 Okay guys, like always I do want to state a disclaimer. We are not traders. We're not speculators. This is not financial advice. All we're doing is educating you about blockchain technology, cryptocurrency technology, and the whole ecosystem. So in this video, we're talking about the brand new platform Waves. And I got my good friend once again, Ethan, which he's going to be educating you on what it is and what he thinks about it. Sure. Waves is brand new in a sense that it's been around for about a year and a few months, couple months. Waves launched with an initial coin offering and a fixed supply of 100 million tokens. But the Waves blockchain project as a platform is actually pretty fascinating. It aims to do a few things. One of them is easy token creation. That is, if you're a user of the Waves platform, you can create a token on the platform really easily. What this means is if you have an initial coin offering for a new project, you can use the Waves platform to launch it without having to code your own sort of blockchain or anything like that. Kind of like Kickstarter type of. Yeah, sort of like that. You can actually even, you could take a small company, let's say like a little property management company that's independent. If you wanted to issue shares theoretically, you could do that on the Waves platform because then you could also use other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum gateways are coming to Waves fairly soon. You could use other cryptocurrencies to pay out dividends essentially to shareholders or token holders. The legality of this is going to change country of country, but it's interesting to watch as a conceptual sort of exercise. The other thing that's really interesting about the Waves platform, at least for me probably the most compelling, is what's called the DEX and that's a decentralized exchange. Waves is not the only platform to put out a decentralized exchange. There are actually multiple efforts in the marketplace to try to put something like that out there. However, I find Waves very compelling because Waves also links to its decentralized exchange fiat gateways. So, an easy on-ramp or off-ramp for dollars, euros, yen and right now a euro gateway is being deployed. It's initially just starting now, but I think that that's going to be a major driver of this particular decentralized exchange. Do you know the major difference between Waves and Ethereum? Because they built their own blockchain, correct? Sure, yeah, that's absolutely right. Waves also employs the use of smart contracts, but it's much more simplified. Ethereum, you can essentially build anything on Ethereum. It is like its own operating system, right? If you think of Windows on the cloud. Nicknamed the world's computer. Yeah, exactly. Nicknamed the world's computer for a reason that's exactly what it is. Waves is much more, it's got a different approach. You can do a lot of the same things that you can do on Ethereum in respect to smart contracts. However, what you have to do is use plugins, essentially. You build things off of the Waves platform that can interact with it. So, it's a different approach, but it's still very similar. And I think that's also why we see some ICOs right now, some projects using the dual blockchain approach. For instance, MobileGo, which just closed, is a blockchain project which is using both the Waves and Ethereum blockchains. What did they do right now? 50 million? Oh, yeah, it was over 50 million. It's like 53 million dollars. It was ridiculously large ICO. It was incredible. I actually almost missed it because there's just so much in this space to pay attention to. Yes. Yeah. But another interesting thing for Waves you mentioned is they're using proof of stake currently. Oh yeah, that's right. Waves is using proof of stake. It's actually called least proof of stake in terms of how they've structured this. So, if you have 10,000 Waves right now, you can set up your very own full node which audits the network. And in terms of other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, you can give it the same as mining. So, you're auditing transactions. You're getting fees as a reward. So, right now, any fees on the Waves platform blockchain goes to these full nodes, these people who are auditing the network. A least proof of stake, however, is a little bit different. So, you can actually come up with staking pools. So, let's say you have 10,000 Waves that you want to use to stake and somebody else has 5,000 Waves which is below the minimum balance required to participate in least proof of stake. They can lease their 5,000 Waves to your node and then your node has 15,000 Waves now to start staking and participating in auditing the network, making it secure. I think right now, just as we're recording, I think we have roughly 70% of the entire Waves. So, if I understand this correctly with the leasing of that, it's almost like you're paying out dividends. Almost, yeah. And I need to caution right now that those returns are very low. Yes. Well, like any dividends, it's long term. It's long term but also because the Waves platform is growing. It was at one point the Waves platform was only doing a thousand transactions a day, not very much traffic was going on. Today Waves, the platform is doing something like 30,000 or 40,000 transactions a day that's growing quite rapidly. But every time a transaction happens on the network, you only have 0.001 Waves as a transaction fee that's very low. So, a lot of transactions have to kind of take place on the network in order for those dividends to be sizable for any individual who's participating. But as I said, that network is growing very rapidly. Let's go back to the gateways. Can you explain that a little bit more? Sure. So, Waves has, what's built into the model are what are called Fiat gateways. So, Fiat gateways are essentially this way that you can take money from, let's say, your credit card. So, you have a credit card. Right now, it is somewhat difficult to transition from your credit card to, let's say, Bitcoin. If you want to buy Bitcoin, there are services where you can buy Bitcoin directly with your credit card. They're very niche. Waves is trying to mainstream that by partnering with banks, with other financial institutions, so that you can essentially have a very, very fluid on-off ramp. So, for example, if I want to buy whatever tokens on the Waves platform, they'll have a gateway for some form of financial institution, whether, let's say, TD Bank in Toronto. Sure. And then my TD Bank will have a gateway to Waves and I can instantaneously then purchase from Fiat into crypto. Yes, that's absolutely right. Because Waves, Waves gateways don't operate just with Fiat currency. They also operate with cryptocurrencies. So, right now, for instance, there is a Bitcoin gateway on Waves. They've just opened up a Euro gateway on Waves using SIPA transfers as well, so you can wire money to an institution to a gateway. So, what you're going to be able to do is essentially, everything is backed by these tokens that you can trade. So, if you throw money into the gateway of Euros, you get Euro backed tokens that you can trade for Euros, if you can cash out of the gateway as well as cash in, or you can trade those Euro back tokens for Bitcoin back tokens, which you can then withdraw from your life. But the key thing though is anyone can create a gateway. Yes, conceptually. Right now, the gateways are very limited. It's all just basically starting now. But in the future, the way the Waves platform is designed, yes, pretty much anyone can start a gateway, which means that many gateways can comply with AML and KYC, or anonymity laundering laws and know your customer regulations. That's kind of the aim, is that there is that interface with the legacy banking system. However, in the future, yes, you will be able to essentially create your own gateway, if you like. That seems to be the direction that it's going. So, let's run through this. Who is currently using the Waves platform? Who benefits from it? Well, several users are just independent users are using the Waves platform. Like we mentioned, for instance, the MobileGo ICO to place partially on the Waves platform. It's essentially anybody who's looking right now for either easy token creation or decentralized exchange of cryptocurrency tokens. So, these are the two main audiences right now. Those audiences will expand and I think we're going to see a much greater focus from institutional money because of those fiat gateways. I think that's a very strong element of this entire platform. Well, I understand the model. I think it's really interesting and I do have some, I'll play a devil's advocate for a second. I do see some issues and my issues is I just want to know more transparency for the team. I want to know what their roadmap is. I want to know exactly what their plan of execution with the money that raised themselves and more transparency. Actually, that's one of my issues with a lot of these ICOs and tokenization platforms, not platforms, but companies, is I want more transparency. Like, for example, in any IPO company, they should take some lessons from IPO. In any IPO company, they have to be 100% transparent every quarter. They have to show us all the numbers, all the papers, what they're doing with the money. We're also pulling out as a shareholder. Sure. Yeah, the Waves team is the people that I have seen on the Waves team have an impressive record. I mean, for instance, the guy who started at Sasha Ivanov? Ivanov? Frazy Russian names, right? So Sasha, the guy who started it, has a pretty long record in the crypto space. He was in fact going to essentially start something that was ShapeChef, except Eric for he's kind of got there first, right? So he's got a long record of interesting projects. Waves seems to be his most successful to date. The funds that they raised, it was also one of the largest ICOs before mobile go, just raised tens of millions of dollars. Anyway, Waves did quite well with their ICO. All of that has gone towards development. They have been reasonably transparent, but I would agree. I would love to see more transparency from that team. But honestly, the way they approach their platform is essentially to get hunkered down into development. They release a lot of what I like to call ninja news. Essentially, hey, by the way, we've just come up with this new improvement in the platform. Nobody was really expecting the announcement, but here it is. They've done that quite often. So they have an interesting track record of releasing new features and development. So I'm quite impressed with the platform. And just recently, the price has risen quite a lot. Sure. Yeah, the ICO price of Waves was something 36 or 38,000 satoshis, which is a fraction of a Bitcoin. And today, it's over 100,000 satoshis. And in dollar values, I think that's gone from somewhere around 35 cents to that's playing with $3 right now. So yeah, it's quite impressive in respect to those games for sure. Awesome. Well, that's all. Let's wrap it up over there. If you guys have any questions, leave a comment below this video. And also leave a comment below this video on future videos you want us to do. Take care, guys. Peace. Toodles.