Coin review of Universa blockchain protocol, the ICO, Universa Smart Money, & UTN / UNTP tokens. Here’s a closer look at the project led by Alexander Borodich & John McAfee as an advisor.
One growing concern that the Universa platform hopes to take out of the equation is blockchain bloating. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of blockchain bloating, all you need to know is that it’s essentially a data storage issue. The increasing number of transactions means that more data is circulated and therefore needs to be actively stored. This means that block sizes must increase in order to keep up with the all the transactions. Bloating takes place when transactions fill blocks to capacity. It’s a growing problem for blockchain heavyweights (particularly Bitcoin), as it can lead to an increase in fees and slower synchronization times between the network and a desktop wallet client. Universa aims to fix this bloating issue through side-chains and its Notary Cloud. Since there isn’t any mining involved, the participating nodes are rewarded via transaction fees for the validation and execution of contracts. The entire network is designed around the concept of transaction, around contracts and their execution. Universa doesn’t build a single full ledger by stacking blocks. Instead, Universa clients apply each set of changes into a separate contract chain (known as a C-Chain) to the previous state with the outcome being vectorized and hashed. According to Universa’s whitepaper, with each action that is to be performed, all nodes receive the present state of the contract and the source of the operation that’s about to be performed. Both state and source are verified by hash-sum to be identical to the stored current state in the contract’s side-chain. The operation is applied and a new state is hashed, which is agreed upon by 90% consensus. After a short period of time, which is currently set at 10 days, nodes are free to discard the contract as well as the state and only need to retain the hashes. Everything else, including transaction records, digital signatures and contract sources can be verified in the associated Notary Cloud, which is separate from the blockchain. Universa uses a Proof-Of-State system. Trusted actors verify any change in state, which is then approved by consensus extremely fast; ten milliseconds or less. Since each contract maintains its own chain of state, it can perform actions asynchronously without impacting the others. The blockchain itself is formed by a direct acyclic graph, also known as DAG technology. DAG represents the combined changes of state taking place. There’s growing support for DAG, arguing that its technological potential may eventually replace the blockchain at some point in the future. Its name might sound complex, but the concept behind DAG is rather simple. It ensures that the same functions are being executed as those within a blockchain, but through a different method. Transactions are not grouped into blocks. Instead, each new transaction needs to confirm one or more previous transactions. A smart contract within Universa is just executable script data stored in tree structures. Information is stored in a key-value format, with each key representing a global unique address and a value that can be either a fixed value, dynamically executing scripts, binary executable logic or even references to other trees and addresses. UTN (Universa’s native token; UTNP is its current placeholder) has a ton of advantages that become obvious even to those who aren’t crypto-inclined, especially when compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum. Compared to Bitcoin, it’s 1,000 times faster & 100 times cheaper, all the while offering a fixed price and no bloating. It’s also 60 times faster than Ethereum. When it comes to scalability, Universa’s nodes allow 20,000 transactions per second, while Ethereum allows only 15 and Bitcoin allows only 3 -6. The 90% consensus algorithm ensures a high level of trust with a low risk of fraud. Much of the network’s increased performance is due to the absence of mining and the design of their protocols and smart contracts. As Universa’s CEO, Alexander Borodich has made his mark as a venture investor, digital media strategist & serial entrepreneur. Universa’s CTO, Sergey Chernov, has more than 25 years of experience in development; 17 of them in cryptography. Art director Alex Dovnar has 10 years of experience as an art director & 20 years of experience in digital & print design. With 12 lead developers, 9 mobile developers, 8 QA managers, 5 user interface & user experience specialists, & 3 project managers, Borodich & his team plan on paving the road for a complete blockchain revolution!
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I absolve myself of all responsibility (directly or indirectly) for any damage, loss caused, alleged to be caused by, or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article. As usual, DYOR.
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