Welcome everyone to the Ubiq Quarterly report for November 2018.

While the markets have been pessimistic, our development team has been hard at work implementing our new Proof-of-Work Algorithm, Ubqhash.

The implementation was a success, with most of the hashrate staying on the network through the transition and no reported issues.

September Recap

First Ubiq Community Operations Call

UIP2 Results — 53.5% of participants voted to sell BTC forks for ETH

Spectrum v3 (ubiqscan.io upgrade) released. Now live.

Ubqhash announced to the community.

Kris Lester joined the Ubiq core team as the new Community Manager.

Alex Sterk was promoted to the role of Business Manager.

Medium re-design implemented.

Ubiq Research blog section revealed. First articles drafted.

Invest In Blockchain featured a blog post of the Whiteblock analysis.

Ubiq signed up to the Blockfolio signals beta.

Members of the team and community attended the Tokenfest and Blockchain Seattle conferences.

Community member Tunachum produced artwork for use.

We pushed UIP3 (Marketing Budget) to GitHub for feedback.

ERC20Exchange announced they were building a game on the Ubiq platform.

October Recap

Escher Airdrop #3 was held with a 36.15% participation rate.

Second Ubiq Community Operation call took place.

We set the UIP1 Hard fork date for block 660,000.

Ubqminer was announced and made available to our mining community.

Gubiq was updated to version 2.0.1.

Dexlab integrated UBQ and all Ubiq tokens into their mobile wallet.

We unveiled our new tagline for Ubiq: ‘Enterprise Stable. Transparent Governance’.

Invest In Blockchain featured Ubiq in two posts about our monetary policy and our network upgrade.

Ubiq research had its first article published, covering our monetary policy.

Our first signals went live on Blockfolio.

We launched our Ubiq Crypto Community Facebook page.

Blockpublisher featured Ubiq in a series of posts.

GeoCoin was featured in ‘altcointraders’ blog post.

Sphere Token announced their swap to the Ubiq network.

Cryptanthropy continued their#RandomActsOfKindness campaign.

Network Activity / Stats / Upgrades

Transaction Activity and Network Hash

Data has been collected in the last quarter for transactional activity, hashrate and difficulty. We will continue to report this in each quarterly report, for the quarter that has just passed.

If you want to view the historical statistics then please read the August Quarterly.

Ubiq weekly average difficulty and the estimated hashrate.

Ubiq weekly transactional on-chain throughput.

Considering the market declines, transactional activity and hashrate has still been resilient. Please note we only extracted the data up to the UIP1 hard fork date and we are expecting to report a decline in the short term next quarter as the network adjusts to the new hashing algorithm.

Full node geographical distribution

We pulled the data extraction for the current network node count before the Ubqhash hard fork. It is likely that this number reduced after the fork and we will report on this in the next quarterly.

1990 nodes syncing to the Ubiq network worldwide

Please note that geographical locations with fewer than 5 nodes are included under ‘others’

We always encourage all of our Ubiq enthusiasts to run a full node if possible. You can find a guide on how to achieve this with a Raspberry Pi or any other SBC.

Governance Updates

We recently pushed UIP4 to GitHub for community feedback and entries. UIP4 will allow the community to select a new logo for our Escher Governance System.

Our development team are making adjustments to the voting system to allow graphics to be pulled through to the voting page, to allow community members to select their preferred candidate with ease. This is still being worked on and we hope to have an update for the community on this soon.

Development Updates

UIP1 Now Implemented

The development team’s focus this month has been on the stable implementation of Ubqhash.

Being the first Ethash coin to fork in this manner has meant extensive testing and focus throughout the implementation process. As of block 660,000 Ubiq successfully hard-forked and is now running Ubqhash.

As was covered in our previous blog post, this upgrade is a key step towards securing the Ubiq chain, as it mitigates the threat of 51% attacks via hashrate rental services. Once we have established the stability of this new algorithm, we will contact the exchanges which offer markets for Ubiq to request that they reduce our deposit confirmations, as the chain is much safer to this vector of attack now.

We are also proud to announce that Ubiq has been de-listed from www.crypto51.app (a website dedicated to tracking various PoW coins ability to be attacked via this method), as we are now safe from 51% attacks via rental services.

Sparrow Update

A major update to Sparrow is being worked on. This update will bring over the latest metamask updates, better integration with Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets, a new user interface, improved token support and integration into our governance system to simplify the UIP voting process.

PoW / Pool Updates

Since Ubqhash has been implemented, there have been fundamental changes to the make-up of our mining pools. The following distribution of hashrate can be found below:

Distribution of hashrate pre and post hard fork

As you can see from the pie charts, there was a significant change in the composition of hashrate across the various mining pools.

Ubiqpool

Ubiq’s first mining pool suffered the greatest reduction in hashrate, dropping from approximately 120 GH/s pre-fork to around 40 GH/s post-fork. It is unclear why the hashrate dropped so much on this pool. Pool operator Angellox has been working on contacting the participants to remedy this.

Maxhash

Counter intuitively, Maxhash had a large increase in hashrate, taking the number 1 spot for largest pool. Before the fork they had approximately 28 GH/s pre-fork and moved up to 83 GH/s post-fork.

Maxhash have been long-time supporters of Ubiq and we congratulate them on their success. However, we remind our miners to spread the hash and assist with moving Ubiq to a greater level of decentralization.

Mining on another pool with less hashrate does not mean a reduction in rewards as the reduced frequency of finding a block is balanced by a greater share of the reward when a block is found.

Other Pools

There were several other smaller pools which went offline after the hard fork, indicating that they did not perform the necessary upgrade.

We are still making efforts to contact these pool operators and are working with some of them to implement the upgrade.

SMOS and HiveOS announce support for Ubqminer

Before Ubqhash went live, several community members contacted SMOS and HiveOS to request Ubqminer support.

Both teams have now officially released support for our miner. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the respective teams for adding this support.

You can visit their websites below:

Simplemining (SMOS)

HiveOS

PheonixMiner Support for Ubqhash

Support was recently announced by PheonixMiner for Ubqhash, giving two choices of miners for Ubiq.

A link to the announcement is below:

Advertising / Marketing Updates

Invest In Blockchain

Ubiq has been featured in a benchmark of smart contract platforms on Invest In Blockchain. The premise of the benchmark is to find a system to identify relative value by comparing transactional activity to current market cap.

Out of all the smart contract platform coins that were benchmarked, Ubiq was found to have the lowest NVTQ score and therefore the most undervalued coin relative to the market. All the data used to perform this analysis is available to anyone to peer-review.

You can read the article for more detail here.

New community website

The new community website

Community member Kojak22 has launched a community-run website at www.ubiqescher.com. We will use this site to capture artwork produced by discord members, provide a source for Ubiq news, information regarding Exchanges, Wallets and Network tools and provide a central hub for anyone looking for marketing materials to spread awareness of Ubiq.

The marketing page also includes the Ubiq color palette, should anyone wish to create new materials. We encourage all community members to embrace their creativity and share designs where possible.

The Ubiq color palette on ubiqescher.com

New and Updated Infographics

Our new infographic for the Ubiq in one page section on medium.

As part of our ongoing branding efforts, the ‘Ubiq in One Page’ part of the blog has been redone, with a new infographic explaining key parts of the Ubiq ecosystem.

We will keep this page updated from time to time with any new developments and key milestones.

We have also updated the ‘What the Fork’ infographic, which highlights the key differences between the major EVM projects.

The updated fork graphic

Interview with Kris Lester on Altcoin Mag

Kris Lester was interviewed by Altcoin Magazine in a Q&A style format, introducing a new audience to Ubiq. The interview covered many aspects, highlighting our main accomplishments, partnerships, key innovations and the future direction of our project.

Ubiq research post on Mining ecosystem

Off the back of our UIP1 network upgrade to Ubqhash, we have published our second Ubiq Research article, this time focusing on the Ubiq mining ecosystem.

This article is an excellent primer for miners who are not familiar with Ubiq, or community members who wish to get a better understanding of the platform.

Escher Logo Selection

As mentioned in our Governance section, we are accepting submissions for our Escher Logo competition.

A selection of some Escher designs submitted by our community.

There is still time to submit an entry to this competition and we encourage community members to read this article first before submission.

Financial Activity Updates

As per our commitment to full transparency, the following update to the NDF/Marketing fund is below:

Current position for the NDF

We are still planning to implement UIP2 and this is still on the radar following the community vote, however it is taking a little longer than expected as we are changing the structure of the funds with a new multi-sig setup. We will update you on this in due course.

Token Activity / Updates

GeoCoin