Inthis episode of the CRYPTO101 podcast, Matthew had the opportunity to interview Alex Sterk, community manager of UBIQ. Born in Ontario Canada and raised on a farm with automated tractors, Alex got interested in electrical engineering and had what he referred to as an “early life crisis” which led him to Vancouver where the crypto scene was thriving.
Alex was part of an experimental fork of one of the earliest cryptocurrencies called ‘Shadowcoin’. The fork was named ‘Jumbucks’ and the intention was to bring some utility to the cryptocurrency scene. Jumbucks were the exclusive currency of unique trading cards that sported the likeness of some of the original cypherpunks — future collectors take note!
Alex Sterk
Jumping forward to the present day, Alex is involved in the development of UBIQ, which describes itself as:
“[A] decentralized platform which allows the creation and implementation of smart contracts and decentralized applications. Built upon an improved Ethereum codebase, the Ubiq blockchain acts as a large globally distributed ledger and supercomputer, allowing developers to create decentralized and automated solutions to thousands of tasks which today are carried out by third party intermediaries.”
As mentioned, UBIQ is a clone of the Ethereum protocol with a few tweaks. When asked about some of the specifics of these tweaks, Alex mentioned the change in block time. UBIQ slows the Ethereum block time from between 10-20 seconds to about 90 seconds which means the UBIQ chain, in theory, should produce far less orphan/uncle blocks. These blocks are blocks that are ultimately left out of the main chain once a new block has been confirmed.
Additionally, the cost of running a dApp on UBIQ is currently comparatively cheaper than running on Ethereum. As well as this UBIQ has a plan for the future of their protocol as the block reward for UBIQ began at 8 coins per block, reducing 1 coin per year until they reach 1 reward coin per block — a relatively steady rate of inflation.
“The market will be able to tolerate that level of inflation”— Alex Sterk
The UBIQ platform was launched with no crowd funding and no pre-mine — meaning it is a project that is entirely community funded and supported from the ground up. This is one of the reasons why Alex is referred to as a “community manager” — there is no corporate hierarchy at UBIQ.
UBIQ was created around the time of the DAO Ethereum hack and issues of governance were highly controversial. Unable to completely do away with governance (as decisions need to be made by someone at sometime) UBIQ’s solution was to ultimately issue governance tokens to the holders of UBIQ coins. These tokens can be used to vote on important direction and developmental decisions for the project. Governance tokens are still being airdropped for those wanting to get involved.
While the project is entirely community funded, Alex mentioned a multi-sig wallet “development fund” which holds the value of approximately 20BTC. These funds were all contributions from the ICOs that UBIQ has helped launch on their platform and will be used to fund the development of the protocol. UBIQ is currently supported by the exchanges BIttrex and Upbit and have 8 unique ICO tokens listed for trading.
When asked about why the space needs yet another Ethereum competitor, Alex said:
“We have a different community and a different philosophy... we don’t view ourselves as a competitor to Ethereum, we are more like a complimentary network”
The community-driven Ethereum alternative is an admirable feat, and UBIQ has proven that enormous amounts of crowd-funding and hype are not needed to successfully innovate in the space. However, one can’t help but wonder whether such impressive innovation may be ultimately wasted in the grand scheme of things, as more and more projects emerge that splinter the crypto community into a multitude of competitors all trying to do the same thing. Alex even had a thought that seemed to confirm this fear when he said that:
“All [of] these tokens, all doing different things ... [is] fracturing the community”
I just hope that the work done by UBIQ can help propel the entire cryptosphere forward, and so far I have little reason to doubt them.
Check out Matthew’s roundup of the interview here.
