Review on Waves Exchange by Jerry Siegel
Waves Exchange
Waves Platform is a smart contract platform founded in 2016. Waves conducted an ICO, raised over $18M in BTC. Today, Waves is one of the most promising and successful projects: they are developing a convenient application tools for designing smart assets, dapps, etc.
Waves DEX is a decentralized exchange based on the Waves blockchain. It operates through the Waves Client application, which is a universal tool for accessing Waves services.
Main functionalities of Waves Client:
1) DEX, Wallet
2) Issue of tokens (smart assets)
3) Leasing Waves (PoS mining, from 1000 Waves)
Overall Impression:
In general, a good impression on the DEX and the entire platform. Waves is now one of the best blockchain projects based in Russia. They also have a huge and active community around the world. I really think that it's a very good project that will go far. Current price of WAVES is a mere pennies for the real value of this token.
I really liked the process of introducing ERC20 tokens on the DEX, which is by the way a very great strategic move that can very well affect the volume and growth of the Waves user base. They chose to give the community right to decide which project will be the first ERC20 token on DEX. It wasn't just a decision made by project management - it was a voting that was conducted by the blockchain, using Waves Community Token.
It is also worth noting that they have partnered up with Ontology (another great project) to provide cross-chain communication between the two protocols and unify their functionality. Onwards!
Pros
- Low fees: for each trade, only 0.003 WAVES (less than a cent), and this commission is fixed (does not depend on the size of the order). For comparison, Binance charges a commission of 1% (trade size) for each occurring trade.
- Convenient interface: everything is user-friendly and has a clean UI, you can see where the order has flown, you can see the filling percentage of the order. Waves Exchange is also a very convenient wallet, and has a very simple token issuance functionality.
- Enhanced security: all funds are stored in personal wallets of users, protected by the private keys that are issued upon registration. No KYC is also very encouraging for traders that like to remain private. Exchanges wallets also has support for cold-wallet connection (like Ledger).
Cons
- Low level of decentralization: yes, the private keys to the wallet belongs to the users. But the Wallet and Exchange mechanism itself is still provided by Waves Enterprise, and not executed by smart contracts. Waves entity has all the backdoors for access and one-point controlling ability to shut down the whole thing. In July 2018, Waves suffered a hack of intercepting DNS requests, and Waves entity has manually disabled access to the Waves Exchange (then Waves DEX), which confirmed the fact of unilateral control of the exchange.
- Low volume: some market orders may take hours to complete because there are no buyers (or sellers), for example LTC / ETH pair. However, low volume is not an unsolvable issue, I believe if Waves succeeds in attracting new users to the platform, this problem will solve itself.
