WAVES. Ultimate crypto-tokens blockchain platform.

here is the last one from a couple weeks ago.

Sasha: “I am the Waves founder. Waves is a blockchain platform that is absolutely focused on custom token creation and transfer. We are trying to be business oriented and are trying to create something that can work well. We are not focused on smart contracts; we are focused on token creation. So you can create a token, a custom application token as we call it, and you can use it in your application in some way. So, there are many ways. Everybody knows about ICO’s. This is one of the most obvious applications. When you can crowd fund… when you can attract funds directly from your users, from your crowd, and you can fund you product/project using this new type of crowd-funding that emerged a couple of years ago. Normal businesses, and even brick and mortar businesses can use it. So, there’s a hidden genius to this scheme. It’s not like… its not actual investment. It’s pretty difficult to raise money through venture investment now, and people are looking for new ways to raise money. They want to cut out the middleman and go directly to the crowd, to the people, to the users of the product. It makes sense. It’s much cheaper and it’s effective. I think we should develop this thing. Also, we did an ICO of our own this past summer. It was a pretty big ICO; almost as big as Ethereum’s. At the moment we have launched the network and we are developing some new stuff like, for example, a decentralized exchange. You can trade on the blockchain very fast because order matching is centralized, but order settlement is decentralized. So, all orders are settled on the blockchain but matched through a centralized server… It can help us, in a way, to get rid of centralized exchanges. There are so many problems with them. They lose funds, and get hacked all the time. So, I think that we need some alternative solution and we are working exactly on that; a solution that will help us be independent. We are going to try to have the cryptocurrency community become independent and get rid of exchanges. Blockchain (itself) is decentralized, but trading cryptocurrencies is centralized. It’s very strange and it has to change. We are working on that.”
Host: “Great. Ok so, your background as a developer… mainly you were from the NXT community, right?”
Sasha: “Yea, yea, yea. It was the first cryptocurrency I had been involved (with). I still like it. Something went wrong I think with the community. In general, all the ideas that were implemented in NXT are pretty nice. Many of the ideas from NXT are being used in Waves. For example, blockchain trading; we do it some other way but the idea comes from NXT. Also, we focus on custom assets/ tokens and not on smart contracts (since they) probably are a little bit early to use at this stage. They will come later; people are going to use them in a couple of years, maybe 5 years. Now, we have to use the potential of just custom tokens. When you can create a custom token and you can do so many things with simple user defined tokens on the blockchain. This potential is not used up, so, I think we should focus on this. The first system that offered that was NXT actually. They were the first to offer an independent blockchain solution that is not based on Bitcoin. There was of course MasterCoin, and there is of course CounterParty, but they were all Bitcoin based. NXT was the first independent blockchain that had custom tokens. So we are following in their footsteps and we want to make this approach succeed.”
Host: “Ok. I’m going to try and go right into the questions because they’re already coming in. I’m sort of surprised… I’m so happy that the Waves community is (snaps fingers) on the ball. So, we just mentioned NXT… Let’s go right into it. So, the guy is asking, ‘Why would people use the Waves DEX instead of the NXT Asset Exchange?’”
Sasha: “Yea… because our goal – our focus – is on the speed and usability of transactions. NXT has on-blockchain trading, and it’s cool, but you have to solve the scalability problems to make it really work.. You have to wait one minute before a trade is executed. For example, it makes bot trading impossible. It makes all types of high-frequency trading really hard to implement. It’s impossible; you have to wait one minute for your trade to clear. We want to create a system where you have more or less the same user experience as you have on Poloniex where the trades are fast, but the exchange doesn’t hold your funds and has no direct access to your funds. So, you still have your funds and you just use the centralized service as a matcher. So, it matches your orders and the actual transfer is carried out on the blockchain. So, you have access to your funds at all times. This is our idea. So, our idea is to offer a user experience similar to current centralized exchanges while at the same time providing some kind of safety. You can be sure that your funds won’t be stolen and no hacker can attack the exchange and steal your funds. This is our goal.”
Host: “Ok. Just going back a little bit…. Shout out to Core Media because I read the previous interview that they did with you, and I read a couple other previous interviews to get some background information so we’re not just asking the same questions. It says here… The Waves Foundation, so to speak … there’re different entities set up. ‘Is there still a possibility that you guys will be set up in Switzerland where you’re more protected from financial regulations?’ Obviously the Swiss Financial regulation ecosystem is more friendly. Obviously, Ethereum is set up there, etcetera. ‘So what’s the status?’”
Sasha: “I don’t think that it’s really needed, to found your company in Switzerland at this stage. As far as I understand, even the Ethereum foundation is thinking about moving to Singapore. I may be wrong actually, but I’ve heard that. I didn’t investigate, but that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t think that it’s really needed to have that type of foundation in Switzerland. We have a UK company and I’m considering founding an Asian company. I think it’s more important now than Switzerland. So, I don’t think that we should copy the corporate structure of Ethereum for example. They followed this path; it doesn’t mean that we have to do that. I don’t think that it was a very conscious choice for them. I know the story about how they … went to the tax office and asked if they can do the thing (register in Switzerland). They thought for a day and said, ‘Ok guys, you have our permission and you can do that.’ It was a taxation issue more or less. It is solved one basis at a time actually. You have to go there and negotiate with them so it is not as easy as people might think. You have to negotiate with the tax office and negotiate all of the terms so it’s not so easy. It might be easier to have like, a UK company, an Asian company, and not try to create this type of foundation structure. You can just have a normal LLC that takes care of maintaining the network and it makes more sense in my opinion actually. For example, the ZCash people have like, a proper American company. So, I think that is a valid approach. You don’t have to have a foundation in my opinion.”
Host: “Great, ok. So, moving on here… Can you give a little bit of technical background? I’m not a programmer. Most people I think that listen to our programming aren’t programmers. ‘Can you explain the difference between delegated proof of stake (DPOS) and leased proof of stake (LPOS) that you want to implement?’”
Sasha: “Leased proof of stake is a development on the same idea. It’s a combination of DPOS, that for example, that existed in BitShares, and leasing in NXT. Leasing is a procedure where you just lease your funds to a miner. In a POS system, you mine with your balance. So, you need coins to mine. So, you can actually take those coins from someone else and he or she can lease them to you. You can use them to mine actually and make profits from transaction fees. The leaser doesn’t lose control (of the coins). The person who leases the funds doesn’t lose control. He has the funds, and he can earn the transaction fees from the fees that the miner earns. So, this is a nice setup, which allows someone to pool funds and make money more efficiently. It’s like, more or less, what we have in Bitcoin with mining pools. This is some kind of a generalization of mining pools to a POS system. In a DPOS system the network participants choose delegates who will do actual confirmation of transactions. They will be signing the blocks and all that. What we proposed was to combine those two things. Users can lease their funds and after that, the miners are then selected by their balance. So for example, you just take the top 100 balances and the miners who have those balances can mine. That was our idea actually. Now we have somehow generalized it and the actual system we are going to implement is going to be a little different. We will combine some scalability approaches that have been developed recently. It should be pretty scalable and pretty nice. Our goal is to have at least 1,000 transactions per second, or a couple hundred at least. Our goal is to be able to issue thousands of assets. We have different approaches. For example, if you have so many assets at NXT, the problem was, you have a very big state. If you have a very big state, you have to store the state of all the assets you have. It was a pain actually. It was like, you have a problem with the blockchain; it can get very bloated. At the same time, you have another problem. You have a problem with state storage. So you have to store the state of all the assets, balances, and it’s pretty complicated. So we are working on that too. We want to be able to not to store the full state and only store some cryptographical proofs of certain things. In this way we don’t have to store the full state. On top of that we want to have the scalability approach. People know this approach. It was not invented by us, but we want to implement it in POS. There will be an article I think within a couple of months about that and we will be working on the implementation / coding the actual system soon. Through this we will be able to have a very scalable system with hundreds of transactions per second. We will have a small state and I think it should be a very usable system. So anybody can come to us; he can issue as many tokens as they want and transfer them with very high speeds. So, after that we will be working on different things like smart contracts. Then, maybe some kind of anonymity or some kind of zero knowledge proofs. If we have this pretty simple system, where you can issue tokens, can transfer them very fast, and you don’t have to store tons of data, it’s going to be very usable. People should be using it, you know? You can use it for so many things, even without smart contracts. So this is our goal and I think it should be implemented within a half a year.“
Host: “Right, and a lot of this is still in the research phase. There isn’t a scalable system that I know of; I know Ethereum is working on Casper. I saw a document last week; there are so many companies working on scalable solutions – Hyperledger, etcetera - etcetera.

So, two questions to sort of stay on topic with what you just said. ‘Are matcher fees based on the size of the stake?’
Sasha: No. Matcher fees are determined, actually, by the matcher itself. It can choose how much it wants to charge for matching the orders. The users can accept that or try to find another matcher. So it’s like general consensus as it’s always been, as it is (in comparison) in Bitcoin now where miners just set the fees. You can send a transaction with a smaller fee, but you can’t be sure if it’s going to be accepted. It’s more or less the same here yea, but it’s set up for all cryptocurrencies.

Host: “So the second question related to that is, ‘If there’s a thousand transactions per second will that impact the blockchain size? Is that going to cause it to grow to fast?’”
Sasha: “So this is another step in our development of blockchain pooling. We are not sure how we are going to do that at the moment. I won’t deceive you; it’s still unclear. The idea is that, if you want to really make money with blockchain mining… you are able to rent a good server, and you can have a big hard drive so that you can store the blockchain. The same is in Bitcoin now. The mining is carried out by mining pools by people who invested money. So, this (Waves) is the same setup but with the POS system. So, the top miners will always be professional miners. So for them, it is not a problem to rent a good server. So, this is our approach and it should work for some time. Then of course we will have to create some kind of blockchain pruning mechanism. It’s sort of like what Vitalik says…, ‘blockchain that is maintained by a network of Raspberry Pi’s.’ That will be very cool. How to implement this is still unclear but this is a very noble goal I think. We want to reach this goal as soon as possible. The next step is blockchain pruning, but until then, mining will be more or less carried out by professional miners. We have to take that into account. If we can offer a system which suits professional miners, it is okay, because people can really make money… They will always be able to rent a good server with a good hard drive. So, blockchain pruning comes next, but we will be thinking about it, and I think we will implement it one way or another.

Host: “Cool. Ok so moving right along here, ‘The Euro gateway… Is that going to be launched by the end of the year or shortly afterwards?’”
Sasha: “Yea.”

Host: “Ok cool… I have to give you this question because, you know, you probably get it 15 million times… Let’s ask the first part and then the second part. ‘Does the platform pay out dividends? Is it designed to pay out dividends?’”
Sasha: “Yea we are creating the system now. So, one of our coders is finishing the back-end and we will implement it in our wallet. The front-end guy will get down to it probably tomorrow or the day after. The back-end is almost ready. I think people need a way to distribute assets to a list of accounts and they need a way to pay dividends. I remember it from NXT. It was a very useful feature; everybody asked for it. It was even implemented in the core of NXT. There was a very nice plug-in that worked even better than the core feature and everybody used it. I used it a lot. I’m implementing it right now because it’s very important.
Host: “‘Does that feature have anything to do with why the coin isn’t listed on Poloniex?’ Poloniex is in the United States… Bittrex is also in the United States, but I think some coins can’t be listed on exchanges because they pay out dividends. I may be wrong. Of course, it’s a Poloniex question. You probably get it all the time.”
Sasha: “Yea yea I’m used to Poloniex questions. It’s a mystery to me with what happened to Poloniex. I told that story last week I think… Everybody knows it I think. It’s all verifiable. I don’t have anything against Poloniex. I wrote Tristan today, right away. Let’s see what happens. I don’t think that the dividend feature is the key to this situation. They do have some other assets listed at Poloniex that could pay dividends and they’ve never had a problem with this. So, it might be this or it might be something else, but I don’t really want to guess. I can make a wild guess. In any case it’s better if they reply to someone, probably not to me, probably someone else. This situation is kind of weird. I’ve known them for a couple years… It’s strange, yea. So, I don’t think this is the reason. There might be some reason. My guess would be, if you want me to take a guess, they were somehow not happy that Bittrex listed us first. But, they had every chance to list us first so there was some kind of miscommunication probably. He contacted me after Bittrex had listed us. We gave him everything but somehow he was hurt. That was it I think. Let’s wait on what their response is.”

Host: “Ok, so let’s just move back right into it. ‘Let’s say I want to launch an asset and someone wants to put money into the project through crowd-funding. Is there any way to remove that pledge before the end of the crowd-fund?’”?
Sasha: “Not at the moment, no. It’s doable, and in NXT it was called phasing. This approach was like, a multi-sig for coins or blockchains that don’t have inputs or outputs as Bitcoin does. They have balances. Phasing is a nice name for this thing – it’s analogous to a multi-sig approach. We’re going to have it for sure.

Host: “Ok and here’s the second question related to that. ‘Will you put any type of smart contract in place if a large developer… Hmmm, how do I word this right? Basically, could a smart contract be deployed so that if there’s a crowd-fund, and there’s a lot of money being raised, but that company or project is not releasing their milestones - can you force a refund?’”
Sasha: “Yea yea. It should be doable. I mean… smart contracts. How would we do that with smart contracts? You will still have to have oracles for this. We will still have to have people who say ‘those guys don’t deliver so we have to take the money back from them.’ So, you have to have normal people. It can’t be (done by a) robot at this stage. So, I don’t think that smart contract approach is so valid here at this stage. Everybody is speaking about smart contracts but if you consider how it works in reality, you always notice that there is some like real man who is doing some stuff there. He has to push a button – he has to vet something to say ‘ok those guys didn’t deliver so we won’t give them the money.’ So, it always boils down to human participation at this stage. So, you always have to remember that. People who are speaking about smart contracts... One working smart contract that they really can say, you know, that it worked was The DAO. The DAO did work of course because it was completely blockchain based. It didn’t go outside of the blockchain. So, if you stay on the blockchain all the time, at all times, you can have some valid functionality for smart contracts. If you try to go into the external world, you always bump into issues with real people who have to approve something, vet something, push some button, and stuff like that. It’s the same. You have to have an escrow whom can vet the project development and say, for example, ‘the guys delivered everything they promised so they can get the money.’ So I think in a usual escrow approach multi-signature, it can still have these features without any smart contracts.”

Host: “So that leads me to the next question. ‘Could it be possible that there is some sort of reputation system on Waves?’”
Sasha: “Yea that was in our plan. It was promised, and it will be executed a little bit later probably because now we are focused on the DEX and on scalability enhancements. Some people ask us why we have to do the scalability enhancements when we don’t have many transactions yet. But you know, we need to offer a system that potentially can execute millions of transactions per day. It’s a very important thing from a marketing point of view too. So, you can say, ‘everybody can come to us. We offer a scalable system that everybody can use, and you can send us tons of transactions.’ Our network is going to be able to execute that. I think it is very important from all points of view, but also from a marketing point of view. So we will be focusing on the decentralized exchange and scalability enhancements. All the side features that come in a little bit like dividends and stuff like this. Fiat gateways, maybe voting, messaging… It will all be implemented in winter. I think fiat gateways – we need messaging. It will be implemented soon. DEX will be implemented within a month because it’s already on the test-net.”

Host: “Using fiat… you will have to comply with KYC and AML, correct?”
Sasha: “Yea. Absolutely yea. There’s no other way.”

Host: “Ok. Yea, there’s no other way, right. A question from the audience, he says, ‘Can a mineable token be launched on Waves?’”
Sasha: “I don’t think I want to do that because, for example, in NXT you had this. They created currency. They had tokens, assets, and they had currencies. Currencies could be mineable, but no one mined them, you know? You have to really think it through. Why do we have to mine them; what is the goal? It has to serve some purpose. You understand what purpose it serves in Bitcoin. You mine because you need to support the network. You make the network work. You make the network decentralized. Mining just for the kicks? I don’t think it would work. It has to have some valid use case. It has to provide something that is needed by the network. In this case if you just mine to create some additional supply of tokens, in the long run, it will never work. If we can find some reason to have a mineable token, we will do that. At this stage, I don’t see how. Not at this stage.”

Host: “Very interesting. So, here’s another question. It’s related to Mycelium. I did read in a past interview that it is kind of expensive to deploy a hardware wallet. Is there any potential that there will be a hardware wallet in the future?”
Sasha: “Yes, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I have to talk to some provider like, Trezor Wallets. That would be the best. It wouldn’t make sense to have some special wallet for Waves. I don’t think it makes sense.”

Host: [Interjects] “Or a card. A visa card, sort of like with CoinBase, and how they have the Visa Card…”
Sasha: “Yea yea. We have to partner up with a current provider who has all the infrastructure and has Bitcoin. So you need to work with people here. We don’t want to have our own solution; we have to partner up with someone on this. We will do that of course.”

Host: “Cool. Here’s sort of an interesting question, I think. ‘How does the company itself make money? What’s the actual Waves business model? Are you guys taking transaction fees on the network?’”
Sasha: “Yea so, as always, there are two directions, and I think everybody takes those two directions. One direction, you have some part of the total coin supply. Everybody does it. We have around 6% I think. So if our network is successful, it is like a stake in equity. So we have some equity in the Waves network. So if the network is successful, our equity grows in value, we make money through this. Another thing that everybody is doing is like, consulting services. So people are coming to Waves. At the moment, they are probably coming for ICO’s; we can consult them on that. Later they will be coming for something else, and we will be consulting with them on something else. Consulting is a valid direction and it’s a valid thing because we understand how it works, and we understand the ecosystem. We can always help people to become a part of it. So, consulting and the equity appreciation, these are the directions that every blockchain developer, every blockchain product takes. You have some coins and you consult people how to integrate your solution into their project.”

Host: “What are the biggest problems you are running into right now in development? Is it just the scale of the problems? Is it still hiring the right people? Even if you have the money, sometimes it is extremely difficult to hire people in this environment. The level of understanding you have to have (blockchain domain knowledge)… you’re dealing with… this stuff hasn’t been done before.”
Sasha: “Absolutely. You can have as much money as you want but if there are no people who can do the thing, yea, you can’t use your money. Not so many people understand how the whole thing works. How blockchain works. This is the problem here. You have to find people who really understand what they are doing. There are not so many people who can code and who understand blockchain. We have those people but there are not so many of them. This is the thing, the human resource pool is really small here. So you have to fight for those people, or you have to attract some smart coders that have no idea about blockchain. They then just dive into the subject and then realize how it works, but it takes them time. This is more or less what we are doing. We have some researchers, but most of our people are just good coders. They came to us without understanding how blockchains work. For a good coder, it takes usually a month to understand how things work here, and then he can start coding. It’s not a problem, but the people have to be educated and it takes a little time. Soon I think it won’t be a problem any longer because we will have more people who will understand how it works. They will just learn everything and become experienced working with the project. Of course, we do work with some researchers – some IOHK guys, a neat professor from Boston; a very great famous cryptographer. So we have cool coders, we have good researchers, and our coders understand how blockchains work better and better with each day. So, I think we are on the right track. Of course, when you start something, you run into those problems with human resources because you don’t have many people who understand how blockchains work. This is the issue here.”

Host: “I imagine, being a startup, you probably put in 14 – 16 hour days. I just want to ask, we have a question from the audience, ‘How was the trip to London last week?’”
Sasha: “Yea it was cool actually. I didn’t have any presentations because I wanted to talk to some hedge fund guys who want to invest in cryptocurrency related projects. They want to start a fund that invests in cryptocurrency. If they are successful, also, they will be launching some kind of marketing agency that can help people to invest properly in cryptocurrency projects. Also it will help people to raise money through ICO’s. So we have several directions of cooperation. One of them is a marketing agency, and another is the cryptocurrency fund. So, marketing agency will be helping people who want to make an ICO on the Waves blockchain. The fund will be investing in the projects. Probably it can provide some seed funding for the projects or it can even invest in equity – not only tokens – but also in equity of those companies. The thing is here, we want to be compliant; we don’t want to break any laws. So we are working not only on some technical issues, but we are working on some like, general legal structure for such projects to raise money so that they don’t have to sell equity. They have to sell some kind of digital product that can be used in their project. For example, it can be an internal currency of some social network that is used inside the network. You can sell it to your backers and it appreciates in value if your network grows. There is some, like, mechanism that connects the value of your token to the project. Many projects can follow this way. You don’t sell equity; you just sell some kind of digital product that is an integral part of your project or of your social network. There can be many things here. For example, your gaming sites, (it can be) an integral currency of your social game. In this way, you stay compliant because you don’t break any laws here. You just sell some digital product after all. At the same time, you can go to your users for funds. You can fund your project efficiently while cutting out the middleman. It’s a very efficient and important thing. So, it’s going to grow and it can be a very valid form of raising capital that goes parallel to VC way. It can be a great thing. I think it’s very important now not to mess things up and to make this scheme, this approach, to work in the long run.”

Host: “Yea I’m glad things are moving forward in that dimension. It seems like this platform is really going to help out a lot of projects. For example I`m sure a lot of the Waves people know of Incent. They know about the Tokes platform starting up in the United States, in Nevada I believe. I’m just happy those projects can get that investment and things are just moving so much faster. That should answer a question an audience member had. It was a simple question. ‘Does Waves have any future customers under contract?’”
Sasha: “Yea. We have many people who are coming to us for ICO’s. This is the hype now. I won’t deny it. Many projects want to do ICO’s. It’s very important now to filter them and to find people who we can really help. It will be good to help them make a product and to do the marketing. We have many people. It is Christmas time now and the New Year, so no one is launching anything now, but we have many projects in the pipeline, many different projects. (There are) IT projects, even some kind of brick and mortar thing. So, it’s going to be very interesting. All those projects, all those ICO’s actually can be divided into categories. It’s like, product model and a service model. For example, service model is when you sell an internal currency for your social network. The product model is when you sell a voucher for your product, like at Kickstarter. Sell a voucher, and you raise funds. With those funds you can manufacture your product. Then you can just swap the voucher for your actual product. It’s like a product model. This product model is like Kickstarter’s. You can launch so many projects with this. It’s better than Kickstarter because you can make your pledge, but at the same time, you can always sell your pledge. At least you have the chance to do so because blockchain always creates some kind of an open market on top of it. So, if you invest in this token, you have this token which can be swapped for an actual product later. If you are unsure that the guys are going to deliver, you can try to sell this token. It is another degree of freedom which can be really useful here. So I think this product crowd-funding, which Kickstarter started and developed successfully, can move into the cryptocurrency arena. It is more natural here. You can like, issue a voucher, and you can swap your voucher for the product. If you don’t want it, you don’t lose your money. At least you can try to sell it. This is a very nice thing and makes it more transparent and more flexible. It doesn’t make things 10 times better, but it makes things sufficiently better. It doesn’t revolutionize the whole market, but it can make things better. It can make things better than what Kickstarter offers at the moment. So, I think it’s a very good thing. This type of product crowdfunding could grow too. Actually, no one has used it yet, but please understand that normal brick and mortar businesses can go in that direction. It can use this type of crowd-funding even now. So, it’s not a question of technical maturity of blockchains. It is a question of understanding how things work. It’s just an organizational question. When people realize how it works, they will be all over it, I think. Many projects will be starting and they will be trying to raise funds for their, like, manufacturing things for whatever, yea, through blockchain crowd-funding. We are just at the beginning of this road, and we are helping people get started now.”
Host: “Moving into 2017… I know this is a terrible question because it implies a date, and when you are doing software development, it’s so chaotic. Things tend to get pushed back. Can you give an estimation of when the asset exchange, instant conversions to the major fiats, and everything (will be ready)…?”
Sasha: “Yes. So the decentralized exchange is on the test-net now. We have to test it and create the front end. So it’s the New Year now, and you can’t make good work so efficiently as they do not at the New Year time (You can’t get as much done around the holidays). I think December will be used for DEX testing and January will be used for front-end development and the actual launch of the decentralized exchange. My estimate would be the end of January for the decentralized exchange. We have the Euro gateway ready organizationally. So we have to implement it now… probably the same. So we are launching it – we’ll try to launch it – and to do most of the work before the New Year. It will be launched I think around the 20th or something like that. Ok, at the end of January it will be there. We are also working on the Dollar gateway. So, it will be launched approximately the same time. Estimate here would be the end of January for DEX and we’re going to have fiat transfer definitely ready by the end of January too.”

Host: “I went onto the Waves site and I only saw one page for hiring so maybe this is a good opportunity. If there are any people that you need, what skill sets, or what languages do they need?”
Sasha: “Yea so we need Scala developers and also front-end developers. Also, you need to be able to work in a team. Teamwork is very important here. We had a couple of guys who just didn’t work in our team somehow. We didn’t fire them; they just couldn’t work here somehow because they are used to working on their own. This is the thing, we are having to discuss things with people all the time. It’s very helpful. If you’re staying alone, coding alone at your home, it won’t work here because you always have to discuss. This is a new thing; no one did it before. We try to move them in a different direction. So, we are in an area that no one has ever been in. So, this is a thing that you always have to bear in mind. You have to cooperate with as many people as you can if you want to be successful in blockchain development. It is very important.”

Host: “A lot of people out there… They don’t understand that developers have some of the biggest egos on the planet… Anybody out there who is trying to raise money with an ICO … (they may have) a finance background or whatever, and you come into this space, and you’re not prepared for the egos that you’re going to brush up against. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I advise a lot of projects on the marketing end. The projects that I’ve seen fail time and time again is from all communication issues. It’s always a breakdown in communication.”
Sasha: “Yea yea so the Poloniex thing is one of the good examples where it probably was an ego thing. Many exchanges are like that. Some developers are like that. Egos always play a role here. I try to always remember that. You have to be really forthcoming and not try to impose your ego on anybody else because everybody in this area has a huge ego of his own.”

Host: “It’s kind of funny. It seems at the same time we’re also trying to get away from that human expression but right now we can’t escape it so… Ok. Let’s go back into the tech then. A guy’s asking here… He’s saying, ‘You need 10,000 Waves to run a node. If the price increases, will the amount you need to run a node change?’” How’s that equation all worked out?”
Sasha: “Yea. We have to limit the minimum amount to mine in order to get rid of potential attacks on POS that do exist… You have to have a limit because there is attack possible where, for example, you can take 1,000 Waves and send them to many accounts and you can, in a way, predict who is going to be mining in the 1000 blocks. It is possible. You can like, occupy the whole network. You can have all the mining actually in your hands after that so in order to limit that, we have to impose this limit. It will be actually canceled in the future I think. At this stage, it’s like that. So, and there are not so many transactions at this stage now but the transactions are growing. I think it makes sense for some people to start mining, as they will be in the ecosystem. They can switch to higher transaction volume when it’s there and they will be making money. So our goal is to provide an opportunity for miners to earn like 1 to 2% per month on a stable basis on their investment. So, it’s doable I think with a high level of transactions. It can be as profitable, or more profitable, as Bitcoin, or Ethereum, or ZCash mining. So, this is our goal. So, at this stage, it is not profitable because we just launched. But, you can get into the ecosystem and you can understand how things work and it will pay off in the future, definitely.”

Host: “Cool. So a question regarding the remaining Waves from the ICO. The ICO tokens that Waves holds, the company. Will they all be used for staking? Will they be used for community development? Will they be burned at some point? What is the future projection there?”
Sasha: “We will be mining them because we will try to adjust our mining stake to the mining stake of the external biggest miner. If we just mine with all the six million Waves, we are going to have all the blocks to ourselves. It doesn’t make much sense. People won’t be interested. Of course it will be used to pay bounties, to support development, and for different things. Consider it to be our equity in the company. Cryptocurrencies are a new kind of security more or less. It’s some kind of equity. We have this equity and it can be used of course in the usual way. When you have some kind of option for equity. For example, if you work for Google or Facebook, you have some kind of option and you get a share of the equity if you work some time for the company. We can use it in exactly the same way. All those mechanisms for rewarding your employees have been developed by so many companies and ‘normal’ economics. You can use the same mechanisms here with those tokens. So, consider it to be equity in our project – our stake in the project.”

Host: “Cool. So another question here says, ‘Did anybody receive proof of stake rewards while there were no full nodes running?’”
Sasha: “No we have to run a full node in order to be able to stake and to receive the rewards at this moment. It can change in the future, but not in the pretty decent future I think.”

Host: “Cool. Right on. We pretty much just talked for an hour. Is there any shout-outs or anything you’d like to say to the community; anything at all?
Sasha: “Yea I just want to wish a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year guys. We really appreciate our community. It’s like, our most precious asset. It doesn’t work without the support of the people. So, we are working for our community. We hope you will be supporting us in the next year. We need your support. We need your testing and your feedback. So guys, this was a very turbulent year, but the next year, I think, will be even more turbulent. The world is moving forward and the times are rough, but probably it’s good because we are on the move. We are trying to create the future world at this stage. We are all in the same boat and we are all in this together. So let’s work on making the future world a good one and a beautiful world where the financial system is decentralized. Where you don’t have vertical government structures that oppress you and where you have efficient governments - a free world more or less. So this is our goal, and it’s possible guys. I don’t think that the world is moving in the wrong direction. I think it is moving in the right direction now. So let’s make it happen. I wish you all the best.”

Host: “Great. Like I said, shout outs to Waves, shout outs to Core Media, shout outs to Evelina who brought this together. Thank you so much to everyone who showed up and asked questions. I’m looking forward to it again any time you want to set something up like this. This is what I do. I do live streaming for a bunch of other projects, including Coin Interview so… “
Sasha: “Thank you. It was great. Thank you.”