Waves’ protocol is being under the decentralized observation of the Waves Association, which supports protocol development and research activities with grants, and promotes its use among developers of Web 3.0 solutions.
Recently Neutrino protocol was launched on Waves. It allows the creation of interest-bearing stable coins (assets with a fixed price) backed by digital assets. USDN, an asset pegged to USD, was launched shortly after on top of the Neutrino protocol. Neutrino turns underlying blockchain staking economics into a regular banking deposit. There’s a huge improvement though, since it provides users with full control of their assets, they are held in users’ wallets and daily interest is paid to them. USDN is pegged to USD, so users effectively get around 10–15% annual interest on their USD.
As a side note I’d like to bring your attention to the fact that it is not based on p2p borrowing, which empowers the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. Rather than utilizing borrowing and lending pools, USDN taps into the blockchain mechanics that ensure network security, and turns it into a source of income for real world users.
Neutrino is growing. But I think that it is crucially important not to focus on developed countries, but instead reach out to a wider international audience. It is very reasonable to think that we’ll achieve mass adoption faster in countries without an established banking system. We can just skip banks there and move directly to crypto.
To speed up reaching this goal, core Waves developers will focus on the products which smooth the transition to the new technology for non technical people, and help the crypto community create tools that allow us to tackle problems we face in achieving mass adoption within a unified front.
The first of these products is the launch of international assets on Neutrino, assets tied to national currencies, assets tied to Gold, and we’ll enable almost instant swap between the assets. Thus we will effectively create the first decentralized Foreign Exchange!
Following the tradition we will call it DeFo. Currency exchange is a huge issue for many countries, for example Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon to name a few, international remittance fees can reach double-digits quite often.
Therefore, by introducing national currencies and their exchange on Neutrino we solve two problems — we create an interest-bearing instrument tied to a local currency but yielding interest effectively tied to USD, allowing to hedge currency risks, and create a smooth exchange mechanism between different national currencies.
This product is not based on speculation, it is based on maximum outreach and a strong desire to solve real-world problems we are all facing. Eventually we aim to port it to other blockchains as well, for maximum penetration and adoption.
This now takes me to a new topic — our newly launched Gravity protocol and its role in the future of the Waves ecosystem (and crypto in general).
Gravity is a data protocol that has been created to connect arbitrary blockchains to the outside world and to each other. It is truly agnostic (independent of any particular blockchain), and does not have a native token. It works with the economies of the participating chains instead. Gravity hub nodes lock a certain amount of native tokens of participating chains and receive compensation for the data they provide with native tokens as well.
Gravity goes beyond simple oracles, its task is to create a one-stop-shop for all data you might eventually need on blockchains, be it exchange rates, logistics data, actually any data from the non-blockchain world, or data from other blockchains.
It will provide connectors to all viable chains, trustless when possible, and trustful when not. The problem of trust is solved through additional consensus protocol on which Gravity nodes run.
Gravity is the foundation, a glue that connects all the chains. There will be applications on top of it, layer 2 protocols. Probably the most important would be the Value hub. This is a token-transfer protocol, allowing us to transfer value between all possible networks. Effectively it should create one asset space for all chains, and in a way one economic space. Waves token holders should benefit the most, since we will be the early adopters; Waves token (and tokens on Waves) will live on all major blockchains!