The Geocoin swap from their proof of work network has been completed with the support of Bittrex and Cryptopia exchanges. This highlights the uses for tokens beyond doing crowdsales; not to say we oppose that use case, but it hasn’t been the primary focus of the Ubiq EVM. There are at least 8 tokens on the network that have a fair market value with several more contracts for more less monetary use cases.

There have also been sizable developments within the EVM smart contract community to establish bridges between these different blockchains. We are monitoring these proposals closely to have the interoperability be available as soon as possible. With all this transactional volume and more utilization of the chain, we humbly request miners and pool operators to start signalling increases to the gas limit to allow for more transactions per block as more applications will use the public network for transactions. UbiqPool.io will initiate this by increasing its gas limit parameters for high traffic periods like airdrop blocks.

Governance

We are extremely excited to announce the Escher (ESCH) token airdrop, a tool for governance and framework for active participants to gain even more utility from the Ubiq network. How this works in practice is that UBQ holders must interact with the claim contract from an address by block 448,000, which is estimated to be mined April 25th. After this block, all registered addresses with a UBQ balance will receive 12 ESCH tokens for every 1 UBQ. Only active UBQ supply will receive ESCH, UBQ on exchanges will not be credited unless they interact with the public contract. As we’ve previously stated, we are not appealing to exchanges to participate or even list the token as trading is not the use case we envision for this system. The plan is to have 4 distributions a year, with the amount of ESCH distributed dropping each time.

Screenshot of https://ubiqsmart.com/escher

Further information and instructions will be released in a dedicated blog post this month. This is also a test claim contract that will end at block 423,300 to ensure users are correctly participating in the claim process, and work out any kinks within the contract/claim process.

Proposals and Development Funds

Currently, we have over 20 BTC in the development fund as well as 14,000 UBQ for the purpose of funding proposals and developments of the Ubiq platforms and other endeavours promoting decentralized technology. The governance system will be using an open architecture for creating proposals where anyone can suggest any use of the funds. However, the Ubiq page which lists proposals will have official proposals highlighted and anti-spam measures such as minimum participation requirements for visibility.

Anyone can still make their own display page of proposals to allow full viewing of all proposals…but spending of the NDF will still be at the discretion of the multisig key holders during the initial stages of governance. Ideally, we will have current service operators submit their own proposal to encourage public utilities like explorers other than Ubiqscan.io, so there will be rewards for three additional explorers as voted on by the community. There will also be general polls from the community on network changes like Proof of Stake or Masternodes, for example.

Shokku

As part of our core infrastructure, Shokku is a public framework of Go-Ubiq nodes that anyone can point their Dapp to for interfacing with the chain. This is similar to the framework that Ethereum’s Infura offers, which relayed over 7 million Ethereum worth of transactions in 2017. As an application developer, this is a useful service where you don’t have to run a node and handle the server costs of relaying transactions from your Dapp. This is a cost that the Ubiq development team is currently bearing with the intent to have it funded by the network development fund through official proposals. If other users would like to launch a competing service, we will be publishing the system to github.com/ubiq using an open source license (expect a blog post soon).

Sparrow and Twine Update

Sparrow is now available in the Chrome store for download. It’s the Ubiq fork of the popular web3 wallet Metamask. It serves the same functionality with both Chrome and Firefox, allowing for simple Dapp usage from directly within the browser. There is still some final fine-tuning required to prevent any cross communication issues with Metamask also being installed. Twine is still being tested to ensure a secure system for UBQ and token storage using multisig. We recently asked the community to create a logo for Twine and received a number of great contributions shown below.