The sharing economy
In the last decade Uber and Airbnb have become frontrunners of the phenomenon called the sharing economy. The industry that is focused on peer-to-peer sharing of goods and services has emerged and is expected to grow to a projected market cap of 520 billion USD this year. Taking into account that the sharing economy was worth around 15 billion USD in 2014, it has seen a tremendous growth in recent years.
Come to think of it, centralized companies leading this ‘back to basics’ industry is a bit strange; as it was originally intended as a non-profit idea of having people share homes, meals, cars and other items or services so the relatively high monetary incentives for businesses of renting or leasing those items could be taken out of the equation.
Seeing a multitude of centralized companies emerge, claiming to be a new sharing economy platform, raises some questions. Are these entities here based on their idealistic views of a sharing economy? Or is their business perspective to profit as much as they can by implementing third party fees for building a platform that connects users and service providers?
Issues in the current state of the sharing economy are the excessive transaction costs implemented by centralized entities, trust issues, data vulnerabilities and abuse.
Realizing the way to solve these issues will be through the implementation of a truly free peer-to-peer network with the combination of blockchain technology along with an underlying sense of the sharing economy.
The sharing economy 2.0
To improve upon the traditional sharing economy, the current issues need to be solved, so that we can enter the sharing economy 2.0. Implementing blockchain technology will be a great step towards a more sustainable decentralized sharing economy that fully gives back the power to the people and makes proper use of the sharing economy as it was initially intended.
One of these companies trying to disrupt the traditional sharing economy is a blockchain based project called UChain.
UChain
UChain is a public infrastructure blockchain network specifically designed for the global sharing economy. Along with other sharing economy enterprises, they aspire to build a decentralized worldwide sharing economy ecosystem where every user can exchange value and publish contents freely without intermediaries. Through UChain and its decentralized autonomous ecosystem, all users and merchants will be empowered.
UChain’s team is building a next-generation decentralized blockchain platform that will allow for decentralized application (dApps) to be deployed and launched on the network. These dApps will form an ecosystem that focuses on providing real-world solutions in the form of sharing goods and services with others. UChain’s ultimate goal is to create a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) for the sharing economy. As the amount of dApps on the platform increases, UChain will also build a decentralized exchange (DEX) to provide extra liquidity to these UChain based URC-1 tokens.
UChain intends to solve the current issues the sharing economy faces in order to become a sustainable thriving industry where the sharing of goods and services between people is really the main objective.
Peer-to-peer network: UChain is building a true peer-to-peer ecosystem that cuts out the expensive middle-man and focuses on providing a fully decentralized sharing economy network where users can interact with each other and share goods and services. By cutting out the expensive third-party intermediary users can save up to 25% in transaction fees. Smart contracts will be implemented to execute terms and conditions on peer-to-peer transactions.
User credit passport: an innovative credit scoring system based on a credit rating algorithm will be implemented and will cover all dApps on the UChain network. The algorithm will track all customer behavior on the platform and provide a credit-score accordingly.
Distributed data storage: UChain will store users’ data in an encrypted tamper-free way. By encrypting, splitting, scattering and shredding data across different network nodes, it is by no means possible for one single node to gain full access to a user’s data, only small unreadable and incomplete data will be accessible.
Token incentive: The UCN value proposition involves several reward schemes. For instance, users will be rewarded in UCN if they decide to contribute their data towards the ecosystem development. Community contributions and the recruitment of new members will be rewarded with UCN tokens.
Token economy
UCN is the chain’s main token and can be used to purchase assets from suppliers (sharing bicycles, smart devices, etc.). UCN can also be earned as a reward for contributing data for the development of the ecosystem and as a payment for API services provided by UChain. Moreover the community can earn UCN by onboarding new users and creating valuable content. It can also be used to pay for advertisements delivered through the UChain advertising system and as a transaction fee for UChain’s Sharing Services, and the UChain Decentralized Exchange (DEX).
UCN can be staked to receive UCPtokens. UCP tokens have voting rights that empowers the holder with higher ecological access. UCP tokens are not tradeable or exchangeable.
Project developers that launch a dApp on the UChain network can launch their own token based on the URC-1 standard, which functions like the ERC-20 and NEP-5 standards that we know from smart contracts on the Ethereum and NEO blockchain.
UChain’s mainnet is projected to go live in Q4 of 2018.
Strategic partners
UChain has established partnerships with various companies focused on the sharing economy, like U-Car, LocalKing and the companies listed below:
U-Bicycle is the fourth largest bike sharing platform in the world.
GRAB and GRAB Cycle: GRAB is a company focused on the sharing economy. They offer their services in connecting users to share rides, bikes, shuttles and food. Currently they are serving South-Asian countries like: Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Uparking: a distributed parking space supplier for both individual users and car-sharing businesses.
UChain’s Investors
UChain already onboarded various renowned venture capitalist firms and other professional investors like:
Ledger Capital: A financial services and investment firm that focuses on digital assets and blockchain based projects with real-world use cases.
Genesis Capital: China’s leading investment firm when it comes to investing in blockchain projects.
Professional entities that invested in UChain in an early stage are: FBG ONE a subsidiary of FBG Capital, Badwater Capital, Black Hole, Origin-X Capital and others.
Exchange listing
The centralized digital asset exchange UEX.com recently started listing UChain (UCN) on the 17th of September. During the launch period, UEX.com is running a UChain reward program.
Media
If you would like to know more about UChain, you can check out their official channels:
Website: https://uchain.world/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/UChainEcosystem
Medium: https://medium.com/uchain
Telegram: https://t.me/UchainEcosystem
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/UchainAnn
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/UChain
Whitepaper: https://uchain.world/css/img/pdf/uchain-whitepaper-dbe5656d6c.pdf
