It seems like just yesterday that the first test network for Ubiq was established, but in reality Ubiq launched a year ago, and in that time we’ve seen a flurry of new and exciting developments and collaborations. This report outlines Ubiq’s most recent activity, highlights important events and provides insight to the future of the Ubiq platform. Excitingly, Ubiq has just crossed over its 200,000th block with over 1,200,000 immutable transactions taking place thus far. Ubiq will be experiencing its very first block reward drop in the next 6 months, which will lower the inflation to ~6%, with 7 UBQ in mining rewards per block.

Ubiq Technologies has encountered several consulting opportunities alongside offers of venture capital investment following our recent conference appearances. These are potential investors who are seeking out ways of getting involved in the blockchain space, we will be formalizing offers with prospective partners by the following quarterly report.

Cryptocurrency is on the rise, that being said, we are still very much in the pioneer stage of crypto and the full potential of blockchains have yet to be fully realized. We have built a healthy community of informed and passionate supporters around this technology, and its been wonderful to see numerous people volunteer their time, skills, effort and resources to the development of this project. The Ubiq chain was created as a stable solution option for enterprise adoption, upon which an attractive ecosystem is established to entice developers to adopt the Ubiq chain for their innovative new projects. We are pleased to see this actively happening, but as always, our robust community is the true impetus propelling Ubiq into the future.

Ubiq Services

The Fusion wallet has been serving the community well with its full feature set and regular updates from the Ethereum codebase. These changes are all voluntary and do not require a network hardfork; though, the upcoming release of Metropolis from Ethereum will be the exception, however it will only be implemented after a generous period of communication and vetting. With the knowledge that many users prefer the web client, MyEtherWallet, Ubiq developers outdid themselves with the launch of Pyrus, Ubiq’s very own web wallet client. It utilizes the same trustless technology and provides users with easy access to creating their very own paper wallet, another popular storage method. There is an additional option of using MyEtherWallet.com by using the network selector on the site. We sincerely appreciate their collaboration with us, they have been wonderful to work with and we look forward to future interactions.

One significant benefit spawning from the development of Pyrus is that we are able to easily add support for the Ledger hardware wallet. This will allow the secure hardware storage of your UBQ and UBQ assets. Following this integration, expect to see the release of Sparrow, the Ubiq fork of Metamask web3 tool. Dapp developers will then have the full toolbox of resources for working with the Ubiq EVM.

Sparrow Logo

Chain Swaps

There have been a lot of ERC-20 tokens developed on the Ethereum network, the vast majority of which are used for fundraising and ICOs.

Ubiq is working to break the mold. There are already three existing coins that are taking their first steps to becoming Ubiq Tokens. This process allows the developers of these coins to shift from their headache of maintaining a blockchain and implementing updates, and refocus their attention on the things that matter, their use-cases. Developers of these platforms can rest assured the Ubiq developers are actively developing and maintaining a POW network that lives up to and surpasses their demands.

Geocoin will be the first of these pre-existing projects to join our other tokens. We are excited to merge resources with an establish application and development team. Their appcoin stores geo-locations with each coin and allows for the collection of coins by bringing a smartphone to the location. By upgrading from their old chain, inflation will now only be used to populate the map each day. Check Geocoin’s official announcement for more details.

Bitseeds is another token slated for swap following the finalization of their planned ICO. Working directly with the Rainforest Foundation, Bitseeds is focused on generating donations which go towards preserving the environment. By switching to a token on the Ubiq network they are able to reduce their operating costs and so allotment even more of every donation towards the Rainforest Foundation’s environmental work.

Last but not least, the SPHR network will be switching to a Ubiq ERC-20 token with burn features. The Sphere Team is developing dedicated Raspberry Pi hardware for dedicated Ubiq node and VPN/VPS services with the goal of bringing easily understandable InfoSec to the masses. SPHR aims to bridge the gap between good security and technologically illiterate with video tutorials alongside each service offered, and to offer suggestions for those who seek out additional ideas on how to stay safe in this crypto-sphere.

We are quite happy to have these teams contribute and share resources with the Ubiq network, Slack, and community. Look for new channels in the Slack and AMA’s with the teams in the near future.

Official Projects

Signum is an underlying focus of ours in re-inventing the way in which systems are built and interact. However, if we don’t improve key management for the blockchain age, then all we’ve done is make identity theft that much more profitable. We’ve been working on new security features like iris scanning to add to the biometric security of fingerprints. As stated in the previous quarterly report this data is hashed and stored within the tamper-proof hardware device.

After a lot of discussion with the Signum team and our legal advisers about pre-selling the device, we decided to develop and beta test the product with two officially supported projects that will contribute resources to Signum advancement. The Artesia project is the first of these beta testers. Artesia is a real estate and equity management platform with a planned offering this fall. Roadmap items include tokenizing memberships and equities, and a decentralized exchange with whitelisted identities managed by Signum devices.

Geno Genesis is a supply chain management tool being developed for the medicinal marijuana industry. The goal for this tool is to ensure the integrity of legal and authorized supply chains. Their partners in production and genome sciences will be securing their lab results and new product strains on the Ubiq chain. Signum devices will be used by growers and lab technicians with a mobile app for identity management further down the supply chain.

Pending the success of these use cases and further testing, we expect to have a pre-order sale for devices early in the new year.

Signum Prototype with fingerprint reader

Recently, @dexaran820, a member from the Ethereum Commonwealth has reached out to the Ubiq team to begin collaboration on multiple platforms that benefit decentralization. We were pleased to see the crypto-community as a whole wanting to work together to advance the space and build strong, dependable tools. You can see some of his overall project goals here. As of now, we’ve agreed to work on a decentralized token exchange and will update as more progress is made. This is the spirit we try to foster in the Ubiq community, promoting innovation and collaboration with other communities that have similar goals to ours.

Governance Update

The success of the APX project and the growth of their NDF has resulted in a significant amount of funding slotted towards advancing Ubiq development. Everyone on the Ubiq team is of one mind that the use of these funds should be governed by the community. With several methods of conducting governance currently available through smart contract technology, the best concepts we’ve seen demonstrated thus far are from the Waves Community Token, district0x, and Aragon projects. In the next quarter, we will deploy a community token contract which will be issued to all accounts with a UBQ balance. The first snapshot will take place in approximately 3 months, after which the community token will be used to decide and fund bounties, employ developer and marketing resources, and vote on future protocol upgrades.

There are no plans to establish an official market for these community tokens, nor will we approach exchanges in assisting in the distribution. When the snapshot date is announced, we recommend that you move your UBQ balance to an address within your full control so that you receive the community token, and can take an active role in Ubiq’s future governance.

General Updates

With the growth of our Slack channel to over 4,700 members, we’re currently exploring other options for chat software. Slack doesn’t publish numbers on what their limits are, but according to this post from January, the service “starts struggling at around 5,000 users” and is hard-capped at 8,500 users. However, there are some additional updates at the bottom of the article that claim the caps have since been raised to 12,000 members, or possibly higher.

Because Slack is billed on a per-user basis and our channel is so large, it is prohibitively expensive to use a premium tier. With the community steadily growing, we want to have an alternative ready to go before we reach any limitations. Slack has been an incredible free service up to this point, we are just outgrowing it rapidly. We will inform users when this transition is going to occur so everyone can migrate to the new platform.

Ubiq ledger hardware wallet testing

Support for Ubiq on the Ledger hardware wallet platforms is still in progress. Luke (Xocel) from the development team has taken care of development/integration and is currently doing the final stages of testing so we can wrap up this important project. We, along with our community, are excited to soon be storing our Ubiq on a secure and reputable hardware wallet.

This process should be completed before the next quarterly report!

Julian is working on upgrading the go-ubiq (gubiq) codebase from revision 1.5.12 to 1.6.7. This upgrade comes with some minor changes and a large number of bug fixes since Ethereum originally released 1.6.0 back in the middle of April. It will put gubiq on the latest version of Ethereum’s go-ethereum client, geth. While most users won’t notice a major impact from these upgrades, it is essential behind the scenes development work like this which needs to occur to keep the infrastructure running smoothly.

Although too early to publish details in this release — there is an emerging Canadian fiat/crypto exchange which has expressed an interest in listing Ubiq. We hope to see increased exchange integration as community members continue to see value in Ubiq and participate in the growth of this platform. Please join us in contacting your favorite exchange and requesting that they add Ubiq as one of their supported coins.