WAVES, a decentralized blockchain platform focusing on custom blockchain tokens operations, commenced its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) on April 12, and raised nearly $2 million in the first 24 hours itself. The ICO has so far raised over 5300 BTC (at the time of writing) and will run till May 31, 2016.

Less than a week into its ICO, WAVES announced the release of the testnet software, which will enable investors to participate in the development process by downloading the first iteration of the client and giving feedback to the team. The 2.0 system is designed to address several key issues in cryptocurrency, including ease of use, scalability and use of fiat tokens on the blockchain.

“Functionality is currently limited, but what we have seems to work well”, said WAVES founder Sasha Ivanov. “We’d like to invite everyone who is interested in our progress to help out by testing out what we’ve got so far and letting us know what they think.”

WAVES is based on the open source Scorex platform, developed by Alex Chepurnoy and financial services innovation company IOHK. WAVES clarified that there is no formal relationship between WAVES and IOHK.

Ivanov explained that although Scorex provides a good foundation to work, it is not production-ready on its own terms. Therefore, the team is building further layers on top of it to create the functionality that WAVES needs for developing a full crypto-ecosystem, that addresses the needs of both end-users and the finance industry.

WAVES said that a bonus of 10 percent on BTC invested will continue until the end of the month.