I'm only going to post this once. I suggest everyone read it who is involved or thinking to be involved in WAVES.I'm so happy I'm out of this project. The main issue issue for me here is the team. They raised a great amount of money and still had time to enter this market. However time is now running out and competitors are moving further away e.g. NEM/Ripple/Stratis (financial remittance) & HEAT/NXT/Stratis (Decentralised Exchange and Scalability approach) *also now AntShares seems to have similar ambitions and funding.
I sold all my WAVES before the exchange launch for an average of 0.00065 after following the slack everyday and realising that the team's morals/business principles are completely against what I would expect.
Firstly Sasha promised that it would be listed on major exchanges, maybe a silly promise to make but it was assumed that in making it he had received confirmation from these exchanges as he had also said he had been communicating with them. He mentioned these exchanges also included foreign (CNY) ones.
Secondly was the shabby initial release. Not only was this significantly late but it was also indicated in the original ico that the aim would be to set up an exchange straight after to enable trading (this clearly went out the window). When they finally got round to distributing the funds they did them in batches over a couple of days. This meant that some people were given an unfair advantage to get the best otc prices. I was fortunate to be one of them and traded some WAVES at YoBit for over 0.001 each. You can imagine how annoyed I would have been if I wasn't in those batches.
Next comes the exchange listing. Sasha has assured me in a Slack DM there would be significant buy support from the WAVES team. There was a rumour of a 500 BTC wall but I'm not sure on this (also remember the project raised over 20k BTC). In addition the buy support has been as weak as ~70 BTC to half ico price at times.
Furthermore Sasha lied to me when I asked about the Bittrex listing saying he had been communicating with them. After he told me this I went to the Bittrex Slack and was told they had received no communication from the WAVES team. The reason I was given by the WAVES team when I brought this up was that they had contacted them but not received a reply yet. Perhaps Sasha misspoke, you can be the judge.
The delays have also been a joke. I don't follow developments anymore but I believe the full node still hasn't been released despite original release planned near after distribution! This also puts their entire roadmap completely back and the developments planned for July have already been missed.
Sasha's professionality has also come into question, with his rants on Twitter and commentary of issues outside of WAVES. Some have speculated that in openly slating Poloniex that this has damaged WAVES chances of being listed. Likewise if Poloniex doesn't list after node release the next development down the line is the 'decentralised' asset exchange which isn't anything particularly unique with NXT/NEM/Counterparty/HEAT and others already involved. Also Sasha's 'solution' to scaling a decentralised exchange is to make it centralised by having centralised order matching (genius that). I said to someone it's the same as me depositing to an exchange, trading and withdrawing straight away *(I understand some people still think it may work or is innovative enough, we will have to see).
With regards to the price right now there would also appear to be a massive bagholder effort by existing holders to stop the price from slipping or some opinion that it's a good buy right now. I am a member of a few very active trading Slacks and I see almost daily comments like "Waves is cheap, time to buy more" whilst they're completely saturated with it. It would seem an all-in or nothing scenario. Similarly a few days ago when I wrote about WAVES there was over 40 people just on Bittrex with over 100k WAVES. At that level of distribution and a liquidity situation like it is now, it could be a recipe for disaster (as we've seen some pretty steep crashes already).
There is also a rumour that WAVES are burning through their funds quickly. Indeed you can see over half the BTC has been moved from the Blockchain escrow address into various different accounts. Whether this is a good/bad thing I'll leave up to you. They clearly have a good stash of money and I would normally say spend it in order to bring out quality developments ahead of time with the extra resources. However that clearly isn't happening at the moment. I'd also like to say that in the interviews during the ico Sasha clearly says that he will be liquidating Bitcoin in stages in order to avoid BTC volatility. Well it would appear from my inspection that the movement of Bitcoin does not indicate a movement into an exchange (as you would normally see them moved again into cold storage or re-distributed). Mismanagement, lies or am I wrong? You be the judge.
Finally it would appear there is a strong censorship of any criticism on the WAVES project from within their own Slack. I was banned a while back and then re-added. They happily refer to it as "obvious FUD" to the members that remain. It would appear this has been echoed by many in this thread already.
A few extras:
1. I haven't been following the WAVES team or developments for the last few weeks (e.g. in the slack).
2. I don't know a-lot about HEAT/AntShares and some of the stuff I've mentioned them in doing might be inaccurate.
3. I may add to this post. There's a-lot of stuff I was trying to remember.
4. Twiggy just don't bother replying to my post please.
5. I also believe that there was very poor protection against abusers in the ico bounties phrase. Particularly in the Twitter & Newsletter bounties.
6. Just as a caveat: I'm not saying WAVES still can't be a success, it certainly can.
7. I'm currently involved with Stratis and I am consistently impressed by their great UK based team
