To kick off this new week of articles we’re looking at a project that focuses on publishing online content. Today I’ll be talking about U Network, a Steemit competitor that wants to fix the way online content is distributed and valued. In this article I’ll be covering why people are interested in U Network, how U Network will fix the issues currently plaguing online content, and its current development and outlook.

Why U Network

In the words of U Network “Online content is broken” and U Network aims to fix those issues that exist in the online market today. Those issues are unfairness in distribution, poor discovery of new content, and centralized governance. U Network’s platform — U Community — is designed to fix those three issues so that users may have more power, can more effectively find new content, and value content appropriately for creators and readers alike. To bring about those changes U Network is building a three part layered system that will reward content producers, price in user upvotes, and enable users to participate in content moderation and governance decisions.

U Community will be built on its own blockchain, and will be a prediction market and publishing tool to help promoted online content that aligns with the interests of its users. That is accomplished through the rewarding of the content creators, rewarding users for predicting popular content, making it easier to discover high quality content, and allowing users to be involved in governance and moderation. U Network summarizes their four key benefits as follows:

Overall, U Network will be creating its own content platform that will make use of its protocol and defines itself as a combination of Medium, Reddit, and Steemit with some key differences.

The first is the fair distribution of value. For example, when an individual posts a long analysis or article to Reddit, the Reddit platform, not the creator of the post is who gains the most from that posting. U Network fixes that issue through the paying of users for quality upvotes, paying authors more for great content, and paying moderators for accurate judgements.

Next, is their skin-in-the game content curation. For other platforms its free to upvote or downvote content which has led to upvote bots which ruins their systems for helping users to discover the best content. U Network makes use of its prediction market protocol that creates a market for votes. In other words, upvoting a piece of content is not free.

Lastly, there is decentralized moderation. Other websites have centralized moderators whose decisions are non-transparent. In U Network users may become moderators by staking a deposit.

Sugar

Before we get into the ways people may earn money we have to discuss what is money on the U Network. Anyone receiving payment in the U Network system will be paid in Sugar (UUU). At the moment Sugar is represented as an ERC20 token, but I assume it will be converted to Sugar on the mainnet of U Network once that is released. Sugar is the right to use U Community and all its other applications and is the holder of value on the system. The team envisions that as more users come onto the platform, more Sugar will be needed and increase demand. That increase of demand on the limited total supply of the token will increase its value, so in other words, that relationship is how all users of the platform will be earning value.

Sugar is how content creators will be rewarded in the system and it will also be the means for users to pay to upvote or downvote a post. Content creators will earn an amount of the Sugar that is used to upvote their posts. The system rewards those who find and upvote quality content. Those who upvote quality content will receive rewards from the sugar used to upvote too. Aside from that mechanism, users who upvoted early on will receive more sugar than those who voted later as the early voters had a more integral role in the spreading of the quality content.

In addition to receiving sugar from upvoting a post (being a content discoverer) or an author of those posts. Authors of quality posts will be able to receive sugar from the “Content Reward Pool”. This pool contains 20% of total sugar to be given as additional rewards to good articles. That pool will be populated once the mainnet of U Network goes live. The rewards from the pool may be sent out daily and/or weekly according to the UUU whitepaper. Naturally, articles with the most upvotes would receive the most Sugar as a reward.

Lastly, we need to go back to the prediction market mentioned back at the beginning of this article. The amount a user would have to pay is based on the prediction mechanisms built into the platform. With this prediction market for upvotes, the price of the upvote of an article or piece of content is set by that prediction software. A user may find a great article by a new author, because the author is new the prediction mechanism may set a very low price to upvote their content. The user who finds that content and upvotes would essentially be “longing” the article assuming other will find this article useful and then upvote it.

Based on the formulas used to calculate rewards, the first upvoter contributes all of their upvote to the author. Then all of the rest of the upvotes are distributed among the previous voters and the author. If the user in our above example is the first upvoter, for them to make a profit from upvoting that article, three other individuals would need to upvote it after them.

Reward Points

So far I’ve explained a lot of systems for content producers to earn rewards and only one for regular users and they have to spend their UUU in order to even have a chance and getting some back. The U Network team foresaw that the system I explained above in absence of this next one would not encourage any spending of UUU, so they added in Reward points. Reward points are a way for those without UUU to still participate and earn within the system.

Reward points are earned through spending time on the platform as well as promoting it. Promotion examples as outlined in the whitepaper include referring friends to U Community as well as distributing content to other social media channels. A mechanism for earning points via one’s time alone would be a daily log in reward. Furthermore reward points are not directly convertible to Sugar in order to prevent people from hoarding reward points or using bots to acquire a bunch. Reward points may be used in voting, so upvoting a quality piece of content early on can earn the user Sugar. Reward points may be used to earn Sugar but not in a direct fashion.

Through the Sugar and reward points system we see how the U Network team aims to fix the first two issues of fairness and discovery within their network. As usual, authors will produce content. That content may be upvoted using either Sugar (UUU) or reward points by those in the community. Upvoted projects will earn greater visibility (like Reddit) and the Sugar used to upvote those projects will be distributed to the author of the content and those who upvoted the content. Essentially, users and producers will earn money through their work and discovering quality work (like Steemit). Now let’s touch on the governance and moderation systems.

Governance and Moderation

Community moderators are users that would be selected periodically from the user pool on U Community. The selection of a user is determined by the amount of Sugar that one is staking. Selection as a moderator also entitles that user to Sugar rewards. A moderator will have the ability to help determine the future of the project. In addition, moderators will have the ability to delete posts that are improper, but authors of deleted posts will have the ability to appeal such a deletion. In that event, the appealing author will need to deposit an amount of sugar as collateral in the process. The entire community would then be able to vote on the issue using Sugar.

The appeal process is based on a simple majority vote. In the event the appealing author loses this vote, they will forfeit their deposit and the users who supported the appeal would lose theirs too. In the event of the appealing author winning the vote, the moderator would lose their staked deposit and those who voted in favor of the deletion would lose their sugar from the voting. Someone should make a U Community Rekt Twitter for when large deposits are lost.

Outlook

The roadmap for U Networked is detailed until the end of 2019. The first milestone on the list was the “Blockchain Connect” China-US blockchain summit back in January of 2018. The next milestone on the list and the one that the team is working towards at this moment is the release of the U Network Testnet in August of 2018. Following that the team hopes to release its Mainnet in November of 2018. The following milestones may be found on the picture below.

Price

U Network is trading at a price of $0.0049 or 58 Sats or 0.00000703 ETH. The total supply of the token is 10 billion and the circulating supply is a bit over 5.7 billion. With those numbers the market cap of the project is around $28 million. Daily volume for the token was at $297k.

Exchanges

UUU is listed on two exchanges with nearly all of the activity taking place on one. The main exchange for trading this token is Bibox. Bibox offers both a BTC and ETH pairing of UUU. Daily volume is 53% for the BTC pair and 46% for the ETH pair which comprises 99% of the daily volume. The last bit of the trading is done on DDEX with its ETH pairing for UUU.

Bibox — https://srv/bindings/506c31e2284a4fb3a7b6cf3a309887c7/code.bibox.com/

Community

To learn more about the U Network project please see the following links.

Website — https://u.network/

Twitter — https://twitter.com/UNetworkHQ

Coinmarketcap — https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/u-network/

Whitepaper — https://u.network/U_whitepaper_en.pdf

Conclusion

U Network is quite the hefty project with many nuances and features. There are a couple others that I did not even cover here including DApps that are being built on top of this too. The first DApp for U Network just entered alpha testing actually. As a content produce I intend to be a part of this community once it’s released and I am a bagholder of UUU.

Thank you for reading today’s article it was a pleasure looking into it. The other projects for this week include ZAP on Wednesday and CargoX on Friday. Follow me on here or on Twitter @thant1194 or on InvestFeed @thant11 in order to stay up to date on all my articles as I release them. Once again thank you. I have to return some video tapes.