Waves protocol: year in review

2020 was a very special and difficult year for the entire world. But for the Waves protocol, it turned out to be a year of achievements and new product and functionality launches. In this post, we’ll take you through the key highlights of the Waves ecosystem in 2020.

Main results and stats

• As Sasha Ivanov, Waves founder, said at his recent AMA session, in 2020, projects based on the Waves protocol began to form a full-fledged ecosystem with a clear value proposition and a range of products, including WavesExchange, Neutrino, Swop.fi, Gravity etc.
• The number of staked (leased) WAVES coins increased from 50 mln to 74 mln.
• The proportion of decentralized app invocations increased to 40%.
• Driven by high demand, WAVES’ price went up substantially from $1.05 in early January, hitting an all-time high of $8.99 in December.
• In 2020, more than 20 partnerships were struck, aimed at developing DeFi and inter-chain communication.

January

In late January, the Waves Association was formed in Frankfurt — a non-profit organization aimed to promote the development of tech built on the Waves protocol and grow out the ecosystem.

This was a major milestone in the Waves ecosystem’s history, as an independent body was created, focused on defining priorities and directions for development of Waves tech though decentralized voting at the association’s meetings.

January 2020 also saw changes to the protocol’s governance and monetary policy, which came as a sign of constant evolution, making the protocol more attractive to various groups of users. A farewell party for MRT (Miners Reward Token) was held in the community, with 1 million WAVES in lease and 70,000 WAVES as a prize handed out and 1,593,500 MRT burned.

February

In late 2019, Waves Signer was launched, enabling safe operation of dApps without installing extra apps or browser extensions. In February 2020, a new version of Waves Signer was released, featuring support for Safari, which facilitated the use of dApps on mobile devices, as well.

March

A concept for the node software’s version 1.2 was finalized, and the core development team started work on it.

A total amount of WAVES deposited to the smart contract to generate Neutrino USD (USDN), the first stablecoin launched on the Neutrino protocol, hit a $5 million mark.

April

In April, we celebrated Waves’ fourth birthday under conditions of a lockdown and remote work. On the stagenet, the Waves protocol’s version 1.2 was released, featuring a range of improvements. The release included a new version of the Ride programming language with several new functions. Failed transactions were now added to the blockchain, and a new type of transactions, enabling updating a token’s name and description, was introduced.

Products for developers, such as an extension for VS Code, online IDE and others, were also upgraded with support for all new functionalities of the protocol and Ride.

May

With version 1.2.5, the Waves protocol and Ride language obtained functions supporting ECDSA cryptography, used in the Ethereum network, which opened up new opportunities for inter-chain communication.

Participants in the hackathon Hack4Future used the Waves protocol to solve real-world problems and implemented two solutions on it — one for curbing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the other for certification of participants in various events.

June

Following six months of research, active development of the inter-chain communication protocol Gravity started in accordance with the White Paper. Gravity facilitates multipurpose communication between blockchains without the issue of its native token. The absence of its own token and the blockchain-agnostic approach lead to the creation of an inclusive, open ecosystem, solving the issues of scalability and stability in the future. Gravity expands the possibilities of all elements in the Waves ecosystem and, which is more important, the protocol operates as a two-way portal between Waves Tech and the entire DeFi space.

Ilya Smagin introduced the concept of “continued computations” (Continuations), which enables splitting the script execution into several blocks, making dApp development easier and solving potential scalability problems.

The Waves protocol’s documentation was substantially upgraded: http://docs.wavesprotocol.org/en/building-apps/how-to

July

At the first meeting of the Waves Association, the main principles of working group operations were formulated, and heads of three working groups — Membership, Grants & Funding and Research & Development — were elected.

A partnership with V-ID, a service for certification and verification, focusing on joint research in the area of document and data certification on top of the Waves blockchain.

A partnership with Band Protocol is aimed at the development of decentralized finance. The two projects completed the integration of Band Protocol’s decentralized and customizable oracles for various DeFi apps into the Waves ecosystem.

Inter-chain DeFi was for the first time mentioned in Sasha Ivanov’s article as one of the main goals for the Waves protocol development in 2020.

A course for developers, Mastering Web 3.0 with Waves, was launched on the most popular platform, Coursera.

August

To help new users find their way in Waves’ comprehensive ecosystem, a new website, waves.tech, was launched, featuring detailed information on Waves products and tech.

Partnerships with Tron, Ontology, Fetch.AI, Ankr and Suterusu, announced in August, are aimed at developing inter-chain communication in general, and, specifically, inter-chain DeFi.

The Waves node software’s new version, Malibu, was released on the mainnet, introducing a range of improvements on the protocol level (adding VRF, Ethereum compatibility, throughput optimization), as well as new functionality for Ride developers.

September

In September, new stablecoins were issued, and the creation of the decentralized Forex began, which was announced a month before. Thanks to the use of the LPoS consensus algorithm, new stablecoins offer an APY of 10%-15%.

Upon the first voting period, the protocol’s most recent version, “RIDE V4, VRF, PROTOBUF, FAILED TRANSACTIONS,” which received support from over 80% nodes in the network, was successfully activated.

Waves and Swingby joined forces to expand the infrastructure for inter-chain communication and connect LTC and BEP-2 tokens through Gravity.

Thanks to a partnership with Fantom, the WAVES token joined the Fantom DeFi ecosystem as collateral for issuing synthetic assets, including fUSD, Fantom’s stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. WAVES holders got an opportunity to use fMint to access fUSD and other synthetic assets that are needed to utilize Fantom DeFi products, such as the lending service fLend and the trading service fTrade.

October

WAVES was ported to Ethereum as an ERC-20 standard token, enabling its holders to transfer tokens between the two chains, using Waves.Exchange’s gateway.

Some first- and second-tier protocols (Solana, Matic, Ergo) joined efforts with Waves to develop decentralized interchain solutions.

The Waves Association announced a 1,000,000 WAVES grant program to support projects and teams building solutions on the Waves protocol or for inter-chain DeFi.

November

The Waves protocol’s implementation in the Go language, supporting all the functionality, was released. That made Waves one of the blockchain protocols with two independent alternative implementations, which improves the security of the network, making it less vulnerable to various attacks.

The automated market maker (AMM) Swop.fi, launched on the Waves protocol, united several types of liquidity pools, based on different price formulas that are most suitable for each specific token pair.

The WAVES token was launched on FTX, a rapidly growing crypto derivative exchange. This provided new opportunities for WAVES holders, also raising the token’s liquidity.

The Waves team took part in Odyssey Momentum, a major hackathon focused on blockchain and AI, winning the Ecosystem Prize.

The Gravity protocol saw a mainnet alpha release, supporting tokens issued on Waves and Binance Smart Chain in the exchange service SuSy. SuSy facilitates trustless token exchange between networks.

Four more protocols entered partnerships with Waves to develop inter-chain DeFi: OkeXChain, Madana, Conflux and IOST.

December

In early December, an application period was opened for grants from the Waves Association. 18 applications were submitted, of which 6 received funding.

Two Waves enhancement proposals, (WEP-11 and WEP-12), were finalized and published on the forum and then implemented in version 1.3.0 for the stagenet. The new protocol version facilitated dApp invocations from other dApps. Developers on Waves can already test the new functions and dApp execution model, which isn’t available on any other blockchain.

Thanks to a partnership with Bonded, the WAVES ERC-20 token became available on the Bonded protocol. As a result of integrating WAVES ERC-20 into Bonded smart tools, the token can be used as collateral in Bonded smart contracts.

It was an excellent year for Waves: many new projects were launched, and the existing ones grew faster than we expected. We’d like to thank our community for the active participation in the development of the ecosystem. We value you and hope for similarly fruitful collaboration in the coming years!

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