Sasha Ivanov’s AMA session: highlights

On December 22, Waves founder Sasha Ivanov did a year-end AMA session, speaking about 2020’s achievements and future plans. This post features some of Sasha’s insights shared during the livestream.

Answering one of the questions, Sasha explained if decentralized applications could work outside the blockchain.

“Blockchain is not the only technical solution for building decentralized ledgers,” he said. “We may want to step back a little and think about [other] approaches that were not used or other consensus mechanics.”

“Basically, two consensus mechanics are [currently] used: something close to Proof of Work or Proof of Stake and something close to voting,” he added. “Proof of Work was invented 10 years ago, and not much thought had been put into consensus before that. So, we can come up with totally different approaches to creating decentralized autonomous systems.”

Sasha also shared his take on the prospects of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). According to Sasha, many projects use NFTs just to reward their users, and they have no real value.

“But there are scenarios, in which they do have value,” he noted. “I don’t believe in NFTs being connected to real assets, like works of art, because we don’t have a legal basis for that [at this point]. But I do believe in using NFTs for insurance, when you have an insurance contract that is clearly non-fungible because it’s a token connected to your specific case.”

“It could provide insurance against a specific accident that could happen only to you,” he went on to say. “And I would love to see an insurance project on Waves. Insurance can be the next big thing in crypto.”

Predictably, Sasha was also asked about the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on Waves.

“We have suffered from COVID, like everybody else, but we have also been able to see that people can work differently,” he said. “We should be thankful to COVID because we understood that people can collaborate not only being in the office. They can collaborate from their homes, and this is quite effective.”

“I don’t think that our productivity has been lower over the past year,” he added. “Maybe it has been even higher. It’s a very nice moment to think about how we all live and how we all cooperate. We understood that we can collaborate in different setups and that we don’t have to be in the same office to work efficiently.”

Speaking about Waves.Exchange, Sasha said that the exchange is going to see major changes in 2021.

“We’ll be trying to create a setup in which decentralization doesn’t have a negative impact on usability,” he explained. “We will have an authorization [system] that uses just your email and a password, but it will be still decentralized. This will be the first [decentralized] exchange to compete with traditional exchanges in terms of usability.”

“We will try to create a decentralized environment that’s as usable as a centralized one,” Sasha said. “It will be hard, but this is the next step for exchanges. Sooner or later, all crypto exchanges will be decentralized.”

Sasha also discussed the release of a new version of the Ride programming language early next year.

“It will allow us to have features that Ethereum has,” he said. “For example, one smart contract will be able to call another smart contract. But, on top of that, we will have features that nobody else has. A contract will be able to run over several blocks, meaning that we will be able to execute contracts and programs of any complexity.”

“This will make competition for block space less harsh than it is now on Ethereum, where everybody has to pay a lot of fees to make sure their transactions are included in the block,” he elaborated. “In our setup, you won’t have to pay because you can just wait, and your transaction will be executed later. There is no gas limit within the block.”

Speaking about plans to release Waves 2.0 next year, Sasha stressed that the Gravity interchain communication protocol is likely to play a major role in that.

“We need to have seamless interaction between chains, which will allow us to scale what we have, because we’ll be able to run a specific app on a specific subchain,” he said. “If every app has a specific chain to run on, we won’t have to be too worried about the scalability of a particular chain, because one chain should be sufficient for one app.”

“We would need an interaction mechanism between chains, and Gravity is an attempt to create a universal mechanism for interaction between any type of chains,” he added. “We can narrow it down for Waves 2.0 and have trustless integration of different chains within the Waves 2.0 ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, answering a question about what the Waves blockchain would look like in 20 years’ time, Sasha said: “I have a suspicion that we’ll have different technology in 20 years. Blockchain was just a start, an eye-opener for many. People understood that we could create distributed systems that work according to a protocol, without human interaction.”

“But this was just a start, and I’m not sure that we’ll have blockchains in 20 years,” he concluded. “I can see the adoption of other approaches quite soon. Blockchains will evolve into something larger, into something even more exciting.”

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