In a month, Waves, the decentralized blockchain platform focusing on custom blockchain tokens operations, has risen almost 71%. It made it to the top 10 over the weekend with impressive gains. At the time of filing this report, it was at the 11th position on CoinMarketCap and crossed $600 million in market cap this year.
It is quite curious for a one-year-old project to make such strides. CCN decided to look into what is influencing the astronomical growth and spoke to Guy Brandon, Communications Director of the platform.
CCN: What is thrusting Waves to the new heights?
Guy Brandon: There are a few factors here. One is that Waves has now been around a year. It’s established itself as one of the more credible platforms in the blockchain space. Many of its core features such as token facilities, the DEX and gateways have been launched. Real businesses – both within the crypto world and outside of it – are using it. Tens of millions of dollars has been crowdfunded on Waves, and many other businesses are coming. It has gained major traction in Russia and Eastern Europe, and there’s a lot of interest at every level of society around it – business, government, individual, third sector.
Overlay that picture onto the spectacular bull run the bitcoin and altcoin markets have enjoyed over recent weeks, and you have your explanation for WAVES’ rise in value.
Q: Most of the time, altcoins skyrocket to the top and in a short while they dimish into the wilderness of Crypto rankings. Do you see the gains to be sustainable?
Guy Brandon: Yes, and I’d expect there to be further gains in the near- to medium-term too for the reasons given above. Waves is the foremost crypto platform in Eastern Europe, but there has been a deliberate decision not to market it too actively until it was enterprise-ready. Now it is ready, and so I’d expect to see another surge of interest as businesses realise just how user-friendly it is and start building it into mass-market applications. If you look at some of the most popular cryptocurrencies by market cap, you can see there’s a long way yet to rise.
Q: What is the guarantee that this is not a pump & dump?
Guy Brandon: Almost every crypto has experienced significant growth recently. WAVES is around 30x its ICO market cap in USD terms, which is great but really isn’t so much in the crypto world. It hasn’t been subject to the same kind of obvious market manipulation that other cryptocurrencies have been. When the dust settles in the wider crypto markets at the end of this rally, we’ll see which ones stand the test of time and are underpinned by real users. Given the activity in the Waves ecosystem, I’d be very surprised if WAVES wasn’t one of them. It’s always been a long-term project, and its holders have known that from the start.
Q: What have been some of the challenges?
Guy Brandon: Building a platform that is suitable for mass adoption is not straightforward! Speed and scaling are critical, as we see from the continuing discussion around bitcoin’s development path, and good Scala developers don’t grow on trees. There’s a saying that if you want a product to be finished quickly, cheaply and to high quality, you can have two out of three of those. Thanks to the generosity of its ICO investors, Waves has the funding to do it right, and it has.
Q: Every crypto’s growth depends on its community. What message do you have for your community at this successful juncture?
Guy Brandon: A big ‘thank you’ for starters. You guys resourced us, you’re our investors, our customers, our focus groups, our testers, our evangelists, our first business use cases. Secondly, this is an incredibly exciting juncture in cryptocurrency history – and in global history more broadly. We have an amazing opportunity here to revolutionise so many areas of life for the better, from financial transfers through to administration, with social, political and economic impacts. Many people have not yet understood the significance of this, but we’ll look back on 2017 one day and realise what was really happening. We’re glad our community is a part of that.