Waves Grants: Participants’ Progress

Published in

Waves Labs

19 min readSep 26, 2019

We are thrilled to share with you news and updates from participants of the Waves Grants program.

Since the launch of the grants program early this year, we’ve received 310 applications and distributed 30 grants with a total value of 126,444 WAVES to 33 developer teams and individuals.

We have some improvements in the pipeline, including an updated procedure for processing projects, as well as news related to Waves Incubator. We’ll have more to tell you on this soon, but now we would like to update you on the progress of our participants from recent grant batches.

While we have a special focus on dApps and solutions that have practical applications and improve interaction with the blockchain, Waves Grants continues to support projects from a wide variety of areas, including gaming, business, DeFi and various dApps, ecosystem and community solutions, infrastructure and tools, as well as research.

Waves Grants is open to teams and individual developers alike, embracing both projects already in development and those at the idea stage. The only condition is that all teams applying must have a developer on board, with a portfolio and a minimum level of experience.

Now to the most recent news from our grant participants, according to the following three categories:

dApps and projects
Ecosystem and community
Tools and infrastructure

1. dApps and projects

Digilira

Digilira is one of Waves Grants’ earliest participants. The project received funding under the second batch of grants.

The project’s team has been developing solutions for the Waves platform since 2017 and has released Digilira, a Turkish Lira Gateway on the Waves blockchain. Almost 10,000 Turkish residents have bought cryptocurrency using this gateway.

After releasing smart accounts and smart assets, it became possible to make a blockchain-based payment gateway compatible with the regulation of any country. Smart accounts, smart assets and data transactions will provide parental control multi-signature, KYC levels on blockchain, remote banning, and allowing or preventing transfer of funds.

Now the team is working on DigiliraPAY, a cryptocurrency payment gateway on top of the Waves blockchain.

DigiliraPAY will allow customers to pay with cryptocurrencies while merchants will receive payment in fiat money. Recently, the project’s team announced an agreement between DigiliraPAY and Turkey’s largest chain of stores for mother and baby goods. Turkish residents will be able to shop with their cryptocurrencies this year.

The team is developing DigiliraPAY on top of Waves blockchain. Creating rules by implementing Smart Accounts and Smart Assets will ensure regulatory compliance of solutions. For example, in Turkey you have to undergo KYC if your customers want to spend more than 750 TRY. DigiliraPAY will keep KYC data on the Waves blockchain and let customers shop on e-commerce web sites if they meet KYC requirements.

Once this business model has been tested in Turkey, there are plans to apply it in other countries.

Nyan Cat

NyanCat.io is a Player vs Player (PvP) skill-based crypto game with collectible elements. It is based on races between cryptocurrency portfolios. The winner is the player whose portfolio’s value sees the biggest increase during a race period.

NyanCat participated in the fifth batch of grants. Under the grant’s conditions, the team is expected to develop a browser version optimized for mobile devices and wallets.

Since development of the project began two months ago, a preliminary version of the game has been released, many bugs have been fixed and support for alternative cryptocurrencies and fiat money has been added. Over 120 cats have been sold, and the daily active users (DAU) figure has reached a peak of 500. The highest number of races per day is over 2,000.

NyanCat.io aims to solve most crypto games’ biggest problem of insufficient audiences. Usually, games like this target crypto enthusiasts and fail to attract regular gamers for a number of reasons. The main reason is that you need to buy cryptocurrency, and install and configure Waves Keeper/MetaMask, which scares off many casual gamers.

Upon analyzing substantial feedback form over 1,500 players who tested the beta version, Nyan Cat decided to re-adjust its game mechanics to the market realities. Nyan Cat: The Crypto Race will now be positioned as a full-fledged fantasy sport project rather than another crypto game. On the one hand, this will help to broaden the core potential audience from tens of thousands of crypto enthusiasts to 60 million. On the other hand, this will resolve a number of gameplay issues, including matchmaking. Another cool feature of the updated game will be a passive income opportunity for cat owners.

Chainify

Chainify is an infrastructure for building blockchain-based applications. The grant was awarded for the development of decentralized messaging protocol Nolik, the first use case for this technology.

Built on the Waves blockchain with the CDM Protocol, Nolik is open-source. Communication is conducted by sending encrypted messages attached to transactions. Each message is encrypted with the recipient’s public key and is decrypted with Waves Keeper.

Functionality:

Start messaging with one click, no registration needed
Auditability of message delivery
Digital signature with every message
Messages can’t be deleted or modified
Provable protection from unauthorized access and data leakages
Provable timestamping for every message
Provable content for every message
Provable sender and recipient for every message
P2P and group messaging
Multi-account system
Open-source code under MIT license
Access to messages even if Nolik will stop operating

In the near future the team will release a new version of Nolik. It have an improved design, a simple sharing mechanism and a cloud environment with replication in Europe and the United States.

Nolik is trusted and currently under testing by “Tvoya Territoria” — a non-profit organization that supports teenagers with online psychological consulting. They will use Nolik to anonymize teenagers and protect them from surveillance and personal data leakages. There is another positive side-effect from using Nolik — a provable number of requests, number of responses and even the time that was spent on every consultation. It is important for the fund’s partons and regulators.

The messenger is available here. A manual for installation and use of Nolik is available here.

Source code on GitHub: https://github.com/chainify/nolik

Deponent

Deponent is a blockchain-based solution for copyright protection, which allows rights holders to enter information about items of intellectual property they have created into an immutable public registry. In May 2019, Deponent received a grant for the development of two new features — a service for signing contracts on acquisition of intellectual rights and an escrow service for agreements on creating intellectual property.

Under the grant, the team developed a new design for the services, including a unified account, an administrator’s account for control over deals’ security, and logic for accessing Waves Keeper, so that users could sign their transactions.

The Deponent team has also developed a test version of a service for uploading files to the blockchain.

A service for buying and selling intellectual property rights is almost ready. All that is left is cleaning up some minor issues in the logic. The Deponent team is currently looking for a developer to finish the work.

Minimal requirements:

Node.js stack + Vue.js (the layout is done, and only minor changes are required).
Willingness to improve someone else’s code.
The possibility to deploy the project on their own server and show their progress.
Ride programming experience will be your advantage.

Send your CV to js@sdlt.io

MaDaMa Labs

Made up of three Italian developers, MaDaMa Labs focuses mainly on gaming dApps. As part of the second batch of funding, the team collected a grant for the development of Waves Island, a dApp written using Ride.

As part of the fourth batch, MaDaMa Labs collected a grant for the development of another dApp built using 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.

Roulette is a classic game we usually find in Casinos, with two main variants, European and American. European is the fairest because it only has a single 0 (Zero) while in the American you have both ‘0’ and ‘00’ (Double Zero).

MaDaMa Labs developed a smart contract-powered version of European Roulette where multiple users can play on the same table, making it multiplayer. Bets of 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2 and 5 WAVES are available.

The Roulette game is ready. Try Roulette on https://www.waves-roulette.com/

The team’s portfolio also includes projects such as OneMillionPixelWaves, WavesIslandBOT, WAVESNotify.

SIGN

Signature Chain (SIGN) is a blockchain-based document certification service. SIGN helps inventors, artists, writers, filmmakers, song and music composers to put a “lock” on their original artworks and creations with just the click of a button.

As part of the documentation process, artists can submit intellectual property as a file of any type, and document and certify them by a transaction on the Waves Blockchain. Aside from certifying them with a date and time, a unique hash will be computed and produced based on the content, so that any changes made — even the slightest change in the certified file or document — will produce a different hash.

Here is an article about Intellectual Property for Art on the Blockchain including an interview with Artist Joey Gates, who is already using SIGN for his art.

Since the publication of our previous report, the team has completed substantial work, including:

Merging the web wallet and the main web app with an activation system of the certification feature for partners, which is currently in testing on mainnet on Coffeecoin wallet.
Adding a mass transfer tab to the wallet, which is currently in testing before a testnet release, with the demo available here.
Finalizing a multiparty agreement (currently in progress). A demo is available here.

The creator of Signature Chain, Christophe Verdot, also spent time on the Waves Web 3.0 course to learn Ride and is still studying it for future endeavors, such as development of some certification logic using Ride.

dApp Ninja

Earlier, as part of the fourth batch of grants, the dApp Ninja team received a grant for the development of a game dApp, “Lucky Wheel”. Now we are happy to announce that the dApp has been launched and is operating successfully.

Lucky Wheel is a game in which a user spins a wheel to win WAVES tokens. A bet can be multiplied by 2, 5, 6, 10 or 20 times. All transactions are fully transparent and protected by smart contract technology.

Over the month that has passed since the dApp was added to dApp Ocean, the turnover of the game has exceeded 700 WAVES. It has been used by 25 people, and around 450 transactions have been made.

A video of the game process:

The game is available here.

Waves World

Waves World was also awarded a grant under the first batch. Waves World is an incentives-based ecosystem. The Waves World (WW) token is a reward distributed in return for valuable contributions to the community or for leasing WAVES to the Waves World node. Reward tokens can be spent in the Waves World Marketplace, which offers a variety of blockchain-related products and services. The project is constantly developing.

Here are some recent updates:

The Waves World Marketplace has been expanding, and many of its products are now available at its Etsy store and sell quite well.
WW will be adding marketplace items to Amazon and Wish in the coming weeks.
The marketplace has added an extensive line of items for personalization. Users may add any logo, text and clipart.
WW has made some Team Sales from the marketplace and will begin promoting this feature soon. This is a great way for teams and other groups to receive discounts for bulk orders.
WW has a new developer working to design a line of Digital Collectibles on the Waves Platform.
WW is working on a new gaming app where players are awarded Waves World tokens. The app is expected to generate advertising revenue.
WW’s writer is working on a new blog series focused on education about blockchain technology and its use cases.
Using the Waves World model, the team will create custom automated programs that enhance fundraising and customer loyalty, adding new revenue streams for businesses.

2. Ecosystem & community

Ventuary DAO and Mastering Web 3.0

Ventuary team, led by ambassador and Waves technological evangelist Alexey Pupyshev, is implementing the project Ventuary DAO. A prototype for a decentralized autonomous organization was created under the third, special batch of grants. Since then, the project has been substantially modified, turning into one of the first decentralized applications on the Waves blockchain following the launch of the Ride programming language on the mainnet in June 2019.

Ventuary DAO is a platform where promising startups in their earliest stages can gain support. Broadly speaking, Ventuary DAO is a sandbox dedicated to filtering dApp ideas and stimulating the Waves community to take part in Web 3.0 adoption.

Every developer can promote their idea and attract their first users. The best ideas will receive Waves Labs’ support, like, for instance, participants of Dev-bounty. The initiative allows users to attract funds from Waves Labs for implementing a dApp idea. The first bounty participants have already received support from the community and Waves rewards. The first batch of grants distributed via the DAO, with a total value of 10,000 WAVES, has been sent to 9 projects. More details on the projects that received Dev-bounty grants are available here.

At Ventuary DAO, the power to decide who receives a grant is in your hands. You can influence the outcome of the contest by donating to a project and leaving a review to convince the grant issuers that the project you like is worthy of funding.

New bounty programs and contests will be held on Ventuary DAO soon, so don’t miss them.

If you want, you can apply to Waves Labs with your startup idea without joining Ventuary DAO. However, Ventuary DAO provides community backing under established rules, making Waves Labs’ support more likely. The best projects are selected for more comprehensive support under Waves Labs’ grant program.

To join DAO, you have to be invited by a member. You’ll find a list of members and their contact information on the community page. Ask one of them to share an invitation link with you, or submit an application to join. You also need to have the Waves Keeper browser extension installed.

Wavescap

Wavescap is a website that tracks Waves projects and DEX asset prices. The website’s developers’ ultimate goal is to make it the fullest and most trusted information source for the Waves ecosystem’s members.

A grant to Wavescap team was released as part of the fourth batch. Thanks to the grant, the Wavescap team was able to implement a free public API supporting third-party apps and encouraging developers to build on top of Wavescap, which means granting them access to Wavescap data for use in their applications.

Furthermore, Wavescap is now able to provide fully customizable price widgets. The dollar price is an average of all trading pairs weighted by volume.

On top of that, the team has released a large tool list based on a unique tag system that works as an information source for anyone interested in the Waves ecosystem.

Wavescap API has been online since August 3, 2019. It can be found at https://wavescap.com/info/api.

The team’s further plans include implementing more detailed dApp metrics as well as dollar charts: adding usage stats for each dApp (number of transactions, number of users/wallets for the dApp, total transaction volumes, etc.) and enhancing the usability and UI of the dApp and ICO modules.

Some statistics about Wavescap.com:

Assets listed: 60
dApps listed: 12
Tools listed: 52
Widgets implemented on third party websites: 3
Average unique visitors per day (June): 773
Average unique visitors per day (July): 653
Average unique visitors per day (August): 631
Day with the most unique visitors: July 18, 2019 (1765)
Day with the least unique visitors: May 6, 2019 (121)
Average API users per day (August): 51

Trustamust

Trustamust is a recipient of a grant from our very first batch. The grant was awarded to improve the project’s MVP. As a result of the grant’s disbursal, a voting system, TrustAmust Verification Center, was created as part of TrustAmust Platform. Holders of Waves Community Token (WCT) are able to vote with their stake via Waves Keeper authorization for any active project on the Waves Platform. Projects can verify their tokens through a voting process.

Since the launch of TrustAmust Verification Center, 26 projects have been registered, of which six have achieved a rank of 100 by going through a public vote with WCT and received tickers, unique logos and “Qualified” status on Waves DEX. Over 50,000 lines of code have been written. 5,000 visits of the website have been registered, and over 1,000 wallets have voted for projects.

WavesDapp

WavesDapp is a Waves ecosystem guide launched by enthusiast Tim Rainer. The project’s website contains information about projects and tokens launched on Waves Platform, Waves tools, applied articles, and training materials.

Funds paid out to the project allowed its creator to launch a video blog, containing videos from the world of Waves Ecosystem, with interviews with teams of projects building on the Waves Blockchain. Also, developer launched WavesDapp Podcast. Now he has all the kit needed to compile media packs, including podcasts, videos and updates.

3. Tools & Infrastructure

Turtle Network

The grant was awarded to the Turtle Network team 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. Eventually, the solution will help to increase the number of Waves nodes thanks to simplifying the node launch process by regular users.

The tool has all the basic functionality required:

A user can request an instance, get an IP and a password.
Upon logging in, a user can configure all basic node functions, such as API key, seed, and enable reverse proxy.
Users can have a clear overview from the last 100 logs, and a history of all executed tasks is also available.

Regular people without deep technical skills will be able to run a node, configure and manage it, without Linux or CLI knowledge.

Under a subsequent grant, the solution will get a friendly UX.

WavesKit

WavesKit is a PHP framework for the Waves blockchain, developed by Dmitry Pichulin, a PHP developer and the creator of VECRO, a random oracle based on blockchain digital signature, and w8io explorer.

Some time ago, working on one of his projects, Dmitry noticed that the Waves Platform didn’t have an SDK for PHP. So, he decided to write one.

WavesKit has already been published, come out of beta and is ready to work with the Waves Platform’s standard functionality. All transactions available on mainnet can easily be created, signed and sent with just one package supported by all 64-bit PHP versions, starting from PHP 5.6.

Transactions are functions starting with tx. For better understating of how to work with transactions, you can study WavesKit documentation or turn directly to continuous integration tests.

More details on how the framework was created are here.

Paddle

Paddle is a Java library for testing smart contracts on the Waves blockchain, developed by Мaxim Smolyakov. Previously, Maxim made Awesome Waves, a list of useful resources for writing dApps on Ride.

Paddle enables writing tests for smart contracts on Java. The library can be used with any test framework.

The developer has now released library version 0.4.1, which enables tests on any node: Docker, stagenet, testnet or any other network. RSA encryption capability for Ride-supported algorithms has also been added, as well as functionality for creating Merkle trees under a Ride-supported algorithm. No other Waves library has that functionality.

Usage examples and detailed information about the library are available here.

Waves Escrow

As part of the fourth batch of grants, the Byzantine Solutions team was issued a grant for the development of an escrow service based on Waves smart contracts — Waves Escrow.

Now we have examples of using the service in other projects. For instance, three projects awarded grants under the fifth batch intend to incorporate Waves Escrow in their apps. A service updated to the latest version of Ride (enabling invoke and callable functions) will be used in Auctionlance, Rentapp, Deponent and Kolin Platform.

The escrow service uses Waves platform’s smart contract capabilities and a UI in a form of a frontend-only web app that utilizes the public Waves API and Waves Keeper for transaction authorization.

The solution executes all relevant logic and stores all data client-side. This is a deliberate design choice aimed at eliminating potential abuse and ensuring that all users of the solution retain control of their funds. All interaction with the Waves blockchain is done through Waves Keeper and the public Waves API.

The solution can be used both on testnet and mainnet, depending on the network chosen in the user’s Waves Keeper client.

The application contains the following components and features:

The account script. An account script implemented on Ride that acts as a 2-out-of-2 multisig between sender and receiver, that holds funds for a period of time.

Frontend-only web app. Although the application is hosted on a server, the server only responds with the app content with all JS functionality bundled for on-client use.

The currently available demo of the project can be accessed here.

The source code can be retrieved from the following Gitlab repository. To run a local version of the app, one has to clone the repository and follow the Readme instructions.

A more detailed description is available here.

Mywish

One of the Waves blockchain’s most important features is its smart contract functionality. MyWish specializes in easily issuing smart contracts based on pre-created templates. More than 6,500 contracts have already been created using MyWish.

The team was awarded a grant aimed to provide Waves users with a friendly interface for creating, testing, deploying and executing STO smart contracts.

Since it was launched in August 2019, more than 30 STO smart contracts have been issued. Although MyWish also has other blockchains in its pool, Waves still became the leader of the month by number of smart contracts created.

Waves users need only fill out the fields to create token:

Inspired by this success, MyWish plans to continue integration with Waves expanding the pool of smart contracts. Please send your ideas for Waves-based smart contracts to support@mywish.io.

The service can be found here: https://waves.mywish.io/contracts

Regulated tokens

A grant was awarded to Artem Badrtdinov for the implementation of the Regulated tokens case. Regulated tokens are tokens traded under designated conditions. For instance, only certain whitelisted addresses are permitted to trade. This means tokens cannot be sent to a non-whitelisted address or bought on DEX until the address owner has conducted the preliminary accreditation process.

The most popular use case for regulated tokens is Security Token Offerings. Security tokens are backed by real assets such as stocks, and their holders are entitled to dividends and other shareholder privileges.

The issuance and sale of security tokens involve compliance with securities regulations in the relevant jurisdiction. This, in turn, forces the token issuer to compile a whitelist of accredited individuals who are allowed to buy that asset.

The provided tool simplifies the technical side of the token issuance process on the Waves Platform. As a result, any user can allow circulation of their token only to addresses from a manageable whitelist.

This solution can also be used in the e-ticket white label from Full Block Solutions.

The solution has already been published and released on the mainnet. You can use the service here.

Payment Channel

A developer team led by Marc Jansen collected a grant for the first stage of developing payment channels based on Lightning Network (LNLPC).

The grant enabled improving the solution’s architecture, enhancing its safety and reliability and adapting it to the newest version of Ride.

Payment channels can be applied in various cases. Generally, every transfer between two parties that do more than one transaction between each other can be conducted via a payment channel. Therefore, the popular use cases are:

Micro payments: if two parties do large numbers of small transactions, those micropayments can be implemented via a payment channel for free. Only the instantiation and closing of the channel costs regular fees.
Two parties agree on a certain amount of funds to be exchanged over a certain period of time. This can once be implemented in a payment channel and then every transfer can be done if the service (or whatever the product / service of exchange is) is delivered.
Performance: payment channels are often used to increase the performance of a blockchain network. By cryptographically securing the funds in a payment channel, single transactions of the payment channel do not need to be stored on the blockchain directly, but only the initialization and closing of the channel. Afterwards, thousands and tens of thousands of transactions can be made via the channel without using the bandwidth of the blockchain network, while at the same time ensuring a certain level of security for both participants of the payment channel.
Networks of payment channels: as the Lightning network does, it is possible (based on additional implementations) to extend payment channels to a network of payment channels, so that every transaction can be executed in this network, with the advantage of the low price per transaction and increased performance.

Waves Payment Channels based on the new Ride4dApps are now available at GitHub.

A detailed manual is available here.

If the solution proves to be popular with the community, the team will create a convenient interface for it.

That’s it. Thanks for reading and your interest in our grant program!

As we have already noted, we have some improvements in the pipeline, including an updated procedure for processing projects, as well as news related to Waves Incubator.

We are open to support both existing and new teams and indie developers with new ideas. We look forward to your applications!

If you are interested in acquiring hands-on knowledge of blockchain, dApps and other Web 3.0 technologies, consider taking our free online course “Mastering Web 3.0 with Waves”. To be at the forefront of the next-generation Web, grab this unique chance and step into a decentralized future with us!

Once you’ve mastered Web 3.0 and come up with ideas for dApps, don’t hesitate to share them with the Waves community though DAO. Support from the community makes it easier to receive support from Waves Labs.

Do you need support for building your first dApp? Apply for Waves Grants.
If you’re working on a longer-term, larger-scale project and need comprehensive support from Waves Labs and the Waves team, consider applying for Waves Incubator.

To learn more about support options, visit Waves Lab’s web site. Also, check out our Twitter and Telegram channel.