There are many hurdles to overcome when operating a decentralized smart contract platform. One of the most significant and frequently overlooked obstacles is the development of a flourishing and vibrant community that embraces the project and its tenets. While the downturn in the cryptocurrency markets has affected every project in many areas, the Ubiq community has shown continued interest in the project and is eager to assist where necessary. This quarterly report is evidence of that.

This quarterly report was written and edited by several members of the Ubiq community, using the guidance and input from the Ubiq developers and marketing staff. Specifically, we would like to thank Alex Sterk for his tireless efforts in producing the previous quarterly reports, and recommend new readers to review those reports thoroughly. Alex continues his work with the project, but has delegated the more mundane process of reporting to willing community members. The focus of his effort is needed elsewhere. From this report onward, members of the Ubiq community will publish the reports under the advisement of Alex and the core development team.

As will be detailed further in this report, there have been significant developments with the Ubiq platform: development continues under the guidance received from community governance; we are making headway with marketing and advertisement; and our social media continues to assist in disseminating news with an eye towards attracting new community members. Our goal is to further the functionality and security of the already active Ubiq ecosystem, using the community governance model to light the way forward.

With that being said, on to the report!

Exec Summary (TL:DR)

Corrective Cycle in the cryptocurrency markets has not affected the stability of the Ubiq network hash rate.

Ubiq ‘full node’ project has increased the number of full nodes syncing to the Ubiq network. Currently there are 1392 nodes worldwide.

Ubiq network benchmarked against Ethereum by whiteblock.io. This found that Ubiq has a 2x increase in transaction throughput (at a 40 million block gas limit) and a 90% lower uncle rate (at a 80 million block gas limit) when compared against Ethereum.

Escher Airdrops concluded successfully with airdrop #1, having an impressive 52.5% participation rate of all UBQ supply, and the #2 airdrop coming in at over 31% participation.

UIP1 is the first proposal the Ubiq community voted on, with 56.4% of the available Escher participating, and 95.7% of the voters signalling a ‘yes’ vote to perform hard-fork upgrade and change the hashing algorithm.

UIP2 proposal to sell BTC forks into more useful assets, has been discussed by the community and will be going live in September.

Funds held for NDF/Marketing has been updated and will continue to be updated in each quarterly report.

Spectrum v3 has been completely re-written and optimised for Ubiqscan, which increases the speed of the interface substantially, provides much more block/transaction information, and has far greater functionality which includes better contract support. This will also be fully open sourced for other teams to use.

Gubiq 1.5.14 update released with several key updates and fixes.

Ubiqpool.io has been revamped in both the front and backend to add several key features. Fees have also been increased from 0.75% to 1% to help distribute the hashrate.

New community mining pool Ubiqminers.com is live. This pool is written in completely new mining code (C# / Dotnet Core), which improves the overall network security, by providing diversity in coding languages across all the pools. This pool is also running at a 0% fee, to help persuade people to spread the hash around.

Anorak.Tech, has joined the Ubiq ecosystem through its mining pool that uses its own implementation of the open Ethereum pool. This pool has a system which penalizes “pool hoppers”.

Alex Sterk has been extremely busy attending several meetings and conferences. He represented Ubiq on the Digital Finance Institute Panel, attended Edcon, Consensus and Dogecon, as well as recording with the Crypto101 and Ledger Status podcasts.

Ubiq now has a USD trading pair live on Einstein Exchange. This integration allows for any exchange using the Alphapoint trade engine to instantly add Ubiq trading with liquidity sharing to other connected exchanges

The Ubiq network has been integrated into the Bisq & ERC20 decentralized exchanges, which permit the direct trading of Ubiq network assets via distributed peer-to-peer technology.

Ubiq featured on the front page of new Canadian crypto asset trading platform, catalx.io.

Ubiq network token Geocoin has provided a significant update on development progress, with one of the new key features being the Proof-of-Location (PoL) interface.

There is now a supplementary guide which expands on the previous Raspberry Pi project. This guide is aimed at getting other Single Board Computers (SCBs) running a full node.

Community member Aaron has just launched a new website for crypto based philanthropy. This site has already benefited many people and can be followed at https://www.cryptanthropy.com.

Network Activity / Stats / Upgrades

Transaction Activity and Network Hash

For those that are not aware, network statistics are available via the https://ubiq.darcr.us website. This is kindly hosted and administrated by @sigwo from the Darcrus team.

Despite the crypto markets continuing through a corrective cycle, network hash rate has been remarkably resilient, with loyal miners continuing to support and secure the Ubiq network. We will be publishing some interesting statistics around this in the coming weeks.

Full node geographical distribution

Community member Matt recently published the Ubiq full node project, using Raspberry Pi hardware. Below are some statistics (as of 23, August 2018) for the distribution of full nodes.

1392 nodes currently syncing to the Ubiq network worldwide

*Please note that geographical locations with 5 nodes or less are included under ‘others’

Running a full node supports the network and helps transactions propagate more effectively. More details around the ‘Raspberry Pi’ project can be found within the ‘community projects’ section’.

Whiteblock Report

During a recent conference we attended (EDCON), a company called Whiteblock (whiteblock.io) reached out to us.

Whiteblock provides one of the industry’s first independent Blockchain Testing-as-a-Service (BTaaS) benchmarks, where they use a proprietary toolset to analyze the performance of client blockchains, measuring transactional throughput and analyzing fault tolerance.

We discussed at length the design choices we made with the Ubiq network and the improvements we felt enhanced the characteristics of our blockchain over the Ethereum network. With great enthusiasm, we agreed on being the first network tested. The results (https://whiteblock.io/library/ubiq-report.pdf) confirmed our main assumption about increasing the gas limit, to allow the same throughput for the 6x longer blocks then ETH, we can process 6x as many transactions per block.

Ubiq transaction benchmark and comparison against Ethereum

The benchmarking was very useful in assessing the capability of the Ubiq network. Overall it was found that, on average, Ubiq has a 2x increase in transaction throughput per second compared with Ethereum (at a 40 million block gas limit) and a 90% lower uncle rate (at a 80 million block gas limit).

The analysis provided by Whiteblock also discovered a potential bottleneck when under high network latency. This is not currently an issue and allows the core development team to proactively address this in a future update.

Governance Updates

Ubiq Community meeting — 20 March, 2018 / 23 April, 2018

As our new governance system rolled out we decided to host a couple of community meetings in March and April. A replay of these meetings can be found in the links below:

March Meeting

April Meeting

Prior to these meetings, the community engaged in providing a set of questions for the team to run through. It is our intention to run further sessions again in the near future. If you would like to have your questions heard, then feel free to stop by the discord and share your views, ideas, and questions.

Escher (ESCH) Airdrops

As has been discussed on previous blog posts (link here), Escher is designed to act as the network’s protocol token, giving active Ubiq holders the ability to signal and claim Escher over a series of airdrops. Each claim period provides claimants with a diminishing ratio of ESCH granted per UBQ, sent to the address that has signalled.

Currently the main use for this token is to allow airdrop participants the ability to vote on Ubiq Improvement Proposals (UIP), via our governance system.

At the time of writing this, Airdrops #1 and #2 have been completed. The first airdrop had an immensely impressive 52.5% participation of the total UBQ supply, with the second airdrop claim coming in at over 31% participation.

Airdrop #1 (left) and Airdrop #2 (right)

The next Airdrop is planned for October (block 624,600) and will distribute Escher at a ratio of 3:1 for each UBQ in an account that is signalling for the airdrop. Please stay tuned to our social media pages for airdrop reminders. For a full video guide on how to signal for future airdrops please see the following guides for Pyrus and Fusion.

You can find the new Escher interface at https://ubiqsmart.com/escher with additional polls and proposals being added from our GitHub (https://github.com/ubiq/UIPs). Currently anyone can create a proposal in GitHub for consideration, however a more formal system is currently being developed.

We anticipated having a few polls to test some of the submission functionality for Ubiq voting prior to release. However, preliminary test results provided us sufficient confidence to forgo additional testing and immediately implement our governance model.

The voting process is similar to claiming Escher: Users signal from their Escher wallet address and follow the directions provided to complete and submit their vote. If anyone requires help in completing the voting process then we strongly recommend joining the Ubiq Discord where one of our moderators or a friendly member of the community can assist you.

UIP1

Ubiq Improvement Proposal 1 or UIP1 (link here) was submitted to address concerns around proof of work mining and Ubiq’s exposure to the rental marketplace for Ethash mining. This proposal outlined a work request for the core developers to test and implement a new mining algorithm.

Due to the time sensitive nature of this pressing issue, the vote was open for a two week period. Participation was high, with 56.4% of claimed Escher signalling in the vote.

Participation rate for voting on UIP1

During the voting period, over 95% of the participants opted to change the algorithm. This vote provided sufficient notice of the community’s sentiment, and justified the allocation of development resources in furtherance of this goal.

Clear community direction signalled for changing the algo in UIP1

The focus of the algo change has been on modifying the Keccak-256 and Keccak-512 algorithms used in Ethash with other standardized and secure hashing algorithms.

The Ubiq development team is currently working on the testing and implementation phase of UIP1, and when completed will then be required to perform a hard-fork upgrade in the blockchain. The hard-fork is necessary since we are going to change fundamental part of the gubiq code.

Summary of the work currently being undertaken by the core development team:

• Test and implement a hard-fork from the current one towards the new algorithm

• Test that the client works with the new algorithm

• Fork some GitHub repositories of Ethash mining software to adapt them to the new algorithm

• Obtain hashing and verification benchmark numbers with the new algorithm

• Fork the Gubiq repository with code that works using the new algorithm

Since the vote, the core developers have been working hard at coding the new algo. There are working implementations in Golang, C++ and Python. The use of different programming languages simplifies the development of closed-source Proof of Work (mining) clients. We have also been testing in a series of private nets, to ensure a smooth upgrade to the network.

To date, we are not aware of any Ethash based blockchain implementing a complete algorithm swap. With this in mind, the Ubiq team is committed to performing the necessary work to complete the algorithm swap as smoothly as possible. We anticipate that the required development and coding will be performed within a reasonable period of time, taking into consideration the scope and breadth of code that requires revision. Please stay tuned to Ubiq’s social media and GitHub for status updates.

UIP2

Recently the community have been collecting feedback and discussing UIP2 on GitHub (https://github.com/ubiq/UIPs/issues/2) and through our discord server.

The NDF and Marketing fund has accumulated BTC and UBQ via donations from the community, contributions from APX and purchases of products such as Ledger and Trezor via affiliate links. The BTC that has accumulated over time has had the benefit of “dividends” in the form of forks (BCH & BTG as examples).

As it is unlikely these assets will play a huge role in the utilization of the NDF or marketing fund, UIP2 has been designed to simplify the funds by selling them into more useful assets.

Now that community feedback on the proposal has been gathered, we are now moving ahead with a vote for UIP2 which is likely to begin in September and will run for a period of approximately two weeks.

NDF and Marketing Fund Update

Current Balance:

Fund updates will be reported in each quarterly report with updated balances.

Development Updates

Ubiqscan.io block explorer re-write (Spectrum)

As the Ubiq ecosystem has developed, additional demand has been placed on the usage of existing block explorers, as more users utilize the network the limitations of the old codebase were rapidly being tested. Ubiq has also been approached by Griff Green (from GivETH), a well-known member of the Ethereum community, to collaborate on a new open-source block explorer.

With this in mind our developers have completely re-written the existing code that Ubiqscan is built on, with scalability in mind. The upcoming v3 release of spectrum increases the speed of the interface substantially, provides much more block/transaction information, and has far greater functionality which includes better contract support.

Core Developer Luke Williams sharing a sneak preview of Spectrum v3

Griff has been running a series of YouTube streams, pulling together the development communities of Ubiq, POA network, MyEtherWallet and RSK, to collaborate on the creation of an Open Source Block Explorer.

Ubiq Core Developer Luke Williams on a recent live stream discussing the block explorer project.

The spectrum re-write is fully open source code for the other teams to use, and Luke will be talking about this on an upcoming ‘Open Source Block Explorer’ stream.

Shokku

Aldo has also been involved in the Open Source Block Explorer project and has attended several key meetings to discuss Shokku.

Ubiq Core Developer Aldo Borrero on a recent live stream discussing Shokku.

We are planning a separate blog post in the near future, for an update around the recent developments relating to Shokku.

Gubiq 1.5.14 released

Since the last quarterly there has been a new release of the Gubiq codebase. The update contained the following changes:

• Update Bootnodes

• Fix Ledger hardware wallet support.

• Remove redundant storage of transactions and receipts. This will perform a one time “Deduplicating database entries” routine on start-up of this version.

• Various removals of unused code and general clean ups

• Fix building with Go >= 1.7

All of the provided binaries are also built using the latest Go 1.10.1+.

This will likely be the last Gubiq update before a hard fork upgrade to change the Proof of Work algorithm as detailed in UIP1.

PoW / Pool Updates

UBIQPOOL.IO Revamp

Currently, most of Ubiq’s mining pools use the open Ethereum pool tool designed by user Sammy007 on GitHub. From there, each pool forks the tool to adapt it to its characteristics, through personalization and the addition of new functions. This is the case of Ubiqpool.io, which has been revamped both in the frontend and the backend, updating the interface with a new friendly theme; and adding some features, among which are:

• Notification through email of offline miners.

• Variable payment cap (from 1 UBQ up to 50 UBQ).

• UBQ / BTC and UBQ / USD real-time exchange rate.

Open Ethereum Pool interface (Top) and the new revamped Ubiqpool.io site

Currently, these new features are enabled in the US and EU nodes. The backup nodes US2 and EU2 do not have these features enabled just in case problems arise. Additionally, the commission has increased from 0.75% to 1% to help distribute the hashrate to other mining pools, which is always a topic of discussion for security reasons.

UBIQMINERS.COM — New Community mining pool

As part of our efforts to decentralize Ubiq’s mining, community member Erik van Rijn has created a new mining pool (https://ubiqminers.com). As all of the pre-existing pools are all running on open-Ethereum pool code, Erik decided to write a completely new mining code in C#/Dotnet Core, which will have the additional benefit of improved network security. Erik will be publishing the code to GitHub after the first 1024 blocks are found to ensure a stable release.

Ubiqminers.com stats page

The pool is multi-platform and can run on Windows, Linux, OSX and has full stratum v2 support, which provides much more efficient mining specs and boasts full geographical load balancing, connecting you to the nearest mining node (nodes in Europe, US and East-Asia/Pacific).

Please note that ubiqminers.com is running at a 0% fee, to help persuade people to spread the hash around.

For full details on the launch please check out the Reddit post here.

ANORAK.TECH POOL

One of the sites with the largest AMD card ROM databases, and resources for modifying them, Anorak.Tech, has joined the Ubiq ecosystem through its mining pool that uses its own implementation of the open Ethereum pool. This pool is based in Germany and uses the PPLNS payment system, which is based on rounds and has an entry window of several hours.

The main advantage of this system is oriented to gratify the loyal miners and penalize the “pool hoppers”, because if a miner enters the pool with a large hashrate and quickly jumps to another pool, he will not be rewarded the same way that miners would who were mining well before the block was found. More features of this pool are that it pays the transaction fees (txs) included in the mined blocks as well as it includes ports with different difficulties to provide stability for small miners. The pools mining fee is currently 0.5% and can be found at: https://ubiq.anorak.tech.

NOTICE — Pool operators are encouraged to join the Pool Operator’s channel in the Ubiq discord. It is important for you to keep updated on UIP1 developments and status updates. Pool operators may (and should) request listing of their pools on the Ubiq website and Ubiq social media sites via Ubiq Discord as well.

Advertising / Marketing Updates

Digital Finance Institute panel — Toronto

On the 5th of March, community manager and Ubiq Technology CEO, Alex Sterk, spoke on the Digital Finance Institute Panel at their Blockchain for Business annual event (http://www.blockchainforbiz.org).

This event is Canada’s premiere Blockchain conference on the latest developments and trends in the Blockchain space. The conference was attended by several member of the Canadian government, the banking industry and large global businesses.

The networking session afterward gave Alex a chance to meet with some of the top leaders in government, business and law enforcement, increasing awareness of the Ubiq network and its potential use-cases.

EDCON — Toronto

On May 3rd to 5th, Alex and Luke attended EDCON, the annual Ethereum Developer conference in Toronto, Canada. This provided an excellent opportunity to raise the profile of Ubiq within the Ethereum community, and led to several discussions around bridging between the Ethereum and Ubiq networks to allow interoperability of tokens and dApps.

As mentioned earlier in the report Whiteblock also approached Ubiq at this conference to benchmark the Ubiq Network using their BTaaS service.

Griff Green was also in attendance, hosting a live ‘Open Source Block Explorer NOW’ meeting, streamed live on YouTube (be warned, some sound issues at the beginning).

Alex discussing the Open Source Block Explorer project with prominent Ethereum community member Griff Green from GivETH

Consensus 2018 — NYC

On May 14th-16th, Alex attended the Annual Consensus Blockchain event in NYC, where over 4000 Blockchain experts and enthusiasts attended.

Alex Sterk ‘forking’ the Decred team

Dogecon — Vancouver

Ubiq was a main sponsor of the 2018 Dogecon event in Vancouver on the 21st — 24th of June, and was attended by Alex.

Dogecon 2018 with the Ubiqsmart logo in the background

Although Dogecon has a light hearted appearance, it was attended by several well-known Blockchain developers. It was a fantastic opportunity to network and spread awareness of the Ubiq platform.

Other Podcasts, Reviews and News articles

In addition to the attended conferences, there have been several Podcasts published with Alex representing Ubiq. There have also been a number of independent news releases and reviews. Links can be found below:

• Crypto101 podcast

• Interview with Ledger Status

• Blockchain review — Ubiq coins video

Financial Activity Updates

Einstein Exchange list UBQ / USD pair

It was one year ago that we met with the founding team of Einstein Capital and had some of the most memorable interactions and consultations that resulted in the formations of the fastest growing Canadian exchange to date.

Their experience in traditional finance ecosystems allowed them to build one of the most feature-rich bridges for the cryptocurrency ecosystem. We are proud to have hit a major milestone in this relationship with UBQ trading on their exchange with a USD pairing.

UBQUSD Trading available via https://einstein.exchange

This integration allows for an exchange using the Alphapoint trade engine to instantly add Ubiq trading with liquidity sharing to other connected exchanges. We expect great things from their business model and encourage everyone to sign up today.

Bisq & ERC20 Exchange DEX list Ubiq & Tokens

The Ubiq network has been integrated into the Bisq & ERC20 decentralized exchanges. Decentralized exchanges permit the direct trading of Ubiq network assets via distributed peer-to-peer technology. This is a significant development, as Ubiq’s addition to decentralized exchanges provides an exchange mechanism for any token project seeking economic opportunities in the crypto-space.

Bittrex partnership with catalx.io

Recently, Bittrex collaborated with catalx.io, a new Canadian crypto asset trading platform, which is currently in beta release.

We are excited to announce that Ubiq will be one of the traded assets on this new exchange, and are even featured on the front page of the website with a number of other very large crypto coins.

Ubiq logo displayed with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin and Dash.

Token Activity / Updates

All future quarterly reports will have a section dedicated to the tokens currently running on the Ubiq platform, as part of our commitment to promote the overall use of the ecosystem and to provide exposure to the teams that have decided to work with us.

Ubiq and it’s tokens, with market caps

As this idea was thought about relatively close to the deadline for this report, there was not enough time for all of the teams to provide an update. In future reports we will give the teams enough time to comment.

GEO Update

Geocoin have provided the following development updates:

• Migration to a new optimized server has been completed

• New partnership announced with KryptoTech team, for their assistance with setting up our wallet backend

• Developed some concurrency controls

• Optimized the geojson payload by 93%

• Added near real-time data updates

• Developed a new Proof-of-Location (PoL) GEO Drops interface where users can pan and zoom into their local area and drop a magnet (https://geocoin.cash/pol/)

This magnet will attract GEO to nearby places. We have showcased the recent developments with another GeoCoin Demo Video.

Also we’ve been sending out some more of our physical trackable GeoCoins to members of the geocaching.com community to help expand our reach into that existing platform of millions of users/caches worldwide.

• Starting dropping hundreds of new PoL GEO to help pre-seed the map for users interested in collecting GEO once we launch. This is also adding to our Circulating Supply.

• Updated our promo website and Bitcointalk OP to reflect the Ubiq Network info for new users in the community

We recommend community members subscribe to the GeoCoin YouTube account, follow their Twitter (https://twitter.com/geo_coin), and join the Ubiq discord to keep up to date with any development progress.

Community projects

Raspberry Pi / SBC project

In April, community member Matt produced a guide on setting up a Ubiq node based on Raspberry Pi technology (link here). The aim of this project was to allow any Ubiq platform user, irrespective of technical knowledge, the ability to run a full node, which helps transactions propagate throughout the network. Since this guide was posted we have had a large increase in the number of full Ubiq nodes running.

Matt has recently written a supplementary guide, which is aimed at getting other Single Board Computers (SCBs) running a full node. Again the guide is a step by step process that any user can follow.

Cryptanthropy

Community member Aaron has just launched a new website for crypto based philanthropy at https://www.cryptanthropy.com.

What actually started as light hearted twitter talk soon turned into real action, when community member and popular Twitter personality Sicarious and an anonymous crypto enthusiast collectively donated $1900 CAD.

Initial reply, followed by Sicarious offering to donate to the cause.

Aaron then turned his words into action, by purchasing groceries, gas, toys, books and various school supplies for the most needy in his community. Below are some of the pictures taken of the recipients.

Some of the beneficiaries of Cryptanthropy

Since then core developer Luke Williams has donated 1000 Ubiq to cryptanthropy, setting Aaron up to do more community work in the near future.

Donation addresses can be found at: https://www.cryptanthropy.com/donate/

Also worth noting, Erik’s new pool (ubiqminers.com) is planning to add an opt-in option for donating a percentage of mined coins to cryptanthropy.

Final Note

Community is a central focus of the Ubiq project. It is essential to its success. As the project has matured, the community has now grown to a point where it has become an integral part of development, marketing, and decision making. The 2018 bear market has not had a negative impact on Ubiq.

As the Quarterly demonstrates, the project grew and has continued to move forward in being a viable decentralized blockchain platform. With the advancement of governance in Escher and the ESCH token, we as a community will be able to even further differentiate ourselves from the other Smart Contract platforms.

The next Quarterly will provide proposals that will be voted on by ESCH token holders as Ubiq propels itself forward in building out its infrastructure, seeks marketing opportunities, and provides bounties for developers to contribute to aspects of the projects.

The Ubiq community has risen to support its core developers and we are excited to be an integral part of the project’s ascension in the decentralized blockchain space.