2019 was a busy year for Waves, from the launch of several new products to a shift in the entire approach of ecosystem development. Here is a look back at the most significant releases and updates of last year.
Annual stats for the Waves network:
- The number of full nodes increased by 25%, from 310 to 413
- Almost 1,700 people finished the course ‘Mastering Web 3.0 with Waves’
- There are 10,526 smart contracts deployed on the Waves mainnet, of which 394 are scripts for dApps
- Over half of all WAVES in existence are locked for staking
January
Waves released a plugin for Visual Studio Code with support for the Ride programming language. The code editor was implemented in collaboration with Microsoft. This tool enables developers to build and debug dApps on the Waves Platform open protocol.
To provide financial support to talented developers and Waves-based startups, Waves Grants was launched. Throughout 2019, numerous different projects such as Neutrino were launched thanks to this grant program.
Smart assets — unique tokens with a script applied — were activated on mainnet.
February
This month, we significantly increased Waves Keeper’s security and availability. The browser extension gained added protection from Trojan-Clicker viruses. Waves Keeper also became available for Opera and Edge browsers, as well as Chrome and Firefox.
March
The Ride programming language was released on testnet, providing the opportunity to Waves developers to build their own dApps using Waves IDE.
Waves launched the Waves Reward Token (WRT) to incentivize Ambassadors and facilitate feedback from the community for our Ambassadors program. 872,200 WRT were distributed to 8,722 addresses.
April
In April, Waves celebrated its third birthday, holding a huge meetup in Moscow. More than 700 people attended the event. You can watch the event report here.
Waves launched a decentralized token rating system that allows voting for tokens issued on the Waves Platform open protocol. The system works in a similar way to BetterTokens, but each user decides what’s good and what’s bad.
Additionally, Waves Incubator was announced. Through this program, anybody can receive technical expertise, marketing assistance and long-term support for their project. In addition, the program allows participants to receive up to 100,000 WAVES in financial support.
May
Waves community members launched a free educational course for developers, aiming to stimulate creation of dApps using the Ride programming language. The course was ultimately translated into many popular languages including German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Hindi. Almost 1,700 participants have completed the course.
June
June was a very important month for us as it saw the release of Waves Node 1.0, and the launch of the Ride programming language on mainnet. It also became possible to issue non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Waves network. This feature is most relevant for gaming applications, including Item Market, which is currently being actively developed.
We launched the Waves Community website, where you can find information about the tools and projects that make up our ecosystem, as well as the most relevant news and updates, all in one place.
July
Waves shifted its focus from Russia to the global market. As a part of this decision, Sasha Ivanov sold the Vostok brand. Henceforth, the Waves Enterprise team is in charge of solutions for the corporate sector.
To increase the decentralization of the Waves network, we launched the Game of Nodes competition and relaunched our node support program. Thanks to Game of Nodes, more than 50 new nodes were added to the Waves network, and over a million WAVES were leased to new participants.
August
This month, we published a proposal for Waves’ ‘Block reward and community-driven monetary policy’, aiming to increase mining and leasing profits. This was a crucial effort going forwards, giving the community full control over the Waves network.
Our gaming initiative Item Market was launched. The platform allows game developers and studios to create and sell in-game items. Nyan Cat, Shadow Era, Chain Warriors and LIGA are run on the Item Market protocol.
September
The community voted in favour of the ‘Block reward and community-driven monetary policy’ feature. The Waves team updated the node with support for decentralized monetary policy. The initial block reward was 6 WAVES.
To eliminate possible blockchain rollback issues on our testnet, Waves launched a new experimental blockchain, stagenet. This is a fully-functional version of Waves network, in which WAVES has no value. Stagenet helps developers to test the functionality of new versions of Waves before they are deployed on testnet and mainnet.
October
Waves revealed its outlines of plans for the ongoing development of the ecosystem. Waves will develop an interchain protocol that will connect all our networks and make them interoperable. We are also going to integrate sharding for the public network and develop an Oracle Chain to provide access to real-world data for our networks. We are currently working on this, so wait for more updates!
November
Waves released an alternative version of our node software, built with the Go programming language. Go offers both high performance and low hardware requirements. The new implementation makes our network even more stable, due to the redundancy it provides in terms of diversity of implementations. You can find an article about it here.
December
December 2 marked the launch day of Waves.Exchange, a trading solution on the Waves blockchain protocol. The new exchange offers market orders, an optimized client, a ‘Tick size’ feature, support for USDT and native SegWit addresses, in addition to all the existing benefits of Waves DEX.
Overall, it has been an excellent year for Waves, with many new projects being released and existing communities growing more rapidly than we expected. We want to thank all our community for their deep involvement in the development of the ecosystem. We appreciate you and look forward to working with everyone in the years to come!
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Waves 2019: Year in review was originally published in Waves Platform on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.