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Sasha Ivanov is one of the most influential and respected people in the blockchain world after building the rapidly-growing Waves platform - a global public blockchain platform with a $1.7bn market cap. He talks to Dorothy Musariri about how it has grown and his new wave of ventures

Sasha Ivanov giving a presentation at Blockchain 360Subscribe to our email newsletter 

Albert Einstein may have passed away almost a century ago but his gravitational waves still live on – and not just in science, but in the world of blockchain too.Two years ago, after failing to keep his other investments afloat, Sasha Ivanov – also a theoretical physicist – took a business risk and the Waves platform entered the space.

Named after Einstein’s most famous discovery, the open-source blockchain platform allows users to launch their own custom cryptocurrency tokens.The cryptocurrency market is primarily a faceless one but Sasha says: “What’s made the business successful is it’s very community-based and we have to actually work with people.


“We are always trying to expand in some areas – for example, we are always trying to find very cheap solutions for any transfers.“We can also transfer fiat currencies [those that a government has declared to be legal tender] such as the US Dollar or Euro.“We are trying to provide the best possible solutions for
people.”




Sasha Ivanov – founder and CEO of Waves platformAs well as providing the platform for creating cryptocurrency tokens, Waves is used for storing, trading, managing and issuing digital assets “easily and securely”.It helps start-ups to raise an ICO (initial coin offering) – a crowdsourcing exercise in which funds are raised for a new cryptocurrency venture. 

Waves platform takes crypto world by storm

The company itself was launched through crowdfunding in June 2016 for 30,000 Bitcoin (BTC) – then worth $80m (£60m) – making it the second-largest successfully crowdfunded blockchain project that year after crypto powerhouse Ethereum.Things moved quickly for the Russian-based company, which now has a market cap of $1.7bn (£1.28bn) as of December 2017 – making it the second-largest successfully crowdfunded blockchain project, after Ethereum.

Waves has subsequently developed into one of the world’s largest tech communities and formed partnerships with a variety of renowned international organisations, such as Binary District – a collaborative tech community that runs educational programmes and events themed around technologies like blockchain.

Another collaboration is with Russian-based venture capital and private equity company TMT Blockchain Fund to work on an infrastructure project.The partnership between the two companies will be focused mainly on blockchain and fintech, including large decentralised applications, as well as private blockchain infrastructure opportunities.




TMT will also support ICOs and existing projects within the Waves platform.Sasha, regarded as one of the most respected and influential people in the blockchain space, says:

“TMT Fund is one of the first funds that is exclusively launching equity totals. It’s going to be compliant with regulations and we are glad to help it achieve its goals.

”“It’s a very contentious space because you have many equity totals which are not regulated, but they are supposed to be.“It’s basically the security for blockchain and the next big thing is actually this – it’s equity totals.” 

Bringing blockchain into the public sector

Taking the blockchain world by storm, Sasha recently announced another new grand-scale project called Vostok.It will create the world’s first usable blockchain solution for scalable digital infrastructure, helping to expand the global accessibility of blockchain.

Vostok – named after the craft that carried Yuri Gagarin into space – will help organisations enhance security, data storage, transparency and stability of their systems.It can be used for processes such as, banking services, payment systems, land registries, electronic voting and more.

It will be able to handle 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) at just $0.000001 per transaction, which is a faster, cheaper and more efficient way than the current blockchain solutions.In comparison to Bitcoin, it has transnational processing capacity of three to six TPS and costs $0.951 per transaction.

Sasha says: “It’s a spin-off from the Waves platform and I think could be a huge success.



“It’s going to be more focused on enterprise, which is a big business.“We are going to be offering big, robust solutions for enterprise in the public sector because everyone could benefit from some kind of blockchain solution.

”Sasha wants to launch with dozens of large businesses and government organisations, and is already in talks to with some of them to use the technology.

He says:

“The plan is to launch the platform and after that we would be doing more sales.“We plan to go to all the governments around the world and offer them our solution for real estate registry, land registry and more.“They can gain a lot from using blockchain – it’s going to be quite a busy year for us.” 

Global plans for Waves

Waves has offices in Russia and Amsterdam, with 90 staff, but has plans to go worldwide.“We are branching out and opening offices all over the world,” says Sasha. “Firstly in the UK, we are going to have an office in London by the end of the summer.

“We also planning to open an office in New York.“We have Japanese invigilators and we want to be based all over the world because blockchain technology is global.

“We have to move in all the directions.” Bitcoin became a favourite topic of the mainstream media last year, leading many people to invest in cryptocurrencies as they followed the hype.

But Sasha believes they are should look deeper into the technology.

He adds:

“My advice to the people who are more focused on the hype is it’s going to subside and probably it already has so don’t concentrate on that too much.

“What you saw last summer probably won’t happen again because technology stays.

“Be focused on the technology – not the hype around it.”

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Blockchain enthusiasts claim the technology will do for transactions what the Internet did for communications: essentially upend transactions as we known them.“Blockchain is going to become everything,” said Brendan Blumer, CEO of Block.one, a company that creates blockchain technologies for businesses. “In my opinion it’s as big as the Internet.”

Blockchain is the distributed ledger technology that became famous, or infamous depending on your view, for powering bitcoin. Bitcoin allows people to exchange currency online without using banks or other middlemen. Bitcoin was the first blockchain application.

But the possibilities for using the technology are endless.Blumer envisions blockchain enabling what he calls “open-source companies.” He gives the example of Steemit.com, a publishing site where writers post their stories and advertisers soon will be able to purchase ad spots directly from the writers.

Transactions will be handled through blockchain “tokens.” The more popular stories garner the most tokens, resulting in more money for the writers of those stories.“It’s a biological business,” said Blumer. “Steemit has over a $200 million market cap,” Blumer claimed. He said traditional companies will find it hard to compete against these new kinds of companies.

Tempering the enthusiasm a bit, the description of Steemit on Wikipedia is more measured. It says some critics think that Steemit is akin to a Ponzi scheme. So while the jury is still out in terms of currency-related uses of blockchain, the technology is being taken very seriously for other use cases.

An article in the Harvard Business Review said of blockchain, “In this world every agreement, every process, every task, and every payment would have a digital record and signature that could be identified, validated, stored, and shared. Intermediaries like lawyers, brokers, and bankers might no longer be necessary. Individuals, organizations, machines, and algorithms would freely transact and interact with one another with little friction.

This is the immense potential of blockchain.”But how might these new kinds of business paradigms affect the underlying resources of compute, storage, and networking that handle digital transactions?

How Blockchain Works

In a blockchain distributed database, every digital transaction is agreed to by a consensus of the participants. The transaction is then time-stamped and becomes a block in a chain of blocks. All transactions are signed and replicated across the network. If a change is made in one copy of a block, all the other copies are simultaneously updated. Thus, the blockchain contains a true record of each transaction ever made.

And it’s virtually impossible to hack.“If a hacker tried to change anything he’d not only have to re-write all transactions but he’d have to replicate them across the entire network, concurrently,” said Anoop Nannra, a senior leader of Cisco’s strategic innovation group.All of this consensus processing and data replication can require an enormous amount of compute and storage resources.

In the case of bitcoin, the underlying blockchain technology has run into problems with time delays as it attempts to transact cryptocurrencies worldwide.But there are a lot of other possibilities for blockchain within more contained networks. Financial services is an obvious use case. The Harvard Business Review cited Nasdaq as an example. It’s working with Chain.com to use blockchain for processing and validating financial transactions within its own private cloud.

Financial transactions require a lot of steps, explained Raphael Davison, global director of blockchain at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). A typical credit card transaction today requires 16 steps, it involves seven parties, and it takes seven days, said Davison. With blockchain the same transaction can be reduced to two parties and take less than one hour.Nannra said there are still server, storage, and networking gear requirements to run the blockchain stack, “but we’re evolving to more enterprise-network, permission-based” scenarios.

Blockchain Use Cases

At the HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas last week, Vincent Melvin, CIO of Arrow Electronics, said, “We sort of sit in the middle of suppliers of electrical components. While I have a huge piece of information about the electronics supply chain, I don’t have all of it.

Blockchain, with womb-to-tomb around the electronics lifecycle, would be hugely disruptive to the supply chain that we have today.”In fact, tracking assets in a supply chain or validating the accuracy of data are both big first use cases for blockchain.Ericsson has already created a product — the Ericsson Data Centric Security — that validates data, using blockchain to “create trust in data,” said Erik Forsgren, a director of portfolio management at Ericsson.Forsgren said many organizations share data across clouds, and they need to ensure they’re dealing with accurate data.

Already, data is secured in some way, but it’s still vulnerable to being hacked or compromised. Ericsson’s product uses blockchain to “fingerprint” data. “The only thing we’re adding to our blockchain is the data signature,” Forsgren said. “The data can still reside in its application. The value is the security of the audit chain.”Smita Deshpande, a marketing manager for Ericsson, added, “The blockchain does not store the data; there are no issues about privacy.

It only stores the signature.”Ericsson is already running its Data Centric Security on the GE Predix Internet of Things (IoT) platform. “That’s an ideal type of use case,” said Forsgren. “In the GE case, they have different types of turbines and utilities with software updates. You need to verify these updates come from a trusted source.”Another possible use for blockchain is to track, log, and store metrics about the health of networks, themselves.

Cisco’s Nannra posted a blog about how blockchain could be used to verify the aspects of fault, configuration, account, performance, and security management (FCAPS) in a network.

Hyperledger

In 2015 the Linux Foundation announced its Hyperledger Project to advance blockchain technology. The project aims to develop an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework.It’s the fastest growing project in the history of Linux, according to Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf.

“We are focused on building a collection of technologies for deploying distributed ledger infrastructure,” he said. “We’re building the plumbing, if you will, that could be applied in all sorts of use cases.”

“Distributed ledgers are poised to transform a wide range of industries from banking and shipping to the Internet of Things, among others,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation, in a statement announcing the formation of the Hyperledger Project in 2015.

“As with any early-stage, highly-complex technology that demonstrates the ability to change the way we live our lives and conduct business, blockchain demands a cross-industry, open source collaboration to advance the technology for all.”The authors of the Harvard Business Review article, by the way...continue reading: https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/blockchain-what-network-engineers-know/2017/06/