Sasha Ivanov’s AMA session: highlights
On April 1, Waves founder Sasha Ivanov did a Telegram AMA session, largely focused on Waves’ recently revealed roadmap. This post summarizes the AMA session’s main points.
The first stage of Waves’ roadmap will be focused on boosting liquidity with a goal of achieving a TVL of $10 billion by September-October 2021. And one of the ways to attract more liquidity will be the launch of a landing platform, Sasha said, answering a question.
“The DeFi space currently has two major parts, swap pools and lending pools,” he explained. “We already have [the AMM service] Swop.fi, and we need to add a lending platform.”
According to Sasha, an existing project on the Waves blockchain, Lombardini, will be turned into a full-fledged lending platform similar to Aave. “It’s not going to be revolutionary, but it’s something we need to complete Waves’ DeFi [operations],” he noted. “Without lending, you don’t have proper DeFi, it allows you to trade on-chain on margin.”
One of the questions concerned the possibility of decentralized data storage on Waves. “This is the next step of our roadmap,” Sasha replied. “We’ll start with the liquidity phase, and then we’ll have the scaling phase, which will implement sidechains. And I believe that one of the sidechains should be a data sidechain. Technically, it’s not so complicated. The idea is to create application chains based on a new sidechain protocol that we’ll start developing in the fall.”
Sasha’s short answer to a question on how interoperable Waves is going to be was: “As much as possible.” He elaborated: “We can’t be fully interoperable with Ethereum, for example, but we’ll add support for MetaMask. Users will be able to log in to Swop.fi and Waves.Exchange with their MetaMask.”
“As for deeper interoperability, we are going to have an EVM sidechain,” he continued. “This is not so urgent because there are too many projects that try to develop EVM blockchains and steal liquidity from Ethereum. Instead of competing with them, we should think about the next stage of blockchain development. If we chase the current hype, we could miss the next one. There’ll be a new phase of developing for distributed ledgers, which won’t even include blockchain. We should think about the next step, at the same time trying to promote our tech as much as possible.”
Another question was on Waves’ possible collaboration with Russia’s largest lender, Sberbank. In his reply, Sasha explained that Sberbank, which has its own blockchain based on Hyperledger, plans to issue a “crypto ruble” not to be confused with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
“It’s not clear at this stage if the Central Bank of Russia allows it,” he said, “But our Russian enterprise branch, Waves Enterprise, is interacting with Sberbank, and there might be a gateway between the Waves Enterprise chain and the Sberbank chain.”
Sasha added that Waves no longer has any crypto-related operations within Russia due to a recent regulation that basically bans crypto. “But we’ll keep all enterprise projects in Russia, some of which are quite big and interesting, such as a project with the tax authority,” he said.
Answering a question about whether there will be Waves Enterprise products aimed for general public, Sasha mentioned a hybrid stablecoin backed by tokens and real-world assets. “The idea is to create a retail product that will be used not only by enterprise, but also by retail customers,” he observed. “For example, you can back it with Eurobonds or other stable assets. We are one of the few companies that think about combining enterprise with DeFi. There is a huge interest in DeFi from real-world companies, but there is an understanding barrier. I don’t understand why there is so little activity in the space. Currently, DeFi can yield high profits.”
One participant asked about the difference between Swop.fi and planned Waves.Exchange liquidity pools. “On Swop.fi, you have purely on-chain swaps, and Waves.Exchange is a hybrid DEX,” Sasha replied. “Imagine that you can add liquidity to any pair on Binance. You log to Binance and add some ETH and USDT to the ETH/USDT pair and earn an interest. We want to do the same. On Swop.fi, you have traditional yield farming, and on Waves.Exchange — yield farming for old-school exchanges with order books where you can add liquidity to any trading pair. For some legitimate pairs, you’ll receive yield farming rewards, there will be governance enabling rewards for those pools. But you will be able to immediately launch your token and add liquidity to it.”
Asked about dealing with KYC and other similar legal requirements, Sasha said:
“We are as compliant as possible, but we always remember our mission. Waves’ mission is to take decentralization as far as possible, rather than try to work with fiat payments, because many other projects are focusing on that, and they are great, but this is not our cup of tea. KYC will be implemented as long as it doesn’t hurt the decentralization idea too much.”
Responding to a question from another user, Sasha explained Waves’ plans regarding synthetic assets that don’t require over-collateralization. “Basically, you provide liquidity to some kind of a swap pool, and when you do that, a synthetic asset is issued,” Sasha said. “For example, you want to issue a Tesla asset. You just add some USDN to the pool, and one part of your USDN is converted into TSLA based on an external oracle price, and the other part is added to the swap pool. So, you’ve created a synthetic asset and simultaneously provided liquidity.”
“If other users want to buy TSLA tokens, they just go to that pool, exchanging them for their USDN,” he went on to say. “You have your synthetic asset, you have a liquidity pool, and you don’t need any over-collateralization. Under this model, you can launch any synthetic asset you want — from SNP500 stock to obscure small pink-sheet stocks. There will be a huge number of new liquidity pools, which will help us achieve our $10 billion TVL goal.”
Sasha also offered his vision on the current state of blockchain development, which he characterized as a mass adoption cycle. “We might not notice it yet, but we have achieved [mass adoption],” he said. “For example, everybody has heard about NFTs. Artists have sold their digital works for over $60 million, and every news outlet in the world has run an article about this. We are at the beginning of a mass adoption stage, and the market capitalization of different crypto assets will reach dozens of trillions [of dollars] within a couple of years. We will see bear markets, as well, because crypto is not different from any other financial markets, but this is the beginning of a phase of greatness for crypto.”
“We are in a phase in which the internet was around the beginning of this century,” he concluded. “Somebody is going to win, somebody is going to lose. I hope we will be one of the winners.”
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