What is the WAX blockchain?

WAX, rather than a blockchain, is an EOS sidechain.

In the blockchain world, an important place is in fact occupied by sidechains, also known as sister chains, i.e. blockchains that have adopted the main features of a consensus protocol but have made some changes to solve some weak points of the original blockchain.

The sister chains differ from the various forks because they create a chain from scratch, without forcing the main chain to “fork” and follow one or the other ideology, (think of the dispute about the block size that led to the birth of Bitcoin Cash).

The EOS blockchain and its sister chains

One of the blockchains with the biggest projects and sister chains is definitely EOS, which features: 

• WAX, 
• BOS, 
• Worbli, 
• Telos, 
• MEET.ONE, 
• EOSFX, 
• Proton,
• XEC, 
• COFFE,
• Remme. 

All these sister chains have introduced different changes to the main EOS chain, such as the Block Producer (BP) number, the voting system and so on.

The WAX blockchain

WAX is an acronym for Worldwide Asset Exchange (here the whitepaper).

The key figures of this blockchain are:

• William Quigley, CEO;
• Jonathan Yantis, COO;
• Lukas Sliwka, CTO;
• Malcolm CasSelle, Strategic Advisor.

Let’s start with the macro data:

• Number of blocks: over 55 million;
• Maximum number of transactions per second (tps) reached: 1214;
• Price and market cap: $0.0032 and $118 million
• Number of accounts: over 485 thousand;
• Daily transactions: 243 thousand with a record of over 7 million transactions.

The WAX blockchain was born with the intent to create, buy, sell and trade virtual assets, the classic NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens), in a convenient and secure way.

A platform is already available to convert tokens from the various games, think of the PGL token from the Prospectors game or the GEM token from the WAXTycoon game, which are actually used as in-game currency.

The WAX blockchain uses the DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) consensus protocol and therefore it is the users, or rather the token holders, who vote the block producers, which on this blockchain are called WAX Guild.

Specifically, there are:

• 21 active WAX Guilds that, when selected, must produce the blocks in a round of 126, or 6 blocks for each of the 21 WAX Guilds;
• 36 passive or standby WAX Guilds that, although not active, can be selected to produce blocks. This way it is possible to identify those who do not own hardware and thus be eliminated from production.

The system of transactions, staking and so on is identical to that of the EOS main chain, so there are the 3 main resources: CPU, NET and RAM, which can be staked to earn WAX tokens or vice versa.

Being mostly based on the EOS code, it is possible to create and execute smart contracts for the development of dApps (decentralized applications), which in this case are very convenient thanks to the price of the WAX token: in fact, with the same resources, it costs 7556 times less than on EOS.

Another interesting aspect is linked to one of the most widely used wallets for interacting with this blockchain, WAX Cloud Wallet. This is a wallet in the cloud that allows both to generate a free WAX account and to access it through Google and various social networks. From this wallet, it is possible to control the various tokens and NFTs.