Waves Monthly Review: October

Published in

Waves Protocol

6 min readNov 9, 2018

It’s been pedal to the metal this month, in one of our busiest periods to date. We hope you appreciate all we’ve achieved — here are some of the highlights!

The Waves team has been hard at work this month, releasing new features that will make the Waves ecosystem more accessible than ever before and bring it even closer to regular users. We know that to make crypto and blockchain truly mainstream products, they need to be as easy to use as any other web service — and while there’s always more to do, we don’t think there are many platforms that are as easy to use as Waves!

If you’re in hurry, just watch our video update.

Development

Node Team

Our Node team has been working on the next tranche of features, with many areas of improvement being explored.

Trading with Smart Accounts is available on TestNet with v.0.15. We are currently testing and improving this. You can find out more on the forum: https://forum.wavesplatform.com/t/trading-with-smart-accounts/3021.

Smart Assets are on the way. These will apply a script to an asset, meaning that token transactions have to be validated before execution. This makes it possible to attach conditions to different operations and create very flexible and powerful token use cases — for example, tokens that cannot be burned, cannot be transferred until a certain date or unless the holder account has certain attributes, or that can only be exchanged for specified tokens (e.g. BTC). For more information see https://forum.wavesplatform.com/t/smart-assets-proposal/3050.

We have made several optimisations to the Matcher (DEX), leading to improvements in performance:

Acceleration of Order history display thanks to implementation of fast storage of indexes of active and closed orders.
Implementation of orderbook caching for fast access (the response is now stored as JSON).
Enabling parallelisation of the validation process for new orders

Upcoming functionality

We are also about to release AssetClasses, which will allow broad categorisation of assets. This will be useful for the gaming industry. For more information see https://forum.wavesplatform.com/t/assetclass-proposal/3369, and wait for our forthcoming article.

One of the particular use cases we have in mind is non-fungible tokens (NFT). These will be non-interchangeable tokens that can be used to represent a single, unique in-game item — like an unusual weapon, or a prize trophy.

Client Team

The Client team have been knocking it out of the park all month. Here’s what these rock stars of the dev world have been up to!

Waves Keeper. The Waves ecosystem has made a step closer to regular users thanks to a really cool browser extension that we’ve called Waves Keeper. It allows you to hold your WAVES keys securely while interacting safely with third-party web resources. In November we will release it on the Chrome Web Store, and then we’ll start development of this plugin for Firefox and other browsers. https://blog.wavesplatform.com/waves-ecosystem-comes-to-your-browser-c2eb09c71796

Script Transactions. The Client now supports Script Transactions, allowing users to set a script for their Smart Accounts from the Client. Before this feature was released, it was necessary to use the API. Now, the process is far easier. However, users must be careful with this feature. It is possible to lose access to your funds if you don’t know what you are doing, so this is for advanced users only.

Data Service is like a search engine for the Waves blockchain, making it possible to extract history data in milliseconds. After optimisation, we have reduced the average response time by 40 percent. We have added support for all transaction requests, along with filters and pagination.

API: https://api.wavesplatform.com/v0/

Documentation: https://api.wavesplatform.com/v0/docs/

Community

Ambassadors program

The Waves Ambassadors program helps spread the word about Waves worldwide — and it’s a great opportunity to join the team. To get involved, apply here.

Meetups

Over the course of October we had meetings in Estonia, Korea, Ukraine, Thailand, Spain, Australia, Azerbaijan and even Columbia! All of the events were fruitful, with excellent opportunities to get to know some of our local Waves and crypto communities. Here are the highlights:

The meetup in Tallinn was fantastic. We discussed business applications for Waves and held a lottery with a Ledger as the prize, using an Oracle on MainNet. We also introduced the Better Tokens project.

We’re big fans of our Ukrainian community! In Odessa we celebrated the launch of smart contracts with a cake.

Another key meeting for us took place in Seoul. This was the first Waves meetup to be held in the South Korean capital, which we view as a highly strategic community. Korea is embracing crypto and our connections here will be important for further community development in the country and across Asia.

Dev Relations

Our dev relations department has been working hard to increase interest in the Waves ecosystem and promote greater adoption within the dev community. We’re keen to attract new developers who are looking to build dApps on our blockchain, so if this is something you’re interested in exploring, please do get in touch.

Node on a Smartphone. Our developers made a working node prototype for smartphones! You can set up a virtual environment with JAVA support on an Android phone and launch node.jar. Then sit back and watch it sign blocks. Of course performance is hardly perfect, but this demonstrates how flexible the platform can be. You’ll find a tutorial about how to set it up here: https://medium.com/@ikardanov/how-to-run-waves-node-on-a-smartphone-eeb8817b8d56

Watch this video, in which our developer explains how it works: https://youtu.be/sL_2tm_t7SA

RIDE IDE. Once again, we have updated our RIDE IDE! We’ve added new commands to the console, and you can enter ‘Help’ for code examples. We’re particularly pleased about the wizard for creating a multi-signature wallet — this gives you a neat walkthrough for how to set everything up.