Waves has marketed itself as the “blockchain for the people”. Waves provides a user-friendly platform for easy integration of fiat, decentralized crowdfunding, and easy transfer of funds across the globe. Alexander Rugaev, Waves’s Chief Business Development Officer, said that Waves essentially combines the ideas behind “Ripple with Nxt and Tether”.
While the whole “user-friendly” thing becoming a more common marketing tactic for many coins (and scam coins) that have no actual technical basis to backup their claims, Waves seems to be a coin that is really “walking the walk”. At the first glance of the Waves website, you are invited to take a look at the Waves “Quick Guide” that explains how to create an account and issue your own blockchain tokens in less than a minute.
What is Waves and Who Created it?
Waves was created in 2016 by Russian physicist Sasha Ivanov, who said of the coin: “We are convinced that this will be the frontier of blockchain adoption. Allowing any business to access the benefits of speed, cost, transparency, reliability, security and independence that the blockchain offers. And, we know this because it is already happening.”
Waves is the easiest platform so far for the creation of custom tokens. Companies can use the Waves platform to create tokens that will fund community-projects and startups; that will allow companies to launch loyalty reward programs; that will enable instantaneous, low-cost sending of money across countries and currencies; and so much more. Like many promising cryptocurrencies, the majority of possible use cases are largely untapped.
Waves allows its users to seamlessly move their fiat into the crypto space and to be traded easily and with no delays. In this way, Waves can be used as a cheaper and easier replacement for some of the financial services offered by large financial institutions, like money transfers. Ivanov said, “We already have money. USD, GBP, EUR – even Bitcoin. Unlike other cryptocurrency platforms, we are not looking to recreate or replace money. Rather we are looking to enable existing forms to work better.”
How Does Waves Work?
To create an account on Waves, you simply download the lite wallet app from Google Play. Once you have created your account, you can use the app to issue your own blockchain tokens–simply enter a description, the total supply, the number of decimals, and whether or not your coin will be re-issuable in the future.
What’s not mentioned in the Quick Guide is that you must hold some Waves tokens in order to issue your own token. There are links on the website to purchase some from Tidex or Bittrex.
According to Alexander Rugaev (Chief Business Development Officer at Waves), every token issued on the Waves platform will be “will be backed up by the same amount of fiat currency at gateways bank account, plus a few layers of security, combined with multi-signatures to issue and redeem tokens and regular or real-time audit.”
Waves as an Investment
There are many things that make Waves attractive as an investment, but perhaps the most important one at the moment is that Waves is being practically used by real-world businesses. There are plenty of cryptocurrencies that are based on genius ideas and have solid technological foundations that have not yet been tested in the “real world”. It’s impossible to know if even the most promising coins will survive as viable pieces of technology until they go “out of the frying pan and into the fire”.
Waves is “in the fire”, and it is doing well. This is important because we see the values of coins stabilize and grow in a big way after they have been integrated into the businesses, governments, or financial services/institutions that they have been designed for. Before that point, the value of a coin is based purely on speculation. While Waves is still relatively new in the world of Fintech, its value is no longer purely speculation-based.
In this respect, Waves can be seen as a good investment. So far, businesses who are using the Waves platform include Incent, WCT, Darcrus, ZrCoin, MobileGO, Starta, wBTC, and more. Notably, the Burger King Russia “WhopperCoin” was created with Waves.
Waves also has a decent relationship with its community of users and investors, which is a major benefit for everyone in the Waves community. There is a Waves community site (wavescommunity.com), a Waves blog, a newsletter, and a slack channel.
Waves History and Team
Waves was created by Russian physicist Sasha Ivanov in 2016, who sought to create a platform that would fulfill a variety of needs in the fintech world–namely, a user-friendly way to decentralized crowdfunding and improve upon the cost and amount of time involved with a variety of financial services.
By the time Waves was conceptualized, Ivanov had already created some successful projects in the world of cryptocurrency, including Coinomat and several other Nxt-based businesses.
The Waves team consists of a solid base of front and back end developers, a sign that the project is committed to the quality of the fintech services that they provide.
The Waves ICO was completed in June 2016 and raised the equivalent of roughly US$16 million in Bitcoin. When it was released onto public exchanges, a single Waves token was ~US$1. Since then, the value has climbed to ~US$5.40 (at the time of writing), close to its all-time high with a bullish trend.
There are 100,000,000 WAVES in circulation with a current market cap of roughly $535,000.000.
Future of Waves
Waves is indeed a very promising coin from a technological and a financial perspective. The value of a single WAVES token is still relatively low, so the potential to make high returns from a small initial investment is possible.
The fact that WAVES has already begun integrating into businesses and financial services is very strong evidence that it will continue to become more popular, and its value will grow accordingly. As long as WAVES can manage to keep up with the growing demands that its growing number of uses bring, it’s easy to see a bright future for Waves.
