WAVES, a decentralized platform which uses custom Blockchain tokens to represent value, has finished ICO, raising over $16.000.000 USD in Bitcoin.
Cointelegraph spoke to Alexander Rugaev, Chief Business Development Officer at WAVES, about the features of the platform, Yobit failure and the Wave coin soon to be available on exchanges.
CT: How much Bitcoin was raised?
Alexander Rugaev: WAVES finished ICO in June 2016 and raised over $16.000.000 USD in Bitcoins. It is considered to be the biggest amount in BTC even compared to Ethereum.
CT: How does the Waves platform work?
AR: Put simply it’s like combining Ripple with Next and Tether. In future the banking finance sector will have token gateways which will implement USD, EUR, GBP, CNY. This is the first priority of the team and we hope it will be done by September at the latest, but in a stable decentralized trading system on top the Wave platform.
The second priority is the decentralization of crowdfunding. We want to make it possible for those people without bank accounts to easily transfer money. We believe that stable coins could be crypto analog for bank accounts.
However, all the fiat operations will be AML/KYC compliant and the financial gateways will be similar to Ripple. We would also like our partners to issue Waves-linked debit cards by 2017. This way it will be possible to trade any asset pair in future.
CT: How will the Waves platform assure users of the stability of the fiat tokens?
AR: Every issued token will be backed up by the same amount of fiat currency at gateways bank account, plus a few layers of security, combined with multi-signatures to issue and redeem tokens and regular or real-time audit.
So the amounts of tokens will always be equal or less than the amount of fiat collateral, like Tether. It will be like digital cash.
CT: Has what happened with Yobit led to second thoughts from investors?
AR: We have written a message on our blog and forums regarding this issue. Yobit don’t have any tokens and didn’t respond to us. Maybe they bought tokens on the ICO, and hoped they could deliver or return the BTC to the investors, otherwise it’s a huge problem for them. We made that clear the minute we were informed.
CT: When can we expect to see Wave coin on exchanges?
AR: We have a large list of them. However, the integration process is not fast now that we have to pay out the ICO coins to user's Wallets. After that we will start with the exchanges.
June 14 was the last day for users to collect their coins. We are very satisfied with our progress, and everything is on schedule now since we have the alpha Dapp with basic functionality, light client and Chrome extension.
We have a great vision for the future of this project - I could risk saying that it will become the third place of coinmarketcap in a year from now, under Bitcoin and Ethereum.