With $16 million raised, Waves becomes the third largest blockchain crowdfunding project

Last week, blockchain platform Waves raised $16 million ( 29636 BTC ) in its ICO. According to Wikipedia, the project ranks third in history after the DAO and Ethereum. In response, Waves CEO Sasha Ivanov discussed some specific details about the Waves project in an interview with Bitcoin.com.

Bitcoin.com (BC): Could you explain the Waves platform in simple terms to our readers?

WAVES Sasha Ivanov (SI): Waves Platform is an open blockchain platform that focuses on the creation and use of blockchain-customized assets, transfer of fiat currencies, crowdfunding, trading and settlement of financial instruments. Our goal is to provide a stable and open platform for payment systems, banks, crowdfunding projects, and to create an ecosystem for community-based projects.

We focus on practicality and ease of use. We want to make blockchain technology accessible to ordinary users. Our simplified client software can be installed with a single click and run directly in the browser, without the need for users to download the blockchain.

BC: You said that the Waves project was inspired by NXT. Can you tell us how that happened?

SI: NXT is one of the first platforms that allows users to create their own blockchain tokens and trade them on the blockchain. Dozens of crowdfunding campaigns have been successfully completed on the NXT platform. NXT technology uses彩色币technology to customize tokens, which is a complementary approach to Ethereum smart contracts. Ethereum's approach may be more radical, but NXT's approach is more direct and does not suffer from scalability issues on all network nodes running contracts.

BC: What does your team think about the Bitcoin network?

SI: Bitcoin should be the primary decentralized money until something better comes along (if anything). Our platform will support Bitcoin deposits and transactions.

We are very excited about the upcoming Lightning Network and we hope it will be a successful launch, and we plan to implement a similar approach on the Waves platform.

Sasha Ivanov, Waves

BC: Can you explain how Waves enables applications such as crowdfunding, community management, and encrypted messaging?

SI: Colored coins are a versatile tool that can be used for a variety of applications, including value transfer, transactions, reputation systems, reward tokens, token voting... basically, you can use blockchain tokens to represent any kind of valuable thing. Therefore, WAVES' goal is to create the ultimate custom token platform that maximizes the use of colored coins technology, similar to how Ethereum maximizes the use of Bitcoin Script.

Therefore, by issuing a custom token, a user can start a crowdfunding campaign, and investors can directly vote on the project or other various activities by purchasing tokens.

BC: How does the reputation system work?

SI: Reputation system, mainly refers to decentralized KYC/AML, which aims to help remove bad actors and may replace centralized KYC/AML. The user's reputation will be calculated based on his network activity and feedback from other users.

BC: Can you tell our readers a little bit about your recent collaboration with Mycelium?

SI: Mycelium is probably the largest mobile Bitcoin wallet with a very active user base, so this cooperation is very important to us. The fiat currency transfer function we want to implement with the Mycelium wallet may become a game changer for mobile payments, which can subvert international remittances, which is another direction of our cooperation.

BC: Your crowdfunding round was very successful, becoming the sixth largest crowdfunding project in history, only behind the DAO and Ethereum among blockchain projects. Can you talk about your experience?

SI: It was an exciting experience. Interacting with the cryptocurrency community during the ICO helped us better shape our vision and understand what the community now expects from blockchain technology. I believe that community feedback is extremely important for the development of decentralized P2P systems.

BC: What do you think of the Ethereum protocol and the DAO hub concept?

SI: Ethereum is amazing, it is the logical development of Bitcoin technology, it is absolutely unavoidable. We are not trying to compete with Ethereum, we are trying to cooperate with it.

The token transfer protocol we plan to implement will allow the transfer of tokens between the Ethereum and Waves blockchains. That is, it will allow users to trade Ethereum tokens on the Waves decentralized token exchange.

We are not going to compete with Ethereum, we are going to collaborate with it.

BC: When do you expect Waves to complete the testnet and launch the light client?

SI: Yes, we are very optimistic and we expect that in a few days, we will have the alpha mainnet online. The full node software will be available at the end of June.

BC: What is the overall mission of the Waves team?

SI: Our mission is to build a blockchain platform for the general public and make blockchain technology mainstream.