Waves 2020: innovations of tomorrow for people of today
Last week, Sasha took a practical look at the tasks lying ahead and at what he believes Waves should build and focus on. He discussed the opportunity for inter-chain DeFi to bridge and unite our fragmented space. Today, I would like to dive deeper into the ‘conceptual why’ for inter-chain DeFi and what has driven Waves to shape the vision behind our solution.
Our vision
Our industry is changing. We are no longer merely in the stage where decentralized layers of technology are aspiring to rival their centralized counterparts. The snowballing experiment that our industry has turned into is opening doors to functionalities that never before were imaginable. This is in part made possible by our extremely transparent and open-source collective mindset, allowing for ideas to swiftly be iterated and improved upon. However, the major driver of our industry’s innovation is undoubtedly the consolidation of multiple aspects of a technological ecosystem into a single native token economy: aspects such as ownership, governance, data and value. This intrinsic and revolutionary incentive alignment ties technological innovation, financial involvement and growth contribution closer together than anything before, but, more importantly, more accessible for all; those in need or those interested. As an industry, we are defining the technological phases and layers required for ‘mass adoption’. But will this game of succession, this race for the fastest, most scalable technology, be solely responsible for the success of blockchain? Additionally, what defines (y)our relevance in an industry rapidly evolving and seemingly so focused on tech progression?
Truly blockchain agnostic
How can we be certain that our industry as a whole is not suffering from confirmation bias or sunk cost fallacy? Is there a way to guarantee the future continuity and agnosticism of the innovative functionality we aim to create? Can we ensure the proliferation of that functionality, when it’s so closely tied to financial incentives, which may simultaneously be our greatest feature, the functional density of a token? The answer is, we can’t. In terms of experimentation, it’s not because we can, that we should, but when there is money involved, chances are that someone will. Could our industry be limited by self-applied requirements and ‘developer & speculator”-expected patterns of what innovation looks like? The inefficiencies and future potential challenges that may arise as a result of current proposals, are precisely what is shaping Waves’ current mindset of how we will drive widespread accessibility to Waves’ ecosystem.
Products, not only protocols
Ecosystem value is not determined by the excellence of its native technology stack alone. The best tech has no guarantee of ‘winning’. Widespread distribution, ease of use and all the right features to drive seamless integration, are ultimately what matter most, yet you can’t have one without the other. Maybe, our industry unintentionally ignores what is most important and tends to forget that the creation of an entire infrastructure is ultimately there to provide user-friendly products and tools for the community. It’s precisely in this margin of ambiguity that we find the origins of Waves’ focus, of what we will build.
Connecting the blockchain of now, not only of tomorrow
The cumulative functionality of our industry is staggeringly impressive and is collectively and continuously being pushed forward. Currently, this infrastructure is highly fragmented, an accumulation of isolated mini-ecosystems, all serving different but overlapping purposes. Plenty of projects are aiming to solve this fragmentation and the industry does not have it all wrong. There is no good nor better approach, but it is clear that we should focus less on project versus project quarrels and more, if not solely, on industry versus challenges. There’s plenty of challenges we will face tomorrow, but today, blockchain is evolving into a decentralized powerhouse. Amidst our own experimentation, as the space progresses, so does the clarity of our focus and approach.
One powerful infrastructure, connecting the blockchain of now, not only of tomorrow, one that is truly blockchain-agnostic, where we build products, not only protocols, is the approach to our vision. Inter-chain DeFi is the accumulation of our vision, and represents technological freedom for blockchain-based finance. Inter-chain DeFi is crucial to maximizing the efficiency of individual DeFi ecosystems.
Our solution
Waves.tech is the solution to this vision of inter-chain DeFi. It’s the entirety of Waves’ ecosystem, a blockchain-agnostic infrastructure of interconnected ecosystems. It focuses specifically on connecting plug and play financial instruments into an agglomerated stack of unique functionalities on different chains. This practical and developer-focused DeFi toolkit leverages the purpose-driven protocols of Waves.tech and allows experimental innovation to go hand in hand with practical user-friendly products. To enable this vision, we combine the unique aspects of Waves.protocol, Gravity.tech and Neutrino.protocol to leverage a tool-rich infrastructure with a unique interoperability solution and a powerful multi-assetization protocol.
Gravity provides multi-purpose cross-chain interaction, but without a native Gravity token. This true blockchain-agnostic no-token approach creates a more inclusive, open ecosystem, while addressing future economical scaling/stability issues. Gravity empowers all elements of Waves’ ecosystem, but, more importantly, it acts as a two-way portal between Waves.tech and the entire open finance ecosystem.
Neutrino.protocol benefits greatly from this portal, allowing it to evolve into a powerful, interoperable multi-assetization protocol. Neutrino acts as an accessible toolkit enabling the creation and combination of new and existing asset types. Moreover, it facilitates frictionless inter-action and unites a powerful but fragmented DeFi space. Neutrino facilitates frictionless cross-chain inter-action and -creation and aims to provide the missing functionality to connect powerful, but fragmented DeFi ecosystems, so that we can build multi-chain products today. Neutrino.protocol will first port its functionality to Ethereum and expand its assetization capacity to instantly access a larger DeFi community. Additionally, we can build on this infrastructure to create a decentralized Forex application. Combining traditional Forex frameworks and innovative DeFi functionalities, we are designing a multi-purpose infrastructure for synthetic asset cross-chain swaps. Central to Neutrino’s ecosystem is the position of NSBT, Neutrino System Base Token, the driver of reserve stability.
Focused on simplified product creation, an infrastructure for achieving that goal will be open to anyone, bringing Waves to a central stage in the global blockchain ecosystem. Expanding the functionality of our own ecosystem, will solidify the underpinning position of Waves.protocol.
The targets we have set for Waves.tech’s functionality, will allow developers and users to access and combine powerful components across different chains. Waves dedicates itself to solving challenges that are currently barring Waves and the industry in general from achieving global adoption.
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