I just came back from the Waves Release Event in Amsterdam. In this post I would like to share with you some important information that I took away from the event.
Waves, current state
Waves is around 1.5 billion in market cap, and is a "unicorn".
Waves-NG will go live on December 22nd, which will scale its operations to 100 trx/s. It will make the blockchain more usable for real-world applications (eg. loyalty programs).
Waves has a rebrand. Its logo looks more business like, and "cooler".
Waves has partnerships with Deloitte and other leading law firms in the world. The partnership will result in a self-regulatory body for ICOs. The project is called Better Tokens, www.bettertokens.org. The goal is to provide better rules and regulations regarding ICOs to protect investors from scammers and low-quality crypto projects.
New Waves client is released today. You can store fiat currencies, and transfer Euros and Dollars. It looks more like a bank application.
In addition you can trade cryptocurrencies in a decentralized way, and create your own tokens.
Roadmap, Q1 2018
Non-Turing complete smart contracts for the development of open blockchains that can compete with Ethereum's smart contracts.
Will have hardware wallets.
Sascha Ivanov believes that voting on the blockchain will be a huge thing going forward. Waves will have decentralized voting so that people can for example rate ICO projects on Waves. We will also see decentralized rating agencies on Waves.
Messaging will be available as well.
Roadmap, Q2 2018
Atomic Swaps so that cryptocurrencies can directly move from one blockchain to another when trading.
Roadmap, Q3 2018
Off-chain messaging.
The implementation of off-chain protocols that will allow 1000s of trx/s.
Roadmap, Q4 2018
Have a lite clients.
Turing-complete smart contracts for distributed computations. Waves smart contracts can be coded in any language.
In addition
The physical presence of Waves will be expanded extensively. There will be Waves offices in partnership with Primalbase: Moscow, Amsterdam, New York, Berlin, Seoul, and more to come.
Waves will have a Waves Lab from next week on. It will help finance and launch new blockchain projects. It provides self-regulatory guidelines and funds for new projects.
Tokenomica has been approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore several days ago. It is the first investment bank on the blockchain, and helps a startup to do a full ICO in a compliant way. It will be launched by February/March 2018.
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@chhaylin