The price rally in Waves started on the day of the Russian invasion on February 24. On March 10, at the time of writing this copy, Waves was trading at $29.44, up over 60 percent in the last week and over 200 percent in the last fortnight. With a market capitalization of over $3 billion, it is currently ranked at 40 on CoinMarketCap.
The latest rally in Waves coincides with the token being featured as an asset in Binance’s loan distribution platform. The token was added along with other popular cryptos, MATIC, THETA, and SLP. It allowed borrowers to use these tokens as collateral to qualify for loans without any credit check. This move from Binance bolsters the popularity and power of these four emerging tokens in the crypto space.
Another factor for the rise in prices of Waves might be the emergence of a new roadmap that laid down plans for an improved consensus mechanism and compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), a software platform that developers can use to create decentralized applications (DApps) on Ethereum.
The Waves Project was founded by Ukrainian-born scientist Alexander Ivanov (also known as Sasha Ivanov). He has ties to both countries involved in the conflict. Hence, Waves has been dubbed as the ‘Russian Ethereum’ by users on the internet.
Before creating Waves, Ivanov was already invested in the crypto community. Previously, he had released the now-defunct instant exchange Coinomat and the indexing site Cooleindex. He had even worked on a prototype stable coin known as CoinoUSD, according to coinmarketcap.
In 2019, Ivanov sold his stake in the Vostok platform, a universal technological solution for scalable digital infrastructure developed by the Waves Platform in 2018. The platform was sold to an early investor, Mark Garber of the Moscow-based financial consultancy GHP Group.
Vostok now has various connections and partnerships with Russian organizations. One of the more prominent ones is the state-owned Dom.RF, a financial institution for housing development created by a decree of the Government of the Russian Federation.
Latest developments in Waves
As mentioned earlier, the team proposed a change in their consensus mechanism in a new roadmap, giving us a glimpse into the future of Waves in 2022. The new consensus mechanism will be a combination of sharding and the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, known as the Practical Proof-of-Stake Sharding (PPOSS).
The new consensus mechanism will also be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), making it more accessible to developers and users of external decentralized applications. As reported by Crypto news, “The new network will be connected to the existing one for a smoother transition to Waves 2.0 without depreciating the old network’s value or efficacy,” the Waves team wrote.
The waves team is also promising to integrate the multi-chain bridges — Gravity and Allbridge — to establish a connection between EVM-compatible blockchains and the Bitcoin and Solana blockchains. The team has also announced the creation of a US-based company, Waves Labs, that will be established in Miami in the first quarter of 2022.
“The US is a key market to drive mass adoption in 2022,” the Waves team said about their decision to relocate there, adding that they will also set up a $150 million fund and an incubator program to help drive decentralized finance (DeFi) adoption in the country.
