AMA w/ CEO, Ian Yu

Published in

UChain

6 min readFeb 23, 2019

Dear UChain Community,

Recently, there has been an influx of questions coming from our community regarding the legitimacy of our project and what is actually happening behind the scenes here at UChain. We recently saw two of our incredible community managers leave UChain due to personal reasons, which has sparked a lot of controversies.

I decided to do a quick AMA to hopefully clear up any doubt, or, “FUD” that is currently surrounding UChain. My team has gathered the most asked question from recent times and I’ll do my best to answer them as best as possible here.

1. Is this a scam? What are you actually doing?

We believe that blockchain will revolutionize the world, which is no different for the sharing economy by transforming the existing centralized platform matching business model to a P2P network. We have been devoting more time, energy and resources into UChain, so it’s a real shame to see anyone calling it a scam.

In the past 2 weeks, due to Chinese New Year, some of the team members have been on holidays but our development progress has never been suspended. Progress and code continue to be made and committed on GitHub. Recently, the main research and development work on the SDK microservice has been progressing by 30%. The 0.6 version of UIP is also under development and we are still performing ICE middleware research. In addition, we are streamlining our core code, improving running performance so that it can run on smaller machines, such as Raspberry Pi. Lastly, we also filed a few patents recently.

I believe the confusion and doubt regarding our legitimacy is lack of publicized dev updates, which we are solely responsible for. Moving forward, I’ll do my best to have these more regularly to keep our community up to date.

2. Why have there been no development updates via Github in over 5 months? What is the core developing team working on?

It’s simply not true that there are no development updates on our GitHub in the past 5 months. The uchain-fullnode has been committed more than 440 times in the last five months, and more than 30 times this week. All community members can check out the progress at https://github.com/UCHAIN-WORLD/uchain-fullnode

At present, we have implemented the core code of UChain through two branches of Java and C++, by gradually optimizing our core code, we aim to achieve optimal performance.

3. Why have the community found links to Apex in the Github? Is the Blockchain copied from them?

Just like the announcement we made on Telegram, the tech team at APEX Network has been acting as technical advisors and consultants for our blockchain tech development. No part of the source code was copied from any source. Particular snippets have been purposely marked with “APEX” in the comments if for that portion of the code we asked an engineer from their team to help us review the code and make minor edits and optimizations.

4. What can we expect from UChain short term + long term?

Unfortunately, we’re in the night, and the night is the darkest just before the dawn. Despite the price fluctuations that most people have their eyes on, we continue to devote all resources possible into the project and strive to deliver what we envisioned in our original whitepaper. For the short term, the most important thing is our main net launch along with the partnership announcement with our ecosystem co-builder. In the long term, we strive to disrupt the sharing economy with blockchain to empower users and enterprises at the same time.

5. The Testnet seemed to launch without much notice. How did that go from your perspective and when can we expect Mainnet?

Just to clarify, the Testnet has not been officially launched. On December 18th, we conducted a small-scale public beta invitation. We called it the “Alpha Test”. More than 100 community members participated and gave us some valuable feedback. At present, our core code developers are developing and optimizing C++ core code, and there are also node developers working on the application layer development (light wallet, blockchain browser, GUI, etc.)

6. How many people are currently working on UChain?

Currently, there are 20 developers working on the UChain blockchain, including core blockchain network, blockchain explorer, wallet and DApp integration.

One of our daily update meetings beginning

7. Recently U-Bicycle Canada stated they had no partnership/co-operation with UChain. Can you clarify what’s going on here?

It’s a misunderstanding and it’s been corrected on both Twitter and Telegram.

U-Bicycle is a fully commercialized company that provides sharing bicycle services in Asia and North America region. UChain Foundation is a non-profit foundation organization registered in the Cayman Islands and is primarily responsible for the ecosystem and development of the UChain network. These two entities are completely separate. UChain will, however, provide U-Bicycle with technical support for blockchain and R&D for its upcoming U-Bicycle DApp. In addition to U-Bicycle, we also have some heavyweight strategic partners which will be announced soon!

8. Is there plans to improve liquidity soon? more exchanges?

Most altcoins don’t have much liquidity nowadays, even those listed on major exchanges. The core team prefers to be devoting money and time into our tech development. That being said, we will be looking into additional exchanges in the future to somewhat improve liquidity.

9. What is HAWK? You seem to be focusing on that more than the actual Blockchain these days

HAWK is a dApp being developed on UChain as a sharing scooter service.

For more information, you can visit here.

10. Most projects are going bankrupt these days, with many blockchain projects laying off staff. How is UChain currently positioned to continue long-term growth?

The bear market is hurting us bad. As we raised ETH during our ICO and as everyone is aware, ETH has dropped more than 80% since then. The drop of our holdings also forces us to adjust our project roadmap, cutting the engineering team from around 60 to 20 along with many business cooperation incentives.

At the current stage, we will solely be focusing on tech development to make sure we release our product, as promised in our whitepaper, in a timely manner.

11. Funds raised from ICO, how are they currently being used?

Funds raised from the ICO are mainly being used for Technology Development to ensure we have a working product to put forward and begin the mission we originally set out to achieve, “Sharing Economy 2.0”.

That is all we have time for today. I feel this has hopefully cleared most doubt in our community. As mentioned at the beginning, I will work with our team to make sure we begin to release more updates to keep you updated on our progress.

To quickly touch upon the Community Management issue and Telegram spam influx recently. UChain will shortly be bringing on a new Community Manager to help manage and update you the best they can!

UChain will continue as we always have, developing our product, and we hope you stick around to achieve our mission together.