Ian Yu — The Future of Blockchain and Sharing Economy (Walian CN Interview Transcript)
Xing Xing:
Ian, you used to be in the field of bicycle sharing. What drove you to start the UChain project?
Ian Yu:
We were one of the early adopters in China to have started the bicycle sharing business since 2016. In 2017, we started a joint venture in Southeast Asia with Grab — GrabCycle marking U.B. Group entering the international market. In September 2017 we started U-Bicycle North America Division targeting the US and Canada market. During the operation process we found that as a centralized operation platform there are so many challenging problems.
My team and me as an individual, we were aware of bitcoin and cryptocurrency since 2013. Ever since then we’ve been keen on it and kept ourselves informed about the development of cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology behind it. We think the technology would not only be useful for U-Bicycle but also for other sharing economy enterprises. We all share similar hindrances in our business model which could be tackled by applying blockchain technology. So we decided to build a blockchain platform to utilize a decentralized infrastructure and incentivize our ecosystem members — to disrupt the current business ecosystem of the sharing economy. And that’s where UChain started.
Xing Xing:
What areas does UChain currently target in its sharing economy model?
Ian Yu:
Because as a matter of fact, the sharing economy can be divided into many sub fields; including shared transportation, accommodation, finance, supply chain, and even shared computing power and virtual assets, we have a wide variety of targeted markets. Uber, Airbnb, WeWork are all world renowned sharing economy enterprises that have proven the disrupting effect sharing economy enterprises can have on traditional businesses.
Xing Xing:
The word “sharing” usually gives people a lot of room to imagine…
Ian Yu:
We’d like to start with shared transportation, which we have vast experience in. And furthermore, we will expand the ecosystem to shared working space, shared computing power, and virtual property by recruiting more ecosystem co-developers.
Xing Xing:
Could you describe how UChain can help individual users or enterprise clients. How is it reflected on macro and micro perspective?
Ian Yu:
UChain is essentially a technology service platform for sharing economy infrastructure. From a macro perspective, the entire sharing economy model will have a sharing service provider. Maybe an enterprise service provider, or a property service provider. And users are on the other side. It will have peer to peer transactions between users and service providers, and they’re matched. Currently, these transactions are controlled by centralized platforms, and UChain hopes to take out the middle man in this process, decreasing the need for centralized platforms.
If users can be connected to property providers directly, there will be no transaction fee, and no middle man to charge a commission. Also, the transaction data will be more secure. We’ll provide an open platform for all sharing economy enterprises for easier development. All data will be stored on-chain. At the same time we’ll incentivize the users in community, to encourage them to participate in the ecosystem and increase the overall efficiency, and reward all participants. At the same time we want to optimize the relationship between market supply and demand to improve efficiency.
Xing Xing:
Since blockchain itself is a technology to disrupt the existing relations of production…
Ian Yu:
I agree. From the micro perspective, an enterprise open platform would offer all kinds of API/SDK services for enterprises. And all these are originating from our previous experience in sharing business. In this way, we only need to make relatively small modifications to make it possible and accessible on our blockchain platform.
Xing Xing:
And UChain as a public infrastructure, data is essential to us… how should we secure user data and gain users’ trust in the early stages?
Ian Yu:
UChain being a public infrastructure, data is essential to us. We want to ensure users’ data to be as secure as possible from two aspects; the first is through a proper mechanism, the second way is through technical means. We can start with how we can achieve it through a proper mechanism. Users’ data will be scattered and stored on different nodes. All service providers who want to access this data can only do so after users make the authorization. This is our first mean to secure user data. Even after users’ authorization, these service provides still need to access through UChain’s smart contract, which has its own encryption algorithm to ensure data security. and through this whole mechanism the data is secured.
And another way we utilize to ensure we keep data secure is through technical means. Users’ data will be scattered and stored seperately. Even if someone managed to get access to it, since all data is encrypted and located in different locations, it’s an impossible task to put them together and decrypt it. Through these two means, user data is stored as secure as possible.
Xing Xing:
Sharing economy has a lot of use cases. What’s your plan on expanding in the market?
Ian Yu:
We will first enter the market through shared transportation. That includes service providers focussing on all kinds of transportation services. Shared space will be the second field we plan to enter. Coworking spaces like WeWork provides, are a way to share the ownership of a property. We also plan to enter the shared computing power market.
Xing Xing:
Your vision is to establish a decentralized platform. How can you achieve it through blockchain, and motivating more participants to join the ecosystem and get rewarded?
Ian Yu:
In two ways — the first and fundamental way is still through technical means. To develop a peer to peer decentralized platform, it can eliminate the commision taken by centralized platforms and give more value back to all users and service providers. And this portion is usually 20–30% of platform’s revenue. This is the first point.
The second point is we’ll take the advantage of the community to promote our platform. For the efficiency of the service providers, all users should participate into the community operation. Taking shared cars as an example, users can participate into the business by scheduling and maintaining the car condition and as a return he can get a portion of the profit as a reward. Users are also a very essential part of the business operation. Users can stake, and by contributing to the ecosystem, get rewarded at the same time. Both points are essential to the development of our ecosystem.
Xing Xing:
Could you clarify what your plan is for the marketing, and what UChain’s long term vision is?
Ian Yu:
We wish to break the barriers and establish a global sharing economy decentralized network. On one hand, in north America, Southeast Asia, and the European market, we already established many good partnerships to help us make UChain a big success. On the other hand, we are experienced in the industry and we know what pain points these service providers have. So we achieve it through technical means on the one hand to achieve the value of our platform and encourage and incentivize more ecosystem participants to share the profit to perfect our ecosystem and to achieve a long term sustainable development.
Xing Xing:
Thanks Ian.
Ian Yu:
Thanks.
UChain — The next generation distributed smart network blockchain for the sharing economy.
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