Waves Announces New Blockchain Investment Fund

Waves is to “play a major role” in the creation of a new blockchain venture fund, ‘the Basics Fund’, according to a company press release.

The fund will operate along the same lines as a venture capital fund, but blockchain technology will make the process much faster and cheaper than with traditional investment funds.

Investments will be made in blockchain companies and products with real-world applications.

The creators are looking for $10 million in investment for January 2018, and a total of $30 million by April. According to the press release: “Ten-fold growth over the course of 2–3 years is expected, vastly outpacing all traditional markets.”

Waves CEO Alexander Ivanov said: “…we’re very proud to be partnering with experts from the asset management industry and launching a new blockchain Fund for mainstream investors, which will pioneer best practices and showcase the strength of blockchain technology to a new market.”

Waves is an open-source blockchain platform founded in 2016 by physicist Ivanov through an ICO that raised over $16 million.

It allows users to launch their own custom cryptocurrency tokens. Waves differs from Bitcoin and Ethereum in that the ability to create tokens is integrated into its software and wallet. Users can create, transfer and exchange tokens, paying transaction fees in the native WAVES token, of which there is a fixed supply of 100 million. It has a current market cap of almost $50 million, according to CoinMarketCap.

According to its website: “Waves Platform’s mission is to reinvent the DNA of entrepreneurship around the world by providing a shared infrastructure, offering easy-to-use, highly functional tools to make blockchain available to every person or organisation that can benefit from it.”

It recently announced Waves-NG, a blockchain upgrade developed by two Cornell Computer Science academics, which will allow it to process thousands of transactions a second. This will make it the fastest platform available today.

Earlier in December, it formed an alliance with IGF, ‎Ethereum and Deloitte with the aim of regulating the ICO industry, which has increasingly seen projects pop up that are questionable in terms of both feasibility and legality. At the time, alliance founder Miko Matsumura said: ‎“The Waves Platform is taking a leadership role in working with the IGF on ICO disclosure ‎standards. By exhibiting ‎leadership here they are expanding the scope of what it means to be a platform for token ‎creation.”