Features
Contents
Waves Lite Client
The Waves Lite Client is the official wallet software and is designed with mass adoption in mind. The application is very light-weight (~5MB) and therefore downloaded within seconds. is designed to resemble traditional online banking interfaces which essentially means being intuitive to use. The Waves Lite Client is available as a Google Chrome plug-in or as stand-alone client on GitHub – follow this link for an installation guide. Its biggest advantage is by far the fact that it doesn’t require a blockchain download; the Lite Client connects directly to a random node in the Waves network. All of this combined leads to a straight-forward and fast set up process – installation and account creation only take a few minutes at maximum!
The Lite Client could also be called a multi-currency wallet. It does not only allow users to hold WAVES but also any custom token issued on the Waves blockchain. But that’s not everything: It also features the Waves Decentralized Exchange which enables trading of before mentioned custom tokens against any other custom token or WAVES. Last but not least, there are several additional features on the road map including but not limited to a decentralized voting system, an encrypted messenger, a block explorer lite and a reputation system.
Waves Mobile Client
The Waves Lite Client has been ported into a mobile application for Android and IOS too. It is available in the Google Play and Apple stores. It has several thousand downloads already. The mobile client allows users to make payments, check their balance and, in the future, also to trade on the go.
Custom Application Tokens (CATs)
Custom Application Tokens, short CATs, are the simplest form of a digital token which is cryptographically secured by the underlying blockchain. The Waves Platform is taking digital tokens to a new level by building the whole platform around this feature aligned with businesses’ interest and needs. The goal is that every user, regardless of his previous knowledge, is able to issue and manage his very own digital token. The issuance fee at 1 WAVES is very reasonable and shall incentivize projects to experiment with our platform. Moreover, Waves wants to make its tokens as customizable as possible. A case in point is the option to make a CAT re-issuable, meaning that after initial creation the supply can be further increased.
Waves Decentralized Exchange
Waves Dex – the show-piece of the Waves Platform. The decentralized exchange allows asset-to-asset trading in a unique way – centralized order matching paired with decentralized order settlement. This means that orders are matched through a so-called ‘Matcher’, a piece of software which can be run by anyone. After a successful matching (usually only takes a split second), the to be exchanged funds are transferred over the blockchain. As a result, we have trading as fast as on centralized exchanges, however, the funds never leave a user’s account eliminating the risk of an exchange hack.
Taken into the bigger picture, the Dex brings several use cases with it:
- Allows early trading of a crowdfunding stake. On Kickstarter, an investor can’t trade his share of the project.
- Enables crypto and forex trading in a decentralized manner.
- Competes with traditional, centralized crypto exchanges in terms of speed and particularly commissions.
The user interface for the Dex has been released in April 2017. The first version is still basic and intended to allow anyone the use of the Dex, not only advanced users. The GUI is going to experience major changes over the course of the next month including the addition of charts and more.
Tokens Flexibility
Another great improvement is what we call Tokens Flexibility. It gives projects on top of Waves and users the opportunity to pay transaction fees not in the native WAVES token but any other token existing on the blockchain. Each Full Node can define for itself which tokens it accepts as transaction fee. This allows businesses to create a closed ecosystem in which they only have to deal with their very own token rather than taking a second one, namely WAVES, into account.
Fiat on the Waves Blockchain
The above-mentioned custom token technology also allows Waves Platform to offer fiat currencies such as US Dollar, Euro or Chinese Yuan on the blockchain. This is achieved in collaboration with compliant payment providers which are to issue a fully backed fiat token on the blockchain. In combination with the decentralized exchange, this allows users to do forex as well as crypto against fiat trading, eliminating the bothersome process of going through Bitcoin and paying a double conversion. Furthermore, future crowdfundings on Waves could potentially accept fiat tokens as a method of funding.
All of this happens in a compliant way: KYC (Know your Customer) and AML (Anti Money Laundering) requirements have to be provided by any user who is either depositing or withdrawing fiat to or from a gateway.
Crypto currencies on the Waves Blockchain
A custom token can also be used to port an existing crypto currency with an own blockchain on Waves. – users are able to deposit and withdraw Bitcoin directly in the Lite Client. Bitcoins exist on the Waves blockchain as a token called wBTC and are backed 1:1 with real Bitcoins in a multi-signature wallet managed by a so-called gateway. Whenever a user deposits Bitcoin to the gateway, it issues a wBTC token on the Waves chain to the user. Vice versa when a user withdraws – he sends the wBTC token to the gateway and the Bitcoin in the multi-signature wallet is released.
This approach allows for faster and, particularly, cheaper Bitcoin transactions which is especially demanded with the current blocksize issues of Bitcoin. Furthermore, crowdfundings on Waves have the possibility to accept Bitcoin without having to deal directly with the Bitcoin blockchain.
This approach can be implemented for any crypto currency. Simply set up a gateway, create a Waves token and there is yet another digital currency on Waves.
Leasing
Leasing essentially means giving your forging power to a running full node without your WAVES actually leaving the wallet. This enables anyone to participate in the forging process without having to operate a node himself. Additionally, the lessor receives a part of the network reward in return, depending on the conditions set by the leasing pool. When creating or cancelling a lease, it always takes 1000 blocks for the forging power to be actually transferred. Most importantly, this drastically increases the amount of WAVES actively forging and, therefore, strengthens the network considerably. While leasing you still receive airdrops of tokens ran on the network.
Decentralized Reputation System (in development)
A decentralized environment requires a lot of trust when conducting business. As an additional method to evaluate a person’s credibility, Waves is developing a decentralized reputation system based on activities on the blockchain. These activities include the date of account creation, the number of transactions and much more.
Encrypted Messenger (in development)
The Lite Client will also include an encrypted messaging feature at one point. It has not yet been decided if the messenger will be on- or off-the-blockchain. Most importantly it has to be reliable and unbreakable. Users will also be able to create groups and lists as known from traditional messenger applications.
Decentralized Voting (in development)
Current voting systems can be gamed fairly easy. Now imagine a decentralized voting system which records each and every vote on the blockchain – no way to manipulate anything. Votes can be based on different parameters: 1 vote per account, 1 vote per token or 1 vote per WAVES. It will allow projects to communicate with their stakeholders, be it to approve a big transfer of funds or to decide on a new strategy – the possibilities are endless. The voting system will also be included in the Lite Client.
Waves NG Protocol Problem Statement and Motivation
Blockchains protocols have some scalability limits and challenges that tradeoff between latency and throughput. The current blockchain technology isn’t fast enough and doesn’t scale to include more transactions into the system so we have a performance challenge to be considered. There’s a united agreement between miners, consumers, and developers with several perspectives that we need to deploy scalability measures, and there has been an ongoing argument on how to improve Bitcoin’s scalability. Current proposals have focused around how big to make the blocks and how to handle the block size increases in the future. All proposals suffer from a major scalability bottleneck: no matter what block size is chosen, the blockchain system can at best reach a proper transaction throughput, increasing from ~3 transactions per second to ~7 transactions per second. This is so far from the 30,000 transactions per second which necessary to compete with the existing systems such as VISA transactions. The same major limitations apply to Litecoin, Ethereum and all other currencies that share Bitcoin’s blockchain protocol.
Waves NG Protocol is going to address the scalability bottleneck by making the network reach the highest possible throughput based on current network conditions. It will not only enhance the transaction throughput, it will also reduce transaction latencies. So it will be possible to get an initial transaction confirmation in seconds rather than in minutes and it does so without changing the Bitcoin’s architecture and the trust model.
For more technical details Github Waves NG