Greetings, Universal Health Coin Community,

I have two points I wish to present to you today on our roadmap to a highly anticipated token sale and the creation of successful global healthcare company.

Universal Health Coin is using blockchain technology to reinvent healthcare funding and payment models globally. Recently, Universal Health Coin contracted with the strategic technology consultants at IBM Canada and the Mohawk MEDIC Digital Health Research Centre to provide an evidence-based evaluation of each of the blockchain platforms that Universal Health Coin has been considering to facilitate our global deployment.

This technical briefing is a summary of that analysis, which considered NEO, Ethereum, and Stellar as potential operating networks. This document explains the rationale for selection and presents the data that informed that decision.

First, I want to announce we have completed our branding strategy assessment of the global healthcare environment, the worldwide blockchain cultural phenomenon, and the opportunity we have to facilitate all kinds of healthcare transactions. Based on these assessments, we have decided to evolve the moniker for the Universal Health Coin digital asset from UHC to UHx.

UHx is our flagship digital asset designed to be the vehicle for our supporting community to partner with us to advance our vision for a transformed healthcare payments landscape around the world. As we prepare for launch, we have engaged many experts in the fields of healthcare, payment processing, blockchain technology, software design, and business operations. Through these engagements, our business models have been improved, our technology stack refined, and our vision for the future clarified. As a result of this recent evolution, an updated whitepaper is being readied for publication in the coming weeks, and our software development efforts have made leaps forward (visit our GitHub site for details: https://github.com/UHCToken/uhc-api).

Now to the Blockchain Technology Assessment

Since Universal Health Coin’s vision for the future of healthcare is anchored in the revolution of healthcare payments, the mechanism of distributed payments is our focus. We are looking for an open-source network that connects with other global exchanges, one that enables all kinds of transactions and payment methods. One that would easily allow members to pay cash to and providers to receive payments for their services in every country of the world. Our goal is to move money quickly, reliably and at practically no cost; creating the least amount of friction and burden to our ecosystem and members.

Our assessment team’s evaluative criteria were focused on business-oriented value propositions of many blockchains systems and the finalists were narrowed down to NEO, Ethereum, and Stellar. These criteria included:

Settlement flexibility : Some blockchain approaches only recognize and effectively work with their own internal coins or tokens. Others intentionally externalize all payments to get around the inherent limitations of smart contract escrow contracts. One allows both. Depending on your application, this is useful or not, but more flexibility inherent to the platform will mean less to build on top of it. And, of course, people on the outside of the cryptocurrency world still want to transact in fiat currencies.

: Some blockchain approaches only recognize and effectively work with their own internal coins or tokens. Others intentionally externalize all payments to get around the inherent limitations of smart contract escrow contracts. One allows both. Depending on your application, this is useful or not, but more flexibility inherent to the platform will mean less to build on top of it. And, of course, people on the outside of the cryptocurrency world still want to transact in fiat currencies. Efficient blockchain : Two of the major challenges of blockchain approaches have been the slow speed and high cost of transactions. In order to fulfill the promise of the distributed, immutable ledger, these have to be overcome.

: Two of the major challenges of blockchain approaches have been the slow speed and high cost of transactions. In order to fulfill the promise of the distributed, immutable ledger, these have to be overcome. Effective smart contracts : Smart contracts and distributed applications are mostly the same thing. They’ve been implemented in both specially designed and existing languages. Conceptually, they have a learning curve and toolkits are weak right now. Some are better than others, however.

: Smart contracts and distributed applications are mostly the same thing. They’ve been implemented in both specially designed and existing languages. Conceptually, they have a learning curve and toolkits are weak right now. Some are better than others, however. Regulator ready : A large portion of the cryptocurrency world wants to avoid regulation, but for blockchain solutions to be useful in the real world of today, they have to be able to play well with existing regulations. Some of that is trivial, as audit-ability of an immutable, distributed ledger is a baked in part of the solution. Other elements, such as identifiable transactors are tougher and indeed often intentionally obfuscated. And obfuscation of sensitive data to align with regulatory requirements can challenge many implementations.

: A large portion of the cryptocurrency world wants to avoid regulation, but for blockchain solutions to be useful in the real world of today, they have to be able to play well with existing regulations. Some of that is trivial, as audit-ability of an immutable, distributed ledger is a baked in part of the solution. Other elements, such as identifiable transactors are tougher and indeed often intentionally obfuscated. And obfuscation of sensitive data to align with regulatory requirements can challenge many implementations. Maturity : This is a rapidly evolving space. Some of these technologies are still effectively in alpha and none are older than 10 years. Most are under 5 years old in their current versions. There are a some with intriguing potential but still too immature for anything except technical exploration.

: This is a rapidly evolving space. Some of these technologies are still effectively in alpha and none are older than 10 years. Most are under 5 years old in their current versions. There are a some with intriguing potential but still too immature for anything except technical exploration. Generalized applicability : Some of these technologies were implemented to solve very specific problems. Ripple, for example, is intentionally a foreign-exchange settlement system with no intention to be anything else. Some are broadly useful.

: Some of these technologies were implemented to solve very specific problems. Ripple, for example, is intentionally a foreign-exchange settlement system with no intention to be anything else. Some are broadly useful. Security: It’s important to remember that blockchain is only a component of an architected solution to most problems. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. While most implementations make the data itself immutable, that isn’t the same as secure. And some solutions have experienced sufficient hacks over the past three years that it’s difficult to consider them inherently secure.

Each technology has its own radar chart illustrating its strengths and weaknesses according to our criteria and displayed on a simple scale of 1–5, with 5 being generally good and 1 being generally weak.

For the purposes of this part of the discussion, we will compare a dominant smart contract solution, Ethereum, with both the NEO and Stellar blockchains. While each has different strengths and weaknesses, the requirements of the Universal Health Coin are clear.

We start with Ethereum

Any discussion of a selection of blockchain approaches which does not include Ethereum is problematic. It’s the gold standard for unpermissioned public blockchains which require tokens. You can see the strengths and weaknesses we found and from our perspective, the lack of overall efficiency is a critical challenge. The Casper hard fork that is coming might overcome this, but we were unwilling to wait for that as a potential solution. Even then and based on other proof-of-stake solutions, we don’t believe that it will be as efficient as we need our solution to be for the transaction volumes we project Universal Health Coin to execute over the next two years.

Ethereum’s Turing-complete Solidity language also offers compelling value, but Universal Health Coin doesn’t require that degree of sophistication in blockchain smart contracts. Solidity also presents some challenges as a development language which will take time to resolve.

Ethereum fundamentally only wants to perform escrow smart contracts which are settled in Ether. This is suitable for Universal Health Coin’s needs, and so was a relative strength on their part, but the overall capabilities of Ethereum to serve Universal Health Coin’s customers was not great enough to warrant aligning ourselves with ETH. That actually validated our original reasoning for looking at NEO.

Assessment of NEO

Based on a comparative assessment with ETH, the NEO network appeared to align with many of Universal Health Coin’s original identified needs and thus the reason we pivot to them in late 2017 for our whitepaper presentation.

NEO’s claimed efficiency, support for multiple standard languages, focus on being regulator ready, and settlement flexibility were all very attractive. We also were able to meet with NEO leadership at the NEO DevCon and start to build relationships with the City of Zion developer community. We liked their organization and were given gratitude for selecting NEO to our solutions partner. Based upon these discussions, we expected to be well guided into the NEO community.

Throughout early 2018, our exploration continued with NEO as we wanted to be fully assured of the strengths of the system to service the Universal Health Coin community. What we uncovered was it was still an immature solution with exposed concerns about security. The lack of English-language documentation is concerning and challenging as well.

Assessment of Stellar

During our requirements and architectural exploration of the Universal Health Coin solution, we evaluated the capabilities of Stellar’s smart contracts. This was a key area of concern, as Stellar does not attempt to provide Turing-complete, distributed applications, but instead, is focused on more limited smart contract capabilities. However, the trade-off for this more limited capability is very rapid performance.

Universal Health Coin’s business process requirements for governance and contracting is of the highest priority in order to appropriately allocate health service interactions and execute responsibilities to our members, healthcare providers, via both on-chain smart contracts and through off-chain technologies. We evaluated Stellar’s capabilities and affirmed that our core approvals process and healthcare event smart contracts could be managed with Stellar. Arguably, we would have been able to do more within both NEO or Ethereum’s on-chain languages, but we understand that any blockchain solution is only a component of a complete solution architecture, not a complete architecture in itself.

Stellar is strongly backed by its community — this has been one of the main driving forces behind their success. The Stellar lumens token (XLM), can be exchanged for any fiat currency, making it an ideal transaction token for Universal Health Coin. The fast processing rates and low fees of transactions make Stellar highly advantageous.

The Universal Health Coin network intends to capture 2% of the $10TUSD of global healthcare payment transactions. Assuming an average claim cost of $1,000USD, that represents ~200,000,000 healthcare payment transactions per year. That would also imply that monthly payments would be made by over 50 million members, generating another 600 million payment transactions on the global blockchain. For the Universal Health Coin solution to scale to this level, the transaction model must be carefully designed.

Stellar has two major attributes Universal Health Coin needs.

The first is the transaction speed of the blockchain. Stellar’s delegated consensus model allows very rapid transactions and given that we are seeking near real-time approvals across a distributed community numbered in the millions of participants, we need a highly performant solution. We also need a mature solution. Stellar is not attempting to create a highly complex set of capabilities. Their community has shown that it is able to deliver its capabilities with confidence, documentation, and great support.

The Universal Health Coin team was able to establish a node, create wallets, and test operational capabilities in a fraction of the time and effort spent attempting to do the same with NEO and ETH.

Stellar’s partnerships also strengthen their community. Stellar has partnered with IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Barclays (NYSE:BCS), among others worldwide where these global businesses are now offering XLM transactions from and to their clients. These include many of the global Fortune 500 and governments around the world.

Stellar has grown by 8325% in the past year ($0.0040USD on 27 April 2017 to $0.3370USD on 26 April 2018), and is continuing to perform well in the global crypto marketplace.

Stellar is more than just a coin though; its community culture is all about making a difference. Stellar is committed to globally spreading low-cost financial services to help fight poverty and maximize individual potential. Stellar’s ventures in this include partnering with the Praekelt Foundation. This aligns well with the core values of the growing Universal Health Coin community and founders, and we believe that it will enable Universal Health Coin to attract similar large-scale institutional agreements much earlier than other platform partners.

While not immediately attracting many ICOs, Stellar is growing in this realm as well. Many upcoming ICOs are showing interest in Stellar’s platform. Stellar’s platform makes a good base for ICOs: it has a built-in exchange where tokens can be listed directly instead of having to go through a third party; it’s a cheaper and a more efficient platform, and it is designed for bank-level security from the ground up.

How do the costs stack up?

We looked at multiple cost elements of expenditure for use of the systems and considered where Universal Health Coin’s processes would incur different costs. We intend to make the most cost-effective healthcare payments solution and to execute millions of transactions monthly, so a transaction cost is a key driver.

We looked at six elements of cost. Each network has different costs based on the underlying technology and the approach to governing the blockchain. As with our exploration of the higher-order business values of the solutions, we rated these from one to five, with one being very expensive and five being inexpensive.

Create token

Deploy generally distributed apps (dApps)

Deploy simple escrow contract

Memory

Transaction

Create a wallet application

We chose to separate generally distributed apps from simpler smart contracts because of our business requirements. We’ve also chosen not to include the creation of a wallet application in the model below but will discuss it, as it’s a cost externalized from the actual blockchain fundamentals (a development cost not a transactional cost).

We’ll follow the same pattern in exploring Ethereum, NEO, and finally Stellar.

In general, Ethereum is a reasonably costed blockchain. Creating tokens is inexpensive, creating wallets is easy (and well-patterned for developers), and deploying smart contracts is inexpensive. Memory is moderately expensive, but this was less of a concern for our requirements.

Transaction costs, however, were not supportable. This includes smart contract execution as well as simple movement of assets. As we were considering high transaction volume, these costs were not sustainable for our business model.

While simple movement of tokens within NEO is inexpensive, other activities drive up costs on their system. After modeling numerous types of activities on the network, including issuing tokens and creating smart contracts, we found that the financial cost of operating our business model on this network would be overwhelming to the Universal Health Coin community. Creating new wallet tools was also determined to be very expensive in terms of time and effort for developers due to shortcomings with NEO’s documentation.

Stellar’s cost structure better aligns with our vision for a high-volume system. Transaction costs are paid in small fractions of Stellar lumens (XLM recently trading a $0.3370USD) called stroops, a ten-thousandth of a lumen for each transaction costing $0.00003370USD at the time of this writing.

Stellar has low costs in part because it does not support Turing-complete distributed applications. For our purposes, the simpler contract models are sufficient for our needs. Our business architecture includes off-chain components which will complement the on-chain capabilities available within Stellar.

Based on this assessment, we have determined our business requires we pivot to Stellar. This was a difficult decision and one we have spent the past two months assessing. We spent considerable technical resources to conduct this assessment with our partners at IBM and the MEDIC research labs. But it’s the right decision.

In summary, to allow Universal Health Coin to become a global leader in the healthcare payment industry, what really cemented Stellar as our choice was the cost of execution, the close alignment of Stellar’s capabilities and our business needs to serve our members and providers worldwide.

Conclusion

Blockchain technologies are moving quickly and so is Universal Health Coin. The worldwide health market that Universal Health Coin serves demands a great deal of any organization especially in the finance and payment space. This demand produces billions of transactions per day requiring high speed-of-transaction processing, a relatively mature platform, maximum security protocols and low costs. Stellar gives Universal Health Coin that and much more than functionality.

Additionally, Stellar has a global partnership with IBM — Universal Health Coin’s preferred provider of cloud, AI, and technical solutions. Our strategic planning team assessed several blockchain solutions. In the end, we determined that our business model does not need a Turing-complete solution nor the Solidity language capabilities, and in fact requires a much faster and less expensive transactions process.

We had previously looked to NEO to provide that mature and performant blockchain platform and thought it was the right fit. We do appreciate NEO’s potential in the future, but we determined that it was not a mature enough solution today to enable the expansive and worldwide development resources we will need for rapid adoption in the 23 countries that have already expressed great interest in testing the Universal Health Coin system for their particular health system needs.

During our strategic and development work with the MEDIC Centre and IBM, we (co-founder Courtney and myself) were introduced to Jed McCaleb and other Stellar leadership to understand their blockchain technical capabilities and their future plans. The company assessed Stellar’s technical proofs of concept with internal and external blockchain experts and MEDIC’s healthcare experts. The assessment reviewed core claims, governance processes, and allocation responsibilities across on-chain and off-chain solutions.

The decision to pivot to Stellar will be detailed further in the updated White Paper to be published shortly.

Learn more about Stellar here: https://www.stellar.org/

Be well, Dr. Gordon Jones

Dr. Jones is a co-founder, President & COO of Universal Health Coin, co-founder and Entrepreneur in Residence at theClubhou.se, and a bunch of other stuff.