Sharing economy is when you have some resources (say, some physical property or services) and would like to share them with others for money. Collaborative consumption is a common practice nowadays, providing significant savings with the same lifestyle and offering economic benefits for every party involved.

What do people typically share?

Knowledge
Transportation
Accommodations
Healthcare
Consumer goods, and so on

When a person looks for or wants to share some idle resources, he/she generally uses some third-party platform for an intermediary. And this is where different problems may arise such as prohibitively high commissions for service matchmaking, lack of trust between participants, compromised personal data security and a threat of data leakage. UCHAIN is going to soothe these problems plaguing traditional sharing economy systems.

What Purpose do they serve?

UCHAIN presents a public infrastructure blockchain for the needs of the share economy. Project authors are inspired by an idea to enable collaborative consumption enterprises to develop their own decentralized applications and mint own tokens using UCHAIN API and SDK.

They believe UCHAIN can make the global sharing economy more effective and tamperproof.

For every problem of a legacy sharing economy system, UCHAIN has its own solution.

Problem: high transaction fees

UCHAIN solution

On the UCHAIN platform, all transactions will be possible only between peers without any middlemen, which would lower transactional charges by more than 20% compared to existing sharing economy networks. During a transaction, the UCHAIN token will perform as a certificate when users make purchases or order services. To transact, a user will need to deposit some UCN tokens. All transactions will be processed by smart contracts and the cross-chain hosting technology to guarantee compliance of a deal.

Problem: the absence of trust between participants

UCHAIN solution

UCHAIN will record all transactional operations on their own blockchain managed by the system nodes. Their distributed ledger will be utterly traceable and abuse-free, thus producing a decentralized and irreversible chain of trust. Here, the platform will also realize a user credit passport engine, available for all parties who deliver their sharing services through the network. Such a passport will keep tabs on the behavior of all registered members, hence, allowing service providers to know whom they are dealing with. A credit passport is also necessary to perform transactions without deposits.

Problem: insecurity of personal information

UCHAIN solution

UCHAIN will keep personal data of participants and service providers in the blockchain. Sensitive data will be kept and extracted from a distributed storage with a help of a private key. Such a measure guarantees that personal information can only be accessed by its owner. If platform users want to refresh personal information in the system, they will need to sign using a private key. All modifications in personal information will be traceable. A distributed storage means that all personal data will be encrypted, sharded, and distributed across different nodes. Even if one of the nodes is attacked or compromised, it will not reveal full information about a person.

When users allow service providers to view their personal information (for instance, identity documents or property papers), a time of access, operation log, and a public key signature – everything will be reflected in the blockchain, thus, excluding the risk of data abuse.

UCHAIN Token Economy

Everything mentioned above was a positive side of UCHAIN. Now we proceed to a less pleasant side of UCHAIN – to its bi-token economy. Why are they doing that? I personally do not know, but I, as a potential investor, do not like when a blockchain startup decides to use more than one token for their project. To me, it only discourages investment. But if this fact is not a concern for you, go on.

UCHAIN will be supported by two tokens: UCN and UCP. UCN is the basic token which will be useful for:

Compensating users for submitting their personal data and providing share economy services in the network
Having access to the UCHAIN SDK for creating decentralized apps
Paying for all services provided by the platform
Publishing ads in the UCHAIN network,
Stimulating authors and developers for the creation of content and dapps through the use of UCHAIN instruments, and some other use cases

The second token is UCP that will have a voting right. UCP holders will have a higher reputation on the platform. UCP tokens can be purchased with UCN tokens. UCP tokens cannot be exchanged or traded.

Their public presale ended on June, 22, and the company decided to cancel their crowdsale round due to the market conditions. This fact also does not make UCHAIN a credit. By the way, their bounty sign-ups (which should be live now as stated in their Telegram channel) are also paused, and there are no exact dates when they will be resumed. No human admin in Telegram, too, only bots…

Final Thoughts

UCHAIN is an altruistic project aiming at improving the current collaborative economy industry with their public infrastructure blockchain network. It will essentially be a P2P network to offer and use idle resources without any intermediary. This platform will also provide software developers with tools to build decentralized applications on the base of UCHAIN or integrate existing apps with UCHAIN.

This all sounds pretty well, if digging further, some questions do arise: why do they cancel a public token sale? Why do not they communicate with the community in Telegram? Why did they decide to use two tokens in the platform? Maybe, you would be more successful than me trying to find answers to these questions.

Additional links

Authored by: Will.Smith (@iwgeiw)

Facilitating Development of Sharing Economy Dapps and Not Just That

What Purpose do they serve?

For every problem of a legacy sharing economy system, UCHAIN has its own solution.

UCHAIN Token Economy

Final Thoughts