On the crest of Waves / Monthly digest / March 2021

Hi Waves community,

We are excited to introduce the March issue of our monthly digest, which is quite special because we are releasing it on the day of Waves’ fifth anniversary.

Over these five years, Waves has gone from a small startup focused on then totally new distributed ledger technology to a major player in the global blockchain industry. Currently, Waves is a powerful ecosystem featuring a range of projects and products that attract numerous users and an active and loyal community across the globe.

In this issue, we’ll share our main achievements over the last few weeks. Meanwhile, far from resting on the laurels, we are constantly on the move, looking out for new ideas and directions in which Waves tech should develop.

In late March, Waves founder Sasha Ivanov unveiled a roadmap for Waves in 2021–2022, which includes three stages. During the first stage, which is to run through September/October 2021, the main focus will be on boosting liquidity in the Waves ecosystem with a goal of $10 billion in total value locked (TVL).

The second stage, scheduled to be implemented between September 2021 and January/February 2022, will be centered on scaling up. By the end of that stage, the average daily number of transactions on Waves is expected to reach 10 million.

The main idea of the third stage will be “to try and come up with something genuinely new, going beyond the concept of fully synchronized consensus approaches,” as Sasha explained it. “Real breakthroughs in scalability will be achieved only with new concepts,” he said. “We plan to implement new approaches to distributed ledgers within the Waves 2.0 framework, to be launched in 2022.” You can read Sasha’s post outlining Waves’ roadmap here.

On April 1, Sasha did an AMA session on Telegram, at which he explained some elements of the Waves roadmap in more detail, while also offering his insights into the future of blockchain. You can check out a recording of the AMA session or a roundup of the highlights in this blog post.

Moving forward, automatic market makers (AMMs) are going to play an increasingly important part in the DeFi space. In another recent post, Sasha explained how AMM pools for synthetic assets, pegged, for instance, to Tesla stock, will work. You can read it here.

On top of trends

Waves is approaching its fifth anniversary in good shape. Waves-based projects are gaining popularity among users across the globe, the TVL on Waves is increasing, more and more exchanges are offering Waves assets, acknowledging their top performance.

WAVES was recently named among the top 5 best performing DeFi projects’ tokens, while major exchange Crypto.com listed WAVES to trade in a pair with USDT and the USDT-WAVES pair was also added on Bittrex.

In late March, the total value locked in WAVES in the Neutrino smart contract for the first time exceeded half a billion.

Meanwhile, the DeFi space continues to expand, attracting more and more users. And the Waves protocol, with its low fixed fees and fast transactions, offers major advantages to DeFi developers and users. DeFi projects implemented on Waves range from AMMs to stablecoin protocols.

All advantages of the Waves protocol that make it most suitable for various DeFi projects are explained in this article.

Over the last few weeks, the non-fungible token (NTF) segment has been all the rage, driven by recent sales of digital art in the form of NFT at exorbitant prices. This has propelled NFTs to mainstream attention, nearly making NFTs a household name and opening up new mass adoption opportunities. The Waves ecosystem has also been involved in this trend, as the Waves-based SIGN platform offers users an opportunity to buy and sell NFTs. In a bid to show how the Waves protocol could be applied for NFTs, Sasha Ivanov offered a digital image of a duck for sale on the SIGN platform and received many offers, the biggest of which is for $600,000.

We explained our take on the NFT craze in an article and a livestream.

In sync with the community

All the recent achievements were only possible thanks to our awesome community, and we congratulate all of its members on Waves’ fifth anniversary! We will continue creating materials and organizing events for the community. And here’s what we’ve done most recently in that area.

We published a tutorial on using Waves wallets on the Swop.fi AMM service, which is quickly gaining traction.

As the DeFi space expands, crypto exchanges are getting an increasing number of new users, some of whom are total novices in the crypto community. Targeting primarily, but not exclusively those users, Waves experts did a livestream, discussing the differences and similarities between centralized and decentralized crypto exchanges, trying to figure out which approach will prevail.

While the Swop.fi team does everything possible to make the service one of the AMM segment’s leaders, the use of AMMs still entails certain risks, which Waves developer advocate Inal Kardanov discussed in this video.

We also released a video tutorial explaining a new staking opportunity on Waves.Exchange, which could yield up to 40% APY.

And this post explains how governance on Swop.fi works, enabling users to vote on pool weights.

In a move to create more incentives for the Waves community, we have launched Duck Hunters, a blockchain game that brings together NFT collectables and yield farming. Participants in the game will receive EGG tokens for completing assignments published several times a week. A user who has collected enough EGG tokens will be able to exchange them for a duck in the form of NFT. Waves Tech will buy back selected NFT, focusing on the rarest ones bred by users. To learn more about Duck Hunters, read this post.

Offering more utility

Waves Tech is working hard on improving utility and creating more potential mass adoption opportunities.

As the Neutrino stablecoin protocol is targeting richer functionality and greater decentralization, its team revealed a short-term plan of steps aimed at fully decentralizing the protocol’s governance and adding the Speculative Decentralized Forex (sDeFo).

One of the protocol’s main goals of is the tokenization of real-world assets, a model in which stablecoins pegged to national currencies could serve as a safe haven for hedging risks. Similarly, tokenized volatile assets may attract volatility traders and thus more liquidity, improving the system’s overall stability. To learn more about planned improvements, check out this post.

Recently, the Neutrino community was invited to adjust DeFo swap fees by governance voting. The results of the vote can be viewed here.

The Gravity protocol announced new integrations. SuSy now enables the swapping of USDN against HECO, AVAX and FTM.

Meanwhile, Swop.fi offers extra profits to their users by automatically staking most of USDN, NSBT and EURN tokens added by users to its pools, to the Neutrino smart contract. Daily auto-staking payouts are added to pool liquidity, just like liquidity provider fees.

As part of its strategy to provide users with new lucrative investment tools, Waves.Exchange also launched ETH staking with mechanics similar to those of USDT and BTC staking.

Another innovative investment tool from Waves.Exchange is algorithmic trading (algo-trading), which combines the reliability of the Waves blockchain’s decentralized tech with advantages of centralized services. Earlier, the Waves.Exchange team developed a system of trading bots that had done well over the past year, generating an annual profit of about 100%. Now, this product is available to users who can earn by providing liquidity to algo-trading pools. More details of the algo-trading tool can be found in this post.

In focus: Waves Association

In March, the Waves Association celebrated its first anniversary. The association already plays an important part in the Waves ecosystem, and its role is only going to grow, as more members join and new governance options are added.

To learn more about the association’s first year of its operation, you can check out a video of its recent general meeting.

Meanwhile, to work out a tech process for collecting and processing grant applications, the association’s members developed a dApp whose main tasks are:

• the creation of a truly decentralized system covering all process participants — working group members, the general meeting, the association’s executive board and grant applicants — to minimize the influence of the association’s founding members.
• automation and digitalization of the process thanks to Waves tech.

In October 2020, The DAO model was announced. In February 2021, the Waves DAO was released on the testnet. A demo version of the DAO is available on dao.wavesassociation.org, and its source code is available on Github.

At a recent general meeting, the Waves Association DAO was used for the first time to vote on a grant application, and it ran smoothly! This comes as a proof of the Waves protocol’s suitability for decentralized governance.

The next step was to enable association members to vote for verification of the ecosystem’s projects’ tokens using the Special Votes feature. The verification will be supported in the interface of Waves.Exchange, basically providing an oracle to the exchange. A project that receives the majority’s support will be automatically verified on the exchange, which could also lead to verification on other services, such as CoinMarketCap.

The Special Votes feature was recently tested for a demo vote on the verification of the SIGN token. The token was supported by 5 out of 9 members of the association’s Grants & Funding working group, which can be traced thanks to the transparency of vote via the Waves DAO smart contract. Based on the vote’s outcome, the token received a Verified status on Waves.Exchange, can be integrated into CoinMarketCap and is in the same category as the Waves ecosystem’s base assets. For more details on the token verification vote, see this post.

Later, four more tokens, MTNT, WCT, SCOneX and TN were approved.

Meanwhile, this is just the beginning of the Waves DAO operation, and there are ambitious plans for this governance tool.

The Waves DAO aims to cover the widest range of the association’s processes, making them more decentralized. In other words, the DAO is expected to become a CRM system for the Waves ecosystem, in which association members will operate as task managers and external teams as contractors.

Another task for the Waves DAO is increasing the blockchain community’s loyalty to the Waves ecosystem by offering direct access to decision making. Under this vision, anyone could become the association’s member and take part in votes or, at least, observe the ecosystem’s development directions.

A detailed roadmap towards implementing these tasks is available here.

That’s it for now. Once again, congratulations on Waves’ fifth anniversary! And this is just the beginning! Stay tuned!

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