It's been a few weeks since the last Badman ICOs issue but the wait has been well worth it. Issue 8 features UChain; an infrastructure blockchain specifically designed for the global sharing economy. The hype around this one is looking huge.

The Sharing Economy?

The sharing economy is a rapidly growing industry and over the last 5-10 years, the big players in the space have seen huge growth and adoption (think Airbnb, Quora and Uber as some examples). "Calling an Uber" has become synonymous with "calling a cab" in most major cities and this just goes some way to show how much potential this phenomenon still has to go. UChain aims to build an underlying protocol to integrate blockchain into the sharing economy, giving these organisations an easy and simple way to optimize their companies and bring them into the new tech age.

Imagine paying for your Uber using cryptocurrency, through a platform that holds the driver's identification transparently in an immutable database, letting you know exactly who is taking you home after your night out and solving one of the current issues that many people have with the service. Going further to this, smart contracts could be set up using GPS so that when you reach your destination, payment is taken automatically from your wallet and into the drivers. This is all just my speculation but it's easy to see some of the possible use cases and DApps that can be utilized through the UChain economy.

The UChain platform describes themselves as "The next generation distributed smart network blockchain for the sharing economy" and while this may seem complicated its actually a pretty simple concept. They are creating a DApp infrastructure platform similar to Ethereum and Neo although focussed exclusively on the sharing economy. Companies like Uber and Airbnb will undoubtedly be coming to the blockchain eventually and rather than using a general purpose platform like ETH, UChain thinks they will prefer a specialised platform that is easy to use and geared towards their business models; I think they are probably right. Aside from the current scaling issues, a DApp built on Ethereum would need a host of specific features that would need to be coded in solidity and it would be far easier and cost-effective to work with a specialised solution like UChain where all the specifics will be ready for them.

The Token Economy

UChain will be an ERC20 token when it hits exchanges but will be developing their own blockchain after main net launch (Q4 2018) based on the RCPA (Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm) and running 1000 transactions per second. This means that scaling should not be an issue, at least initially, and puts them ahead of most competitors.

The token economy feature two tokens; UCN and UCP. UCN will be the basic value unit used to pay for services through the platform or earned by "sharing" idle resources. UCP can be obtained by staking UCN and is described in the whitepaper as "UCN with voting power". UCP will be non-exchangeable or tradable but will generate a passive income of UCN while it is held, giving an incentive to hold the token and reduce volatility. UChain will also be developing their own token standard, URC-1 - similar to NEO's NEP5 or ETH's ERC20 tokens.

The Blockchain

As well as featuring a trustless peer to peer economy, UChain is developing a "User Credit Passport" - a record of all transactions stored securely for each user of the platform. The data will be accessible only by the data owner by using a private key and will be split up and distributed across nodes on the network. This means that if any node was compromised, the data would be unreadable and its integrity left intact. This passport will be sharable with service providers and can be used as identification and to create a level of trust between both parties.

UChain is being developed by the people behind U-Bicycle, a successful bike sharing business based between China and Canada and operating in 3 other countries. U-Bicycle already has 300+ employees and over half a million bikes that are rented to 30 million users on a daily basis. Although UChain was only founded in September 2017, it has an impressive team of developers with a strong background in the sharing economy backed up by some blockchain and financial services based heavy hitters on the advisory board.

The roadmap lists a main net launch in Q3 2018 followed by UChain's first DApp for U-Bicycle in Q1 2019.

Summary

UChain is shaping up to be one of my favourite projects over the coming months and ill be following up this article with a "Badman Review" as soon as possible.

To find out more about the project check out the website, the telegram group or the ANN Thread. The whitepaper is one of the best I have seen and is definitely worth a read as well. The Public sale has been cancelled because the project raised enough funds during the private sale but you can get access to UCN by participating in the replacement bounty program and helping to promote the project, you can find out about it here and on telegram. Alternatively, keep an eye out for it hitting the exchanges sometime in Q3/Q4.

Thanks for reading, to stay up to date. Follow me to check out my blog and read more like this

Badman Crypto (Phil Stephenson)

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ETH: 0xea5924b2a0b977604c9dd02fd4723cf92767a083
NEO: AWoF9Jaj4UchBG9iTkL54NjM6UgoX9yTpW