The Business Incubator of Higher School of Economics in Moscow has announced a second year of FinTech start-up program HSE Pro Fintech, with official partner Waves, the decentralized platform for crowdfunding and community management and National Settlement Depository.
The Incubator recently launched the second round of its pro fintech programme. The program aims to develop projects in the field of financial and blockchain technologies, in particular services for banks and their customers, personal finance management systems, peer-to-peer services, investment systems, payments, transfers and other FinTech products.
A number of blockchain-based decentralised asset exchanges have already been created, including on the Nxt, BitShares, and Counterparty platforms. Some have voiced concerns that the assets traded generally have low liquidity and high spreads. Other issues include the decentralised platforms having little accountability and some low-quality and fraudulent assets. Regulations are often not prioritised and additionally, trading can be slow due to inherent block-time limitations of various blockchains.
Waves platform is aiming to bring solutions to all of these problems with its Waves’ decentralised exchange, which has just been released on testnet. It allows any token to be traded directly against any other token – rather than trading two tokens separately against a reference currency, as many other platforms require. Moreover, it features a new system that enables trades to be executed in near real-time via a “Matcher”, enabling high-frequency trading but retaining settlement on the blockchain for security.
Additionally, fiat gateways are in the process of being created to allow the use of blockchain-based EUR, USD, CNY and other major currency tokens. Gateways, which act as on- and off-ramps between the traditional financial sector and the blockchain, are responsible for remaining compliant in their regulatory jurisdictions, improving speed, security, and compliance.
