New Waves-NG protocol launches on mainnet

Waves, the custom blockchain platform for token trading and asset generation announced today its major new upgrade to the Waves consensus algorithm will be rolled out today and is expected to activate later this month. Over the course of this year, the Waves team has been developing a new consensus algorithm based on Bitcoin-NG, a protocol developed for Bitcoin by Emin Gün Sirer, Co-Director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts at Cornell.

With the help of the community, the Waves team has wholly tested the new algorithm and it’s now ready to release on mainnet. Activation will be triggered by the new Waves Activation Protocol, which is designed to ensure that activation of features requiring a hardfork occur safely and predictably.

Once nodes have updated with the new version, miners can start setting approval flags in their blocks. After 5,000 blocks (around 3.5 days), the Protocol checks to see how many miners have signaled acceptance of the new features.

If a minimum of 4,000 blocks (80%) have approved the fork, it is automatically activated after a further 5,000 blocks.

The Waves team said:

“Scalability is a concern for any blockchain that aims to be enterprise-ready, and yet few crypto platforms have addressed this satisfactorily. Bitcoin currently struggles along with a capacity of around 3 transactions per second, with Ethereum managing 5 tps. Obviously, such throughput is not enough to support the mass adoption for which Waves was designed.”

“We have set the hardfork for block 795,000, which is estimated to occur at around midday GMT on Friday 15 December 2017. Voting will end 3.5 days later, on 18 December, and activation will take place on 22 December. All being well, then, we will see Waves-NG up and be running before Christmas, alongside a major new upgrade to the wallet. We’ll keep you posted on progress at this very important time in our history!”

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