WAVES is the native token of the Waves platform, an open-sourced technology for decentralized applications (dapps) that is typically used for products that require high security. Use cases include handling information related to finance, personal identification, gaming and storage of sensitive data.

In April 2016, Waves held an initial coin sale, or ICO, of WAVES tokens that raised about $16 million. The platform minted 100 million WAVES during the ICO and distributed 85 million to its participants, with the rest reserved for bug bounties, early supporters, strategic partners and developers.

The token started trading in June 2016 at a price of about $1. The WAVES price fell to a record low of $0.1227 on Aug. 2, 2016, and touched a high of $41.33 on May 4, 2021.

At launch, WAVES had a fixed asset cap of 100 million tokens. That changed in October 2019 when token holders elected to move WAVES from a fixed asset to an inflationary one. That means the total number of tokens can increase over time.

Waves is a decentralized, open-source blockchain platform for the development of dapps and custom blockchain token processes. It uses its own programming language, called RIDE and a modified proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol known as Leased PoS, and has its own on-chain governance. WAVES holders can vote on on-chain reforms known as “Waves Enhancement Proposals” (WEP). An approval of 80% is required in order to support any changes to the protocol.

The WAVES token is an inflationary asset that offers a reward for every block mined. The reward was initially set at six tokens. Every 100,000 blocks, or roughly 70 days, token holders can vote on whether to change the mining reward by 0.5 WAVES or leave it unchanged.

The platform was developed as a smart contract-first, application-based platform that uses the so-called colored coins approach. It allows the development of new dapps with their own coins that are customized – or colored – iterations of the base version.

Since its mainnet launch, Waves has generated several purpose-specific applications for running decentralized applications. Some use cases for the protocol include decentralized exchanges (DEX), stablecoins and blockchain-based games.

Unlike ether or bitcoin, WAVES offers fixed-fee transactions without the need for gas fees.

The Waves Platform was created in 2016 by Russian theoretical physicist Sasha Ivanov, who named the project for Albert Einstein’s gravitational waves theory. The project was developed based off of the Nxt blockchain protocol. Ivanov, realizing the limitations the Nxt protocol brought to his project, decided to create a platform that met his needs better.

As the platform developed, Waves became the official partner of accounting firm Deloitte and entered a collaborative partnership with Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing business.

In June 2019, Waves held its mainnet launch, which included the release of the RIDE language. With RIDE, developers could create dapps directly on the Waves blockchain.