Coin review of Universa blockchain protocol, the ICO, Universa Smart Money, & UTN / UNTP tokens. Here’s a closer look at the project led by Alexander Borodich & John McAfee as an advisor.
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Number 8: What is Universa?
An oversimplified description of the Universa Blockchain Protocol would be a new generation form of blockchain technology that enables smart contracts through a decentralized notary cloud certifying each transaction. If you were to take a look at the project’s whitepaper, however, you’d soon realize that it’s much more. The Universa Platform wasn’t initially developed as a cryptocurrency, but rather as a distributed system for the execution of smart contracts. As such, Universa doesn’t depend on mining. This is a major advantage particularly in terms of the speed and cost of processing operations. The platform is designed to improve on Bitcoin's and Ethereum's technologies using a contract execution machine and a distributed state ledger. Its features focus on business adoption while also placing a greater emphasis on contractual agreement and tokenization.
Number 7: Why Was Universa Created?
Universa can be seen as a possible fix to the weak spots of major blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin. The main problems that it aims to deal with refer to transaction cost, speed and scalability. The innovative aspect is the broad potential use of its blockchain technology which, unlike most of its blockchain competitors, isn’t reliant on cryptocurrency. One growing concern that the project hopes to take out of the equation is blockchain bloating. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of blockchain bloating, all you need to know is that it’s essentially a data storage issue. The increasing number of transactions means that more data is circulated and therefore needs to be actively stored. This means that block sizes must increase in order to keep up with the all the transactions. Bloating takes place when transactions fill blocks to capacity. It’s a growing problem for blockchain heavyweights (particularly Bitcoin), as it can lead to an increase in fees and slower synchronization times between the network and a desktop wallet client. Universa aims to fix this bloating issue through side-chains and its Notary Cloud.
Number 6: How Does Universa Work?
Without delving too deep into the technical aspect of things, there's a few key aspects worth mentioning that may shed some light on how the entire Universa platform works. The Universa Blockchain is comprised of core nodes that must be authorized and licensed by the Universa Corporation. They're owned and operated by Universa partners, and guarantee speed, availability and security. Since there isn’t any mining involved, the participating nodes are rewarded via transaction fees for the validation and execution of contracts. The entire network is designed around the concept of transaction, around contracts and their execution. Universa doesn’t build a single full ledger by stacking blocks. Instead, Universa clients apply each set of changes into a separate contract chain (known as a C-Chain) to the previous state with the outcome being vectorized and hashed. According to Universa’s whitepaper, with each action that is to be performed, all nodes receive the present state of the contract and the source of the operation that’s about to be performed. Both state and source are verified by hash-sum to be identical to the stored current state in the contract’s side-chain. The operation is applied and a new state is hashed, which is agreed upon by 90% consensus. After a short period of time, which is currently set at 10 days, nodes are free to discard the contract as well as the state and only need to retain the hashes. Everything else, including transaction records, digital signatures and contract sources can be verified in the associated Notary Cloud, which is separate from the blockchain. This makes Universa a much leaner platform. The size of the blockchain is reduced and the transaction speeds are greatly improved.
Number 5: How Does Universa’s Proof-Of-State Mechanism Work?
Not to be confused with Proof-Of-Stake, which I’ve covered in a previous video, Universa uses a Proof-Of-State system. Trusted actors verify any change in state, which is then approved by consensus extremely fast; ten milliseconds or less. Since each contract maintains its own chain of state, it can perform actions asynchronously without impacting the others. The blockchain itself is formed by a direct acyclic graph, also known as DAG technology. DAG represents the combined changes of state taking place. There's growing support for DAG, arguing that its technological potential may eventually replace the blockchain at some point in the future. Its name might sound complex, but the concept behind DAG is rather simple. It ensures that the same functions are being executed as those within a blockchain, but through a different method. Transactions are not grouped into blocks. Instead, each new transaction needs to confirm one or more previous transactions. Thus, the transactions create a hierarchy, with each of them being confirmed and unchanged. Think of it like this: you’re a teacher and you have hundreds of students. When the time comes for you to grade their papers, you’ll have a lot of work to do. Instead of grading all the papers yourself, you can have the students grade each other’s paper, and you only need to quickly check that they're doing it fairly and correctly.
Number 4: How Does Universa Achieve “Smarter” Contracts?
Without getting too technical, it’s essential to remember that a smart contract within Universa is just executable script data stored in tree structures. Information is stored in a key-value format, with each key representing a global unique address and a value that can be either a fixed value, dynamically executing scripts, binary executable logic or even references to other trees and addresses. As a whole, the tree hierarchy creates a Smart Contract Chain, with contracts that reference and confirm one another. If this sounds familiar, it’s mainly because it’s reflective of the same DAG technology that I discussed earlier. The blockchain doesn’t store the body of the contract, but rather, only its current status. Universa Smart Contracts have wide applicability in real, day-to-day business and can be used for programming a wide variety of applications.
Number 3: What Can I Use Universa For?
Universa is built in such a way that it supports the tokenization of everything from gym membership cards, vouchers, and gift cards, to bus tickets, taxi fares, boarding passes, and even passports! A token can be created to represent the smart key or deed to your house or car. The wide applicability of its smart contracts is meant to facilitate the transition of businesses and individuals into the realm of e-commerce. While other platforms struggle with pegging a particular amount of money to a smart contract for the required currency of a particular business transaction, Universa boasts the invention of “smart money.” It allows for the creation of currency and the exchange of new or existing currencies through the contract.
Number 2: What Are the Advantages of Using Universa?
UTN (Universa's native token) has a ton of advantages that become obvious even to those who aren't crypto-inclined, especially when compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum. Compared to Bitcoin, it's 1,000 times faster & 100 times cheaper, all the while offering a fixed price and no bloating. It’s also 60 times faster than Ethereum. When it comes to scalability, Universa’s nodes allow 20,000 transactions per second, while Ethereum allows only 15 and Bitcoin allows only 3 -6. The 90% consensus algorithm ensures a high level of trust with a low risk of fraud. Much of the network’s increased performance is due to the absence of mining and the design of their protocols and smart contracts.
Number 1: Who is Behind Universa?
Time will only tell if Universa can make good on all its ambitious objectives, or if it'll face extreme resistance from its competitors. The ICO was held between October 28th till December 9th, 2017 and the team raised over $28.5 million. ERC20 tokens were distributed and the price of a UTN token was placed at one cent each. Trust, confidence, and faith in the project is largely due to the man behind it: Alexander Borodich. As Universa’s CEO, Borodich has made his mark as a venture investor, digital media strategist and serial entrepreneur. Although not necessarily a major international personality, he’s widely known in the Russian-speaking community with an impressive track record. In 2016, Russia’s Business Angels Association recognized him as the country’s “business angel of the year.” Universa’s CTO, Sergey Chernov, has more than 25 years of experience in development; 17 of them in cryptography. Art director Alex Dovnar has 10 years of experience as an art director and 20 years of experience in digital and print design. With 12 lead developers, 9 mobile developers, 8 QA managers, 5 user interface & user experience specialists, and 3 project managers, Borodich & his team plan on paving the road for a complete blockchain revolution!
