Since the end of November, the Waves coin (WAVES) has bucked a market trend and risen in price by over 150%. The cryptocurrency has not only risen to a price, at the time of writing, of $2.49 per coin but as bitcoin price falls, WAVES value against bitcoin (BTC) is also growing.
The Waves cryptocurrency today, for a short time, entered the top 20 coins by market capitalization but has since fallen back to 22nd place as other coins show green. The coin’s market cap is now nearly $245 million, its highest since July 2018.
Why is Demand for Waves Increasing?
Waves is a blockchain platform where organizations and developers can create their own custom tokens. It has its own decentralized exchange (DEX) where these tokens can be traded alongside some of the most popular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, Litecoin, and Monero. There are 69 tradeable coins on the Waves DEX with Waves reporting over 20,000 custom tokens in use.
Just over a week ago CCN reported that the release of an updated Waves mobile wallet that enabled credit card purchases of Waves which could then be traded into Bitcoin, or for other coins on its own DEX, could be fuelling interest in the coin. That could still be the case. According to CoinMarketCap trading volume on the exchange has increased this week too.
Waves has been busier still. After first introducing smart contract functionality to the platform in September 2018, it’s now adding smart assets and smart account trading. A Waves announcement was posted December 13, and the functionality will be added to the blockchain’s mainnet once Waves miners vote their agreement. Waves also released its wallet add-on for the Firefox browser on December 14, and will be launching a European securities token trading platform in 2019.
Hey #Waves community! Look what’s going on and what we’ve got planned with #Tokenomica — our European security tokens platform. We’ve got some really exciting plans. 2019 will be a really hot year for the #WavesPlatform ecosystem!#Blockchain #Trading $WAVES pic.twitter.com/umOjngar6E
— Waves Platform (@wavesplatform) December 12, 2018
The Waves blockchain, according to Waves, is fast, supporting 6,000 transactions per minute which equates to 100 per second. Ethereum is capable of around 10-15 transactions per second currently but Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin believes once second-layer solutions like Sharding and Plasma take effect the network is capable of over one million transactions per second.
There may well be some growing confidence in the Waves blockchain. Waves announced it had processed more transactions in one day than any other on October 21, 2018, reaching 6.1 million and surpassing Ethereum at 1.3 million and EOS at 5.4 million.
Waves could also interest investors with its dual business focuses of token creation and smart contract blockchain functionality, and decentralized exchange, giving it two markets to drive success.
In terms of up and coming blockchains, Waves is not without competition. The price of TRON’s TRX isn’t performing as well as WAVES, but it too is also not being impacted as much by crypto-winter as other coins. dApp usage on the TRON blockchain surged to 1 million transactions last week and the TRON Foundation has just launched its own exchange.
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