Waves

Waves is synonymous with its founder, Ukrainian-born scientist Alexander Ivanov (also known as Sasha Ivanov). Prior to creating Waves, Ivanov was already active in the cryptocurrency space, having released the instant exchange Coinomat and indexing site Cooleindex. He also created an early version of a stablecoin, CoinoUSD, tied to the U.S. dollar. Ivanov is publicly active in promoting Waves and the wider blockchain industry.

As one of the earlier blockchain platforms, Waves set out to improve on the speed, utility, and user-friendliness of existing offerings. It supported smart contract and DApp development from the outset. Over time, Waves has added other products like the Gravity cross-chain and oracle network, and the Neutrino DeFi-focused platform. In 2020, Waves announced that its platform would be interoperable with Ethereum by releasing WAVES as an ERC-20 token.

Waves uses a modified proof-of-stake algorithm called WavesNG, which is based on the Bitcoin-NG scaling proposal. The platform highlights that its code is open source, allowing for more trust and ease of maintenance compared to closed-source enterprise blockchain solutions.