Wanchain (WAN) is a blockchain platform founded in 2017 by Jack Lu and Dustin Byington, who are also the founders of projects Factom and Tendermint respectively. Wanchain is viewed by the team as a bridge in the currently disparate decentralized financial world.
The network makes use of a number of features to distinguish itself from other projects with a similar goal, these being cross-chain functionality and private transactions through the Ring Confidential Transactions technique.
Calling itself the most advanced blockchain interoperability hub, the Wanchain team is working on connecting isolated public and private blockchains. The team has listed 4 major use cases for this concept: cross-chain decentralized exchanges, cross-chain mobile payments, connected enterprise blockchains and decentralized financial applications.
Wanchain has established several partnerships to expedite the process of different chains working together. Partners include PundiX, MakerDAO, ICON and Aion, the latter two and Wanchain being members of the Blockchain Interoperability Alliance.
At the end of 2018, Wanchain published their agenda for 2019, which included a proof of concept for a Proof-of-Stake algorithm and alpha testing for it, upgrades to the wallet, more ERC20 token integrations, multi-asset wallets, the live launch of the PoS algorithm and the launch of Wanchain 4.0.
The team completed several of these objectives in 2019. Most recently, the team completed the switch to the PoS algorithm. The team also released mobile, desktop and offline wallets. As for Wanchain 4.0, it is expected by the end of the year. Also worth mentioning is the focus on ecosystem development, and the project has made much progress on that front, as a slew of releases on the official blog will attest to.