The Waves blockchain has been flagged by Binance, indicating it might not meet the required standards anymore and could be delisted. This news made the price of Waves Protocol’s $WAVES token drop by 32.5% to $2.88 since April 2, catching the attention of many traders.
It’s been a rough year for Waves. In February, it was removed from the OKX exchange because it no longer met their requirements. However, for those who have been keeping an eye on Waves, this didn’t come as a shock since the platform has been facing challenges for quite some time.
Launched in July 2016, Waves was once considered a strong competitor to Ethereum, earning the nickname “Russian Ethereum.” At its peak in April 2022, it had a market cap of $5.6 billion. However, like some early blockchains, including EOS and Cardano, Waves struggled to attract developers and failed to onboard a wide user base, leading to a decline in interest.
In 2022, things got worse when a hack on its lending protocol, Vires Finance, led to investors losing over $530 million. This also hit Waves’ stablecoin, USDN, hard. It lost its peg and dropped almost to zero, similar to what happened to Luna’s UST, causing more big losses for Waves users and investors.
Waves founder Sasha Ivanov has been accused of causing these failures, which he denies. There are also reports that Ivanov’s personal wallets were involved in some shady transactions after the Vires Finance and USDN issues.
According to DL News, a wallet linked to Ivanov, among several others, was involved in a sophisticated scheme that manipulated transactions to funnel funds out of Vires Finance. When directly questioned about his control over the wallet in question, Ivanov did not deny ownership
Despite all this, Waves and Ivanov remain active on social media, sharing updates on new initiatives. In fact, Ivanov is venturing into a new project, the Units Network, with its native token UNITO. This Layer 2 network, based on Waves, aims to attract Ethereum developers by offering compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. However, it is unclear if they will come to the party, given the past issues with Waves and Ivanov.
Ivanov’s past projects, including Waves and USDN (now called XTN), have lost most of their value since their all-time high. It is uncertain what will happen with UNITO, but those who have lost money on Ivanov’s projects might think they already know.
