Coleman Maher on why startups are moving to Waves blockchain

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have coleman mayor head of the ecosystem of waves labs coleman welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time thank you so much ashton you're very welcome i'm excited to dive into the waves blockchain i know it's been around forever i've been following

0:20it since five six seven years now and there's a lot to catch up on as the ecosystem continues to grow more companies are starting to build on waves which is super exciting i know that waves labs has a great part in helping companies get involved in the ecosystem so let's just start off the conversation by hearing a little bit about what you and your team are working on at waves

0:45labs and how that fits into the big picture and then we'll dive into everything else yeah yeah so as you mentioned waves has been around for quite a while it's launched in 2016. it's a layer one blockchain for those who don't know it's never gone down it's had a solid ecosystem for you know six years now but what waves labs is kind of the new growth engine

1:11for growing the waves ecosystem of applications so waves labs is in marketing community business development partnerships arm of waves it's based in the u.s so it's we're opening an office in miami and we're doing lots of hiring hiring key executives from other top projects and you know traditional finance and web 2 to try to kind of hyper accelerate

1:35the growth of waves as you know like all the layer ones have very big ecosystem funds now and they're targeting the same pool developers the same pool of users so in order to stay competitive we started wage labs to be the growth engine of waves very cool and yeah i feel like with all these giant funds that the layers one layer one protocols have now there's a big

2:03incentive to help companies start building on the ecosystem can you talk a little bit about why waves is a great ecosystem for startups to start building their projects on top of yeah so i would i would tout the advantages of the waves blockchain and then i can speak a little bit about some of the incentives we're offering for application builders so

2:27as i mentioned waves has been around since 2016. it's never gone down it's faster than ethereum it's a proof-of-stake blockchain but it's more decentralized than other proof-of-stake blockchains or other very fast blockchains like a solana so it has that good sweet spot between speed practicality and decentralization which i think is very important you know if you're

2:53building in web3 you want to build something that users can actually use that's inexpensive and performant but you also want to keep that decentralization and you don't want the blockchain to go down every other day you don't want your application controlled by you know just a handful of node operators that are you know really the same person so

3:16i would say waves offers a good sweet spot between speed and decentralization and security and as far as the incentives we're about to announce the launch of our incubator so we're looking to offer mentorship funding and all sorts of support for projects that are looking to build on the waves blockchain so that announcement should be coming out shortly so

3:43we feel that you know offering hands-on support and mentorship is just as important as committing like large amounts of funds you know you've seen with other layer one blockchains like they have these massive ecosystem funds but you know a lot of those projects don't end up actually doing well or becoming anything so i think it's important to have like a long-term

4:03game plan with long-term mentorship and people who really care about you know the long-term success of these projects definitely i completely agree to help send them in the right direction and you know one of the reasons why a lot of the you know ethereums build a great network effect is that there's a lot of developers that have already been

4:23working on there and have learned solidity because it's close to javascript how easy is it and to start developing with waves and is there a lot of barriers to entry for developers to get started there so waves is not an evm blockchain so it doesn't use solidity there's its own programming language called ride we think ride is simpler easier to learn

4:50safer more secure than solidity but it is a change if you're used to building on with solidity then you're gonna have to adjust to a new language but the way we think about it is that you know there's only a few thousand you know maybe tens of thousands of you know web3 developers right now there's millions of web 2 developers so you know the herd of

5:12web3 developers hasn't really arrived yet so having that you know first mover advantage of okay you know all the current web 3 developers no solidity like let's just keep focusing on evm chains i don't know that's the you know right long-term strategy and you're starting to see like a lot more developers use rust or you know develop on non-evm

5:36chains so yeah i would say like if you if you're used to solidity then it's going to be a bit of an adjustment but you know i think the future is multi-language anyways it's not going to be completely dominated by evm chains we have we have developer tools we have a developer portal like we have a thriving developer like community we just hired a new head of developer

5:58relations who's been you know building on waves since the very beginning so he's there to kind of help guide our community of developers in the right direction and we see new people join the community every day and you know not only him there's a lot of just community folks people who don't work for waves but who have been developing with ride on waves who are just in

6:20that chat room you know every day answering questions from new developers that's great to hear and you know i remember way back before you know the sort of craze of defy like looking into the waves decks and the ecosystem and i feel like since d5 has exploded and all this value is being locked into these smart contracts and nfts as well there's a lot more

6:46projects that are starting to build with those use cases on the ecosystem is there a specific niche of different kinds of companies that are starting to work with waves whether it be d5 projects or nft or other industry use cases or is it just all over the board i would say it's all over the board we're a general application blockchain i know some layer ones are trying to

7:12position them position themselves as the d5 chain or the nft chain but you know we're here to serve all sorts of applications i would point out that waves is was quite early to defy like usdn our algorithmic stablecoin you know preceded most of the other well-known algorithmic stable coins by years you know we've had significant tbl on our d5 applications for quite

7:39a while now and you know our decks the most popular dex on waves is called waves exchange and you just go to waves.exchange it's an order book decks which is you know a little bit unusual but you know that a little bit ahead of its time you're starting to see now dexes switch from amm style like liquidity to cool style to order books because you know like in the professional

8:01trading world the non-web3 trading world you know order books are you know generally easier to use you know more orderly as the name would imply so you know waves was kind of ahead of its time in terms of defy and it's also a little bit ahead of its time in terms of like metaverse applications waves ducks has been around for quite a while it's it's really

8:24popular it's a play to earn metaverse game where you control these nft duck characters you can breed them you can battle them you can race them and you know there's many sorts of different games that you can play with these duck nfts so that's been around for quite a while as well and you know has several hundred thousand active users so you know we've been making strides

8:47in both fifa and metaverse you know it hasn't always been the most well publicized but that's kind of the role of waves wraps to you know improve the community and marketing arm and to highlight all the great things that we're doing at waves and of course to continue to grow the ecosystem that is exciting and yeah the game five space and just incorporating nfts and

9:11blockchain into games i feel like it's at a breaking point right now where some major games that explode and sort of incorporate that technology it's going to be a huge huge industry that really hasn't come to fruition at all yet we've just seen a few sort of big players like axi and things blow up and then they don't really have the retention so

9:34looking forward to seeing how that continues to develop now say that there was a startup that was building a game or just any application how far along do they need to be to start applying into into waves and sort of integrating into the ecosystem you know whether it's just an idea a white paper or an alpha or a full launch product so we have different tracks for you

10:00know projects based on their level of development so if you just have a white paper you might you know join the incubator as an early stage project we also have an accelerator track where you know you're a little bit further along and you just need to accelerate your development and then we also have grants for teams that want to be more independent

10:21and you know they just need a little bit of funding but they're already you know well on their way so we have different buckets or tracks for you know different projects based on you know their stage of development if they're just a technical founder with a white paper or you know they're 10 people they've already formed a company and they're

10:43looking to launch soon so we have we're going to offer support for projects on any stage of their development basically that's good to know and you're talking about incentivizing projects you know there's all these other blockchains to choose from and how do they decide that waves is the best for them and you know financial incentives help but also being i think

11:09even more important is guidance and sort of strategic investors as you talked about giving them other assets besides money to help guide them on the way now on the on the financial side do you guys just give them waves tokens or how does that work in applying for like financial grants yeah so the grant structure is still being decided and we're going to

11:31announce that soon yeah yeah the financial aspects one aspect of it and you mentioned mentorship and other things but i think one of the key incentives for building on waves is that there's actually quite a lot of tvl on our chain and quite a lot of users but there's not a huge number of applications so the way i like to think about it or pitch it is that you

11:55know there's you know billions of dollars of tvl on waves d5 but you know that's on a handful of applications and there are some basic i wouldn't say primitives but basic applications types that are are missing on waves so if you build you know that missing piece capital is going to flow to your application because there's already a lot of tbl on waves and you know

12:20there's already a lot of d5 users so you have this kind of captive audience the same thing for metaverse nft game five like there's a really popular there's one really popular game five application on waves and games are an infinite design space if you build another cool game like you know waves dutch players i'm sure we'll check out your game so i would say that you know

12:40our community and the amount of tvl that's on our chain is a really strong selling point because you know there aren't you know frankly there aren't that many third-party developers on waves yet so a lot of the stuff has been built in-house once if you are a third-party developer building on waves you're going to have a pretty big head start i think because

13:01we're we're able to offer so much mentorship so much support and you know just the things i mentioned the community and tvl aspect like things are gonna users and capital are gonna flow to your application just because there's not you know hundreds of apps for it to go to like the competition right now on waves is a little bit low and you know one day hopefully there's gonna be

13:26hundreds and hundreds of flourishing apps but right now i think is a really good time to start building on waves yeah no that makes sense just like there's a few cogs missing and if you have the right piece then you know obviously it's gonna fit perfectly into the waves picture now do you have any nice success stories or examples of the companies that have joined with you guys

13:50recently and you know you've helped them out and now they're doing really well there's a few projects that have launched recently that are doing quite well and you know the founder of these projects is was formally in-house at waves and has kind of branched out and launched his own things and he's actually going to be helping out with the incubator a lot

14:10because he has a lot of experience so i mean one of those projects that he started is called tsunami finance it's a derivatives dex on waves it's attracting quite a bit of interest so yeah that's you know it's a project by this guy named vladimir he's he's a great builder and he's one of the i think strong assets we have in our developer community we have

14:35people who have been who have built multiple projects and waves who are willing to help new developers on board so yeah i'd like to give a shout out to him and talk about his project tsunami finance very cool and what's what's your and wave sort of stance on you know the future is multi-chain and being able to transfer assets or applications sort of cross-platform

15:00yeah i do think the future is multi-chain i think most people in crypto agree with that but i think that view has been challenged quite a bit by recent events you know clearly bridge security is not where it needs to be and there's an aspect to multi-chain not only like your bridges get hacked all the time but you know contagion financial contagion

15:27between like that starts on one chain can spread to other chains due to you know multi-chain infrastructure so i think this thesis is being tested like battle tested and i think we need to do a better job at building this multi-chain world we can't just you know build you know a few bridges and you know not worry about the consequences of that like say a liquidity pool on

15:50ethereum gets drained and it affects the price of the erc20 version of that token like we have to be thoughtful of how that's going to affect that token on other chains so i think you know actually sasha the waves founder has a lot of thoughts about this you know he's always posting his thoughts on crypto and where things should be headed so i'll check out his

16:13tweets or his telegram channel if you're interested in this debate like is it gonna be a multi-chain world like how do we build the future of crypto correctly he's always posting his thoughts on it on this and he's been around for a long long time he's one of the most thoughtful people in crypto great to know and i'll link his twitter in the description box below as well

16:34now coleman if there's projects that are at different stages sort of looking to find out more about the incubation acceleration platform like what's the best way for them to learn more and to potentially apply right now they should just reach out to me i can give you like my telegram or twitter we're going to have the website up you know within a matter of

16:55weeks and the application form for the incubator as well so you know we're working on that would have loved to have it ready but you know for right now they can just contact me directly and i'll refer them to our incubator read sounds great coleman and i can leave those contacts and links in the description box below as well make it easy for the viewers thank you so

17:21much for coming on and just talking about the waves labs and waves and it's exciting to see the ecosystem grow out and expand even more i would love to follow up in the near future you know when talk about more great success cases and how waves is expanding in the next quarter so until then have a great one thanks for having me yeah i would love

17:46to do like a follow-up when we have our first incubator cohort i think that'd be really interesting but thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me thanks you