Hi everyone, we are starting a series of posts on what is going on with Universa development; this post highlights the most exciting things that happened in January.

In case you didn’t know, the New Year holidays in the former Soviet countries are two weeks in early January when nothing and no one works. For the second year in a row, we decide to skip the major break and concentrate on business development instead, while most people are recovering after the New Year celebrations.

China

This is why we flew to China as soon as January 6, to attend the Global FinTech Innovation Summit, hosted by the Department of Commerce of Hainan Province and China’s biggest financial companies.

Universa in China

We used Global FinTech Innovation Summit to explain why the country needs to define digital assets and smart contracts to proceed with digital transformation and to identify the role of blockchain technology in the digital world of the future. We also agreed on a partnership to promote our technology in China and held more than 20 negotiations with leading companies and foundations.

China+India+Germany+Israel+Russia+USA = Global Fintech

Jim Rogers believes in blockchain

We had a separate discussion with the great Jim Rogers (Quantum Fund and Soros Fund cofounder) about the future of blockchain technology and the place of blockchain in the robotic world of the future, and it turned out our views are quite close — we both believe that this technology is the basis for the digital world of tomorrow.

Blockchain will lead the Digital Transformation

Our trip to China culminated with the final transition of all communications with the Chinese party from email to Wechat. Now I have to learn Chinese to make it easier to communicate with the Celestial Empire.

Bahrain

The trip to Bahrain included negotiations with FinTechBay, the Central Bank of Bahrain, E-government Authority, and a number of local financial companies that need blockchain technology to exchange payments in digital assets.

As a result of these negotiations, we agreed to open a local office that will work with the digital assets and cooperate with the Bahrain government on various issues related to digital transformation of legacy processes.

NDA is in place, the work has started :)

Bahrain FinTechBay + Universa = Universa Middle East Unit

Bahrain E-government meets Universa

Golden Piramid at Central Bank of Bahrain

United Arab Emirates

From Bahrain, our tour of the Middle East continued to other nearby countries. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, meetings and negotiations covering Smart Cities, financial services, tokenization of oil and real estate. United Arab Emirates have advanced far beyond many other countries in terms of digital transformation, even border crossing no longer requires human involvement — just a camera with face recognition software and a passport scanner, and you are free to go in three seconds.

During the negotiations we identified several niches that require ultra-fast blockchain, signed MoU/NDA; hopefully, we will have something to show by summertime :)

Presidential Palace of Abu Dhabi

Saudi Arabia

In Saudi Arabia, we held negotiations with the banking industry regarding introduction of interbank payments based on Universa Blockchain. Currently working on an offer, and a prototype solution will be demonstrated in March.

I also gave a big interview to Shahamh TV channel about the future of the digital economy, can be, smart contracts and smart robots.

Russia

In the second half of January we had a lot of fruitful work with the largest Russian companies. Set a funny record last week — 5 NDAs in a day :)

I made it to Russia’s Top 100 People in Digital rating: https://medium.com/universablockchain/russias-top-100-people-in-digital-af0ebf508f77

An article published with my forecasts: https://www.crypto-news.in/guest-stories/glance-future-3-forecasts-cryptocurrency-market/

https://coinspot.io/analysis/tri-prognoza-dlya-rynka-kriptovalyut-ot-aleksandra-borodicha-ceo-rossijskoj-blokchejn-kompanii-universa-io/

The 2018 Report

Here is our team’s progress report for 2018, in case you missed it.

Russian version:

https://medium.com/…/с-новым-u-годом-2018-вкратце-a84268f82…

English version:

https://medium.com/u…/happy-u-year-2018-summary-5955deaaf371

Work on Universa Blockchain

Node

• Designed a new execution system for v4 node — U8.

• Developed a backbone for U8 multi-platform executable system: C++ <-> Javascript (ES2018, based on V8 library).

• Asynchronous execution with direct access from event sources in JS (without interim event bus)

• Timer subsystem with JS compatibility layer

• Implementation of ES import / common JS require dependencies

• Support for user scripts with aync main()

• C++-based service functions not implemented in V8 (text encodings, base64, etc.)

• Support for multi-platform builds and downloads of precompiled libraries for various pfms

• Designed universal asynchronous input/output system (asynchronous channels)

• Selected a library for handling asynchronous transactions, checking Asio C++, libevent, Linux AIO API, libuv

• Designed and developed IOHandle asynchronous input-output class and namespace asyncio methods

• API methods for asynchronous file and directory handling:

• API methods for методы IOHandle class: asynchronous file opening, writing, reading, closing

• API methods for file class: asynchronous reading of the file as a whole, writing the file as a whole, reading part of the file, deleting files

• implemented delayed callback initialization (open()->then() type construct)

• Doxygen documentation

• Testing asynchronous work with TCP and UDP sockets

• Boss serialization

• Automatic salting for unsigned contracts

• UMI: error corrections, adding Multimap to the list of linkable types

• u4: refined basic classes

• sign/verify, encrypt/decrypt methods for private/public keys

• libtomcrypt library modified for compatibility with our keys

• script for automatically downloading compiled libraries from FTP when rebuilding the project

• C++-based HashId

• digest for KeyAddress

• Safe58 for KeyAddress

WEB 2.*/3.*

• Hypertoken purchasing

• Nicknames and user names in chats instead of anonymous users

• Ability to send tokens without confirmation from the receiving party

• Support for multi-keys for transactions with tokens

Libraries and APIs

• JS API

• fixed contact import

• fixed key address computation in case of zero bytes in crc32 (web 1, web 2)

• boss.js build, documentation

• minicrypto.js 3 builds, documentation

• expanded helpers for split/join

URS/unicashier:

• Unicashier:

• Support for Syslog in logs (and multi-line logs)

• Updated CoinMarketCap API key configuration (due to change of API used to query exchange rates for tokens/UTNP/Ethereum, and later due to exhaustion of API key resources)

• Urgent upgrade of the geth pool to version 1.21 (due to Ethereum Constantinople plans put in place first, then canceled)

• 28th UTNP issue

Documentation

• Article: https://kb.universa.io/web_client%3A_utn%2Futnp_swap/143

• Updated the KB on notary contracts (added methods to verify compliance for data attached to a notary contract): https://kb.universa.io/contracts_service/16#notary-type-contract.

We are always happy to answer your questions in the Telegram channel — t.me/uplatform (EN) and t.me/universa (RU).

Follow the news in t.me/UniversaNews (EN) and t.me/UniversaNewsRu(RU).

Sincerely your Paranoid CEO, Alexander Borodich