[Messari AMA] Max Pertsovskiy, Head of Growth at Waves

Messari hosted a public AMA with Waves' Head of Growth Max Pertsovskiy in the Messari community group. This is a transcript of the conversation.

Messari: Max, thanks so much for joining this chat for a bit to field some questions about Waves this afternoon. We have a super-full queue of questions, so this should be a lot of fun. Thanks for being here.

Max Pertsovskiy: Hey, thanks for having me!

Messari: Before we jump into questions, can you give us a bit of background on why Waves was initially developed and your journey to joining the team?

Pertsovskiy: Sure. Few words about my background. I am personally passionate about both technology and entrepreneurship. I started my first company in Lithuania. It was a maker space. We provided access to a range of fabrication spaces and prototyping tools for a wide range of independent companies in fields as diverse as robotics, industrial design, A.I., urban technology and energy. One of our aims was to foster collaboration and progress across disciplines.

My second passion is games. I was a real hardcore player :) I founded the GOSU Data Lab. It’s an analytics company focused on gaming data and AI. Using Machine Learning algorithms we built a platform that applies the computer’s power and insights to gaming data, helping gamers to play better, training pro gamers, and improving gaming companies’ analytics. I stepped down in 2016, but that company is still going strong now.

In 2016 I joined the Waves team. It was very early, and there were just 10 people with great passion. I originally worked as COO but I’m now responsible for Growth and Strategy.

Messari: I want to start with a couple questions about Waves’ recent launch of a language for smart contracts and dapp development. The first question is about what makes Waves different: “There are lots of smart contract and dapp development platforms. What makes Waves different?”

And: “Looking at the Electric Capital Dev Report Waves has some of the highest developer activity after Ethereum, why is this? What brings developers to Waves versus some of its competitors?”

Pertsovskiy: I think it’s worth to start with Waves company and our core products. Waves is a Switzerland-based technology firm with a strong focus on building core infrastructure technologies for Web 3.0. Waves team is distributed between Amsterdam, Moscow and Zug.

Waves has launched and supports two core products:

1. Waves Platform, a complete ecosystem of products, easy-to-use tools, libraries and frameworks for developing fully-fledged Web 3.0 applications

2. Vostok (VST) Platform, a universal blockchain solution designed for large enterprises and public institutions

Messari: We have a bunch of questions about Waves’ Vostok project. Can you give a bit more explanation of what it is and why it’s being built? What are Waves’ plans for Vostok?

Pertsovskiy: Sure. Waves Enterprise (Vostok Platform) is the commercial arm of Waves AG, a universal blockchain solution designed for financial corporations and the public sector. The reality is that these require different technology to the day-to-day businesses. For example, they may need to meet certain standards in terms of speed, privacy, encryption algorithms, etc, which are laid out by regulators or other guidelines.

And you need to be able to avoid the potential speed limitations of an open blockchain. So we only have approved nodes, it’s a private chain, though much of the tech is of course similar. Need to say that they’re separately funded, but development of the two platforms will occur in parallel, and innovations can be copied between them.

It’s an important ecosystem project that will bring more exposure and better tech to Waves.

Messari: With that background, can we discuss what makes Waves unique?

Pertsovskiy: Sure, answering your question we need to say a bit about Waves new Ride Language update.

Messari: Yes! Please do. That was the next question (we have a few about this): comparing RIDE to Solidity (Ethereum) or Move (Facebook) or other smart contract languages. Can you give a quick comparison?

Pertsovskiy: Waves has learned from previous smart contract platforms and avoids many of the mistakes that have plagued Solidity, for example. RIDE is a strongly-typed and human-readable language, making it accessible and predictable.

Solidity was designed to be 'familiar' for the widest range of developers possible, therefore inheriting a lot of bad practices that modern languages try to avoid: with mutable data structures it's easier to miss a costly error, and it's harder to formally verify a code written in imperative language.

Another important aspect is, again, the execution environment: the public blockchain and the language’s Turing-completeness.

Pertsovskiy: One of the problems of this approach and Ethereum’s gas requirements is that we see failed transactions not only being paid for, but being recorded on the blockchain forever and duplicated across every node – which is an incredible waste of space and provides no value.

That's what we managed to avoid with RIDE, of course, and while it’s less powerful than the JavaScript-like Solidity, it avoids these frustrating shortcomings. It has fixed fees, and there are no grey areas – code executes as planned, with no failed transactions. That makes it much more secure, and the edge cases that have plagued Ethereum should not exist on Waves.

It’s worth saying that competition is good in itself. Solidity is in danger of becoming an ‘industry standard’ simply because it was first.

Waves offers a very different approach: not better or best in every respect, but different, just as C and Python are different and have different use cases. We don’t want to risk monopoly-based stagnation in the industry, not at this early stage in smart contracts’ life

Messari: I appreciate that explanation. The thoughts on competition are important, and I think most everyone would agree. A follow-up to that: Who are Waves' biggest competitors?

Pertsovskiy: Ethereum has been able to establish strong network effects since its launch, which derive from its large community of developers, users and available infrastructure/tools. It has clearly benefited from its first-mover advantage. However, in certain situations, particularly with the development of new technology, those with a second-mover advantage can emerge as long-term winners. From existing platforms: Ethereum, Cosmos (in some areas). From upcoming platforms I could say Dfinity, Polkadot, Cardano, Algorand.

Messari: We have a couple questions specifically about dapp development on the Waves platform. First: “How are you planning to grow the dapp ecosystem? Platform competition quite high and best tech doesn’t necessary bring the best adoption results as seen now.”

And: “We have seen a couple gambling dapps already, also with grants. How can Waves grow beyond gambling and what is in the pipeline for 2019 and 2020? What can we expect?”

Pertsovskiy: Good question! We have a specific plan to market waves to developers. One of the ways we’ll be doing this is by funding them directly via Waves Lab, which disburses funding for long- and short-term projects on Waves. Our aim is to have 100 dApps on Waves by next year, collaborating with developers, researchers and community leaders to accelerate progress towards Web3 adoption.

The ecosystem growth program has just got started, focusing on seed project activation and support for dApp development. The main strategic regions are the United States and Asia (Japan, Korea).

Our targets are to hold 100 hackathon events in USA and Asia, attracting around 20,000 devs, as well as holding 150 workshops at universities in USA/Asia and attracting another 50,000 devs globally to our online courses.

We expect that the results of this ‘funnel’ would be 5,000 committed developers and 500 functioning dApps, of which we would select 100 for further funding and mentorship under Waves Lab’s incubator.

Messari: We have a question about a couple of the competitor projects you mentioned. “Are you currently working with any interoperability projects like Polkadot or Chainlink?”

Pertsovskiy: Actually we don’t consider this great projects as a competitors. We would like to collaborate rather than to be isolated. Interoperability tech for blockchain is still in its very early stages of development. Different approaches include interoperability between sidechains (or similar tech-based chains) and interoperability between completely different blockchains. The latter is still mostly limited and conceptual, or at a very basic level, like atomic swaps.

Waves is currently investigating sidechain-based interoperability, preparing the necessary changes in block structure and smart contracts, along with conducting soft discussions with the Polkadot team, which are in the R&D stage from our side.

Waves will take part in a Web3 summit this summer where we will consider digging deeper into the tech side of integration with Polkadot.

Messari: I’m also curious to know how Waves thinks about decentralized exchanges (DEXes) because there are a lot of DEXes in this space, but adoption is challenging. What’s the plan for Waves DEX?

Pertsovskiy: This year we made the key decision to push Waves DEX as an independent project. It’s also clear that in order to bring greater volumes to DEX, we need to offer more currencies and tokens – which means more gateways.

Specifically we’re working on the ERC-20 gateway. This should organically increase volumes, for a start. Without this, we can’t compete with the internal network effect of exchanges that offer many different popular coins and tokens.

Today crypto traders need a platform which can protect their personal data and assets as well as providing a user-friendly experience.

Most DEXs do the former, while most centralised exchanges are better on the latter. That’s why we built the Waves DEX to combine the security of peer-to-peer technology with the speed of centralised systems, and why we prioritised the UX with so many of the tools and charts that traders use on centralised exchange.

Any DEX in operation today is still very much a proof of concept, because so much trading still happens around centralised exchanges – even if we are all aware that our funds are out of our control.

I would love to see the majority of users and liquidity moving to DEXs, but that’s still a long way off.

Messari: Switching gears just a bit, we have an interesting question about failure. I’m paraphrasing from Slido: What are some of the biggest failures Waves has experienced so far with product strategy, partnerships, etc.?

Pertsovskiy: Any project has to bear in mind the realities of the market, and in the blockchain sector, that means things can change very quickly. We did a lot of mistakes for sure. Waves started out as a custom tokens platform. It did something that no other platform did at the time: enabling users to launch digital tokens quickly and easily to their own specifications, and trade them on a fast, secure, built-in DEX. Everything was built around that product.

Of course, the reality of the blockchain sector is that we quickly needed to build new functionality in order to differentiate our platform and compete with others that were springing up. There was nothing wrong with ‘CATs’ (Custom Application Tokens), as we then called them – it’s just that the market wanted much, much more, much faster than we could have imagined when we launched. I can say it’s not the mistake, it’s the new chapter for us.

Messari: We also have a bunch of other questions about partnerships, assets on Waves DEX, atomic swaps, Waves adoption, etc., and we don’t have time for all of them. But I want to get to a couple of them.

A question about incubator projects: “We have not heard much about Waves incubator participants ever since the program being launched. When will participating projects be announced?”

Pertsovskiy: The main goal of the grant and incubator programs is to go beyond the technical side of solutions and help turn them into profitable and self-sustaining businesses. There were many applicants and it has taken time to work through them. There have been lots of promising entries but you’ll understand that when supporting long-term projects with some quite significant capital backing, due diligence is extremely important.

Since Waves Labs launch in January, we’ve got 250+ applications from indie developers and teams, provided grants to around 30 projects for a total of 80.000 Waves.

You could check them out here:

Bunch1

Bunch2

Bunch3

Bunch4

We’re getting there and we will announce the results of the program this summer. Be tuned.

Messari: Awesome, thanks for the links. One more question (from me): Can you give us a quick summary of what growth and development in Q3 and Q4 2019 look like for Waves?

Pertsovskiy: Developers, developers, developers. Waves are going to the US market this summer. That will be our core priority.

Messari: Thanks so much for your time, Max! I know there's a bunch of questions we didn't get to—so, last question: What are the best ways to follow up on questions we discussed here and others that we didn’t get to?

Pertsovskiy: You could find me in Twitter. If you would like to apply for the Waves grants please check their website here.

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