We have updated the plans for developing the Waves Enterprise platform in the following quarters. This post will uncover its priorities and main directions.

Our main priority for the next 2–3 quarters is the performance of the platform in order to take part in the most ambitious and high-load projects of the enterprise and state sectors. In previous months we spent much time researching and prototyping sharding to reach high scalability of the platform. The results were contradictory: though sharding meets our objectives, adding it in full scale is quite tricky without extra risks of private data disclosure and additional points of failure. This needs even more research.

In the meantime, we found other opportunities for performance growth. These include polishing network protocol for nodes, partial refactoring of the architecture, accelerating both operations with the big data and private data exchange, along with others. So here we’ll continue boosting performance, as we’re doing in the 1.7 release. This will help us fit the platform to the customers’ expectations in the next year.

Another important direction is about integration and customers. We expect a large number of third-party projects both in our mainnet and private chains. So we’ll continue developing our Java, Scala, and JavaScript libraries, adding new patterns of smart contracts, developing and integrating of business applications, information systems. We also have plans for extra instruments to manage nodes and networks. This will reduce the entry barrier for the potential platform users.

We also plan to integrate public key infrastructure (PKI) into the platform. Neither an enterprise nor a state information system can’t function apart from PKI — this is what almost any jurisdiction demands, one way or another. At the same time, we want to give convenient key storage instruments — both hardware and trusted cloud ones — to the mainnet users. This will take extra time, but we think it’s worth it.

Of course, we’ll be developing our containerized smart contracts. Here we plan to boost performance, integrate with native tokens for creating new services and apps, and add private data support.

We should also mention our key direction in the Waves Enterprise mainnet development — this is interoperability. We’ll continue expanding cross-chain interaction with popular public blockchain networks and projects in order to finally break the wall between enterprise blockchain and the whole world of crypto.

You can read more about all the future updates in our regular posts, which come with all the important releases.