Summary of our AMA (April 2020)

Unibright.io
UnibrightIO
Published in
9 min readMay 1, 2020

We present a condensed summary of the AMA (Ask Me Anything) we did at the end of April 2020. We cover multiple topics around Unibright like its past and present, our clients, the Unibright Framework, Unibright Freequity, Baseline, EEA, the UBT token and more.

As requested by the awesome Unibright community, Unibright’s co-founders Marten and Stefan held an AMA at the end of April, covering a selection of more than 100 questions that had been collected from the community in the days prior. A video of the AMA can be found on our YouTube channel:

In this post, we give a summary for each topic along with the answers given to various questions. The AMA will be followed up by two live demonstrations/videos of Freequity components, showing the token issuing and simulation aspect and the trading capabilities with guaranteed liquidity. Those videos will be available on our YouTube channel as well in the coming days.

Present and Future of Unibright

  • Our vision of Unibright for the next years is to become a leading blockchain powerhouse. We want to provide first class development and consultancy services and products and additionally create value with our unique network of players within the field of blockchain technology and digital assets. With our verticals, our mix of products and services, a great team and a huge network, we see ourselves becoming a pioneering player in the field. All of this is based on the UBT utility token, evolving it more and more into a Universal Blockchain Token.
  • As concerns hiring new employees, we will dynamically adjust to the demands and opportunities offered, scaling the team as needed. With our setup we have been able to rapidly scale up the team in the past. This approach lets us tackle any opportunity in the time to come.
  • We do not see “knock-off projects“ copying Unibright as a threat. First of all, it is not just about copying code — a lot of knowledge is bound to people. Additionally as we are moving so fast, one could not be fast enough in copying. Nevertheless, we even like the idea of people and projects building upon the Unibright stack for the whole space to benefit. This is something we see with Baseline, where the community is asked to “copy” the code and build products on it.
  • We are still in 100% control of all Unibright equity, verticals and decisions; therefore it is not possible for another company to “take us over”. If strategic partnership options arise, we will be open to them, as we have been in the past with our partnerships with Zühlke, Microsoft Germany and others.

Clients and Adoption

  • Already a big portion of Unibright tokens (UBT) has been locked within our products and services. 7.5M out of 150M total tokens were locked at the beginning of 2020, and more have been added. Although we are just at the verge of widespread blockchain adoption, we already see a lot of growth coming into the sector and are very positive about adding customers using our tokens for various offerings in the future. The token locks indicate how many customers are using parts of our offerings — at least those not paying in fiat money.
  • We won’t make any numeric predictions on how many tokens will be locked at any specific date in the future, as this is akin to trying to read a crystal ball. The usage of automated software products needs adoption of the underlying technology first. We like to focus on building new use cases and verticals for our tech stack and our token and are sure that everything else will follow, like it did in the last two years.
  • Demand for workshops is still high, especially in the areas of Baseline and SAP integration. These are covered with the EEA/Baseline token locks in December. Due to the given situation with COVID, some in-person meetings had to be postponed for obvious reasons. Many workshops are requested to be held by the founders personally, so to honour our priorities, we decided to not offer the smallest workshops due to high demand.
  • Profits made by Unibright will be re-invested into the company by paying for the team and resources. Additionally, we are always open to great ideas and ventures to selectively put into our resources or investment funds to help building great things.
  • Cooperation takes place within Freequity. Components of our 360° tokenization platform are designed to be white-labeled and used by customers, e.g. with our liquidity component and first companies in the STO space.

Unibright Framework

The Unibright Framework is blockchain agnostic and capable of connecting various blockchains and off-chain systems like for example SAP ERP. You can find more information on the framework here.

  • ERP integration in general is independent from blockchain usage. It refers to connecting systems on a technical basis, so that they can exchange information and eventually value, enabling distributed business processes. With the Unibright Connector (built on our existing integration platform) we offer exactly this. But the value proposal of the Unibright Framework is ADDING the blockchain world into that picture — so that not only off-chain systems can be integrated, but also numerous blockchains and blockchain protocols like Baseline can. This makes it possible to have not only distributed business processes, but decentralised ones, making use of all the features blockchains offer, like being trustworthy and tamper-proof by design, which is a huge addition to the traditional off-chain world.
  • The Unibright Framework is “Baseline ready” to support visual smart contract modelling, generation, connection and monitoring of baselined processes.

Token and Exchanges

  • We will not engage in actions to increase liquidity for the Unibright token (UBT) manually. We have feedback from customers that they can use the token as intended. Apart from that, we see that additional liquidity comes naturally with wider usage and demand for the token. Liquidity is just one metric of a token success — the usage of the actual utility is also a very important one.
  • More new exchanges where our utility token can be purchased appeared during the last months. For the future we are fine with other exchanges adding to that, given they are legally compliant to support our utility token and address customers all over the world. If a new exchange extends the potential audience of utility users, we support that.
  • Customers can use the token “independently” from the current market price, as soon as they lock the tokens up within our Framework. This gives them the possibility to renew their locked up tokens for a fixed amount periodically. Our token model proved to be strong in all phases of new technology: easy access for early adopters, and incentive for long-term usage for bigger players coming in later. Please read more information on the token model in our blog on that.

Partners

DataDash is and has been a very thoughtful and valuable advisor; we do not “measure” him on marketing activities. We are happy to continue working with him. Other partnerships have been made especially by evaluating their future potential, e.g. Tolar with offering an alternative DLT-approach and different consensus algorithms. Being start-ups themselves, some partnerships may show their value in the future, when the underlying tech stack has been built completely.

Private

We were asked if we play “FF7”, and had to look up what FF7 actually means. A proof that we are not real gamers, we are too busy with building ;-) But in 1990, Marten and Stefan (aged 11 and 13) had much fun playing “Italy 90” together ;-)

Baseline Protocol

The Baseline Protocol is an open source initiative that combines advances in cryptography, messaging, and blockchain to deliver secure and private business processes at low cost via the public Ethereum Mainnet. Unibright plays a major role in developing the Baseline Protocol, which is about connecting traditional systems to each other via Ethereum Mainnet. You can find more on it and Unibright’s leading role here.

  • Baseline has a very positive effect on Unibright and its offerings. As we share the same vision, we see a clear win-win situation. Based on Baseline, we can offer compelling enterprise blockchain solutions, enabling secure and private business processes via public Ethereum Mainnet.
  • On our product side, we adapted the Unibright Framework to be fully “Baseline compliant”, and offer our toolset to establish a complete business lifecycle on the Baseline Protocol: visual definition of baseline ready business processes (e.g. Request for Proposal, Request for Quotation, approval processes and many more), generating code for and connection to the needed registrar smart contracts, providing pre-built and configured adaptors for off-chain systems of record (like SAP and other ERPs and CRMs) to connect to the Baseline API, monitoring the ongoing processes across private and public chains and including off-chain systems
  • It is one of the major requests for participation that you build your product to be compatible with the new Protocol. We do not see the danger of being copied — rather, the opportunity to raise usage of our products. Think of Baseline as a protocol like HTTP. You still need browsers to make use of it. And you will always use the best browser. We think Unibright is the best “browser” (toolset) to take full advantage of the Baseline Protocol.
  • Unibright will contribute to the open-source project behind Baseline, by adding and reviewing code and specifications. This will be coordinated alongside the work of EMINENT, the Integration TaskForce under the roof of the EEA, where Unibright already plays a leading role. EMINENT focuses on the standards and specifications used to integrate the Ethereum Mainnet with ERP, CRM, and other corporate systems of record.

Freequity

Freequity is our compliant 360° security token platform. It is a platform that covers all relevant stages of a tokenization process and integrates them into markets and system landscapes and bundles together issuance, a regulatory compliant marketplace and guaranteed liquidity inside one platform. Please find more here.

  • It is important to understand Freequity as software components. It is not our goal to hand-pick the best “real estate” project; this should be done by project managers of the respective offerings. Our software is highly adaptable, is based on a visual no-coding approach, and offers high automation, regulatory compliance and integration by design.
  • Freequity components can be used independently (e.g. only adding liquidity to an existing token) or be used as a complete stack for tokenization. The intended first usage is as white-label solution, meaning Unibright gives away licenses/allowances to use Freequity. Therefore the Unibright Token (UBT) is needed, as it is the utility token to use any Unibright product or service.
  • Freequity is not limited to real estate use cases, although it has been developed to focus on these first, thereby allowing a token to be tailored to the needs of real estate assets. This includes for example doing analysis on which pool sizes are needed to guarantee liquidity for the token and finding the best parameters and formulas for price determination (bonding curve).
  • Freequity’s main goal is to create specific tokenization solutions for many (especially smaller/mid-sized) assets. This is in contrast to traditional approaches where millions of traders trade one digital asset on a big exchange. We envision Freequity allowing for “millions” of tailor made tokenizations, where every tokenized asset might only have hundreds or thousands or investors.

Thank you

For us, this AMA was very challenging, as we wanted to answer as many of the questions as possible. We are thankful and proud of our engaged community — so thanks for your interest in Unibright! We will keep on buidling, and let you know about our progress in our blog.

Unibright is a team of blockchain specialists, architects, developers and consultants with 20+ years of experience in business processes and integration. Unibright turns ideas into businesses, and improves processes with the help of blockchain technology.

Unibright develops enterprise solutions, invests in start-ups, builds process modelling tools and integration platforms and offers a 360° ecosystem around tokenized assets.

Verticals of https://unibright.io

Learn more by visiting the Unibright website, Twitter and Medium.

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