to be the most comprehensive and trustworthy source of information for participants of the Waves ecosystem.

Wavescap’s plan is to combine tracking of asset prices, a database of dApps, ICOs, and tools of portfolio management based on on-chain data, an explorer for investors, and other features.

Already available features are:

• Asset price monitoring.
• dApps list.
• ICO list.

The grant will cover the implementation of the following:

• A complete list of tools existing in the Waves ecosystem.
• Improving the dApp database, adding usage stats for each dApp (number of transactions, number of users/wallets for the dApp, total transaction volumes, etc.) and enhancing the useability and UI of the dApp and ICO modules.
• Wavescap API, which is to be released soon as part of the process of switching to data gathered from Wavescap’s node.
• Price ticker Widgets that could be created on wavescap.com and via html, allowing users to customise them easily and integrate into their web content.

Wavescap are considering placing ads and charging for services, but since they feel this would negatively impact the user experience, they want to avoid these two options for as long as possible. The Project would prefer to run with the support of Waves Labs and the Waves community.

Another option is to charge a small fee for listing dApps and ICOs as soon as Wavescap grows to sufficient size. Coin listings will always be free.

We consider supporting enthusiasts, who are willing to make the Waves ecosystem more understandable and accessible, to be an important element of expanding our influence.

Recipient: Marc Jansen, @Hawky, Payment Channel

Grant amount: 2,500 WAVES

Scalability and throughput remain the most acute issues faced by blockchain-based projects. One of the best known solutions to these issues is the Lightning Network.

The grant will be awarded for the first stage of development of an idea based on Lightning Network-like Payment Channels (LNLPC). Previously, a script for creating payment channels was created but it has some problems and irregularities.

Under the grant, the solution’s architecture will be improved from a security and reliability viewpoint, and it will be adapted to the most recent version of the RIDE programming language.

Later, during the second phase, a user-friendly interface will be created.

Projects like this are vital for the ecosystem as they help uncover and resolve the blockchain platform’s issues and help streamline its development strategy.

Recipient: Bettex

Grant amount: 3,000 WAVES

Affiliate programmes have recently become a popular tool for drawing users to a specific product, with businesses rewarding affiliates for attracting new customers.

The grant will go towards the development of a multi-level decentralised affiliate programme at Bettex, a smart contract-based decentralised betting exchange.

The process of calculating and paying out affiliates’ rewards will be conducted using a smart account, fostering participants’ trust and improving transparency.

The project is in Waves Labs’ sphere of interests as it is a dApp based on Waves smart contracts. This is also a product with potentially significant real-world appeal. In addition, this solution could be used in any existing or future apps on the Waves blockchain, since an affiliate programme is a major component of many services.

Recipient: Byzantine Solutions

Grant amount: 3,000 WAVES

The grant will be spent on the development of an escrow service based on Waves smart contracts in a bid to improve the security and transparency of online deals involving crypto payments.

The suggested solution consists of two parts:

• A set of smart contracts on the Waves blockchain, implementing the business logic of an escrow app.
• A web service integrated with Waves Keeper, enabling buyers and sellers to manage transfers and track their statuses within a convenient interface.

The escrow service is one of the use cases we previously suggested for implementation under the Waves Grants programme, as we believe that interaction between buyers and sellers should always be secure and transparent.

Recipient: Bram Nagtegals, Blackturtle

Grant amount: 3,000 WAVES

The grant is awarded for the development of the Node Management Tool, a service for launching, managing and updating Waves nodes. The service aims to simplify the process of node hosting and maintenance. As a result, even users with limited technical knowledge will be able to do it, while reducing the chance of errors.

The Node Management Tool will be developed in Python with the use of Ansible Playbooks. An end user will be able to run all node management operations from the interface.

Making working with Waves tools easy and convenient for the widest possible range of users is one of our priorities. However, node launch still involves many issues and difficulties. We think that the arrival of a service simplifying node launch and the upgrade process will come in handy for Waves users.

Recipient: MaDaMa Labs

Grant amount: 7,000 WAVES

Made up of three Italian developers, MaDaMa Labs has already received funding from Waves. As part of the second batch of funding, the team collected a grant for the development of Waves Island, a dApp written in the RIDE programming language. Gaming dApps are currently MaDaMa’s main focus.

This grant will be spent on the development of another dApp built on RIDE, Roulette, and a prize fund as a contingency for the possibility of a large win before the smart contract’s reserve has been filled up.

The award of the grant comes as another step toward embracing dApps as a tool enabling transparent, fair and legitimate gambling.

Recipient: Aleksei Pupyshev (Ventuary Lab), «Mastering Web 3.0 with Waves» and «Coupon Bazaar dApp»

Grant amount: 6,000 WAVES

Alexei Pupyshev and his Ventuary team are running an educational course for blockchain developers, «Mastering Web 3.0 with Waves», in collaboration with Waves’ DevRel department.

Participants who have taken four lessons and earned over 350 out of 400 points by developing solutions and passing quizzes, receive a Web 3.0 Professional certificate. Those who have taken all the lessons and earned over 700 out of 900 points receive a Web 3.0 Expert certificate. The course is currently in full swing.

Previously, Alexei collected a grant for the introduction of the Token Curated Registry (TCR) concept to Ventuary, a working decentralised reviews and voting platform to be announced soon.

Courses like «Mastering Web 3.0 with Waves» are vital because they enable direct interaction with developers — the immediate users of Waves’ tools. We believe that such courses help build out the Waves ecosystem and enable the development of useful new solutions for its users.

Recipient: dApp Ninja

Grant amount: 3,000 WAVES

The grant will be disbursed for the development of a gaming dApp — Roulette. The dApp will use different game mechanics from those developed by MaDaMa Labs and will be similar to TRONbet’s Roulette.

The dApp will have 21 sections for different winning ratios. To play, a user selects a winning ratio and the size of the stake. If the selected ratio wins, the player collects the amount of their bet multiplied by the ratio.

Upon placement of each bet, a random number will be generated by a smart contract, which will determine if the bet wins or loses. Smart contracts will be written in the programming language RIDE for dApps on Waves’ testnet.

Gaming and gambling dApps are among the priority areas for Waves as they quickly gain popularity, with several of them ranked among the 10 most popular dApps.

The use of smart contracts in gaming and gambling dApps is set to ensure full transparency of bets, transactions and storage of currency.

Waves Labs has already collaborated with the leader of this developer team, issuing him a grant for the implementation of the Waves Merchant payment solution.

Recipient: SIGN

Grant amount: 2,000 WAVES

SIGN is a custom Waves wallet with diverse functionality. One of the wallet’s main features is certification of files, such as texts, video and images. The developer has tested hashing for files of up to 10 GB in size.

SIGN also runs Web Wallet, a service enabling users to create customised wallets with their own tokens and designs.

As part of the second batch of funding, the developer was issued a grant for support of SIGN Wallet. This was spent on launching the wallet on mainnet and adding new functionality.

The current grant is being released for the project’s further development, such as combining two versions of the app, sign-web.app and web-wallet, in one app with a wider range of functionality. This will make the wallet faster and more user-friendly. Subsequently, the developer will be able to focus on adding new features.

The decision to issue a grant is based on our understanding that custom wallets are an integral part of the Waves ecosystem as they facilitate the creation of user interfaces for communication with the blockchain in various areas, improving user experience.

We would like to thank all Waves Grants applicants. We are currently working on the next batch of grants. Considering applications for Waves Grants is a continuous process and, due to high interest in our funding programs, we can’t always immediately reply to every applicant. However, every application will be considered, so please be patient.

We would also like to remind you that several weeks ago, we launched a new funding initiative, Waves Incubator.

Waves Incubator is a long-term strategic initiative designed to support solutions based on Waves technologies. Unlike Waves Grants, which is mainly focused on smaller projects implemented within three months, Waves Incubator is a larger-scale, longer-term initiative.

Waves Incubator provides support to projects developed over a period of up to one year. Since Waves Incubator’s focus is on larger-scale projects, it releases larger grants of up to 100,000 WAVES per project. Finally, in addition to funding, Waves Incubator provides technical assistance from the Waves team under the supervision of the Developer Relations department, as well as marketing and PR support. A special focus is on building dApps in the RIDE programming language.

To learn more about our funding initiatives, please, see https://waveslabs.com/grants for Waves Grants and https://waveslabs.com/incubator for Waves Incubator.