Sasha Ivanov is the Founder and CEO of Waves. He is a technology entrepreneur and has been working to improve business, banking, and public administration systems for the past decade, developing electronic payment mechanisms. In 2016, he founded Waves Platform, a global public blockchain platform with a market capitalization of $1.7 billion (as of December 19, 2017), which was crowdfunded with 30,000 BTC ($18 million), making it the second-largest successfully crowdfunded blockchain project after Ethereum. The name of the platform alludes to Ivanov's background as a theoretical physicist and to the recently-discovered gravitational waves predicted by Einstein a century ago. Waves Platform has since grown into one of the largest tech communities, with 300,000 active users in 25 countries, and has formed partnerships with a variety of renowned international organizations. Recently, Ivanov initiated a new project, Vostok, to create the first usable blockchain solution for scalable digital infrastructure, helping to expand global access to blockchain.