Russia, Kazakhstan, CentralBank& Livecoin
In this issue – Astana Economic Forum, St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, ChildTech Forum and Russian Blockchain Week and a 2,500-strong social gathering with Zemfira’s concert for the SPIEF visitors; plus working with banks, integrators and developing new modules in Universa Core. More detail follows:
ChildTech: Innovations and Technology for the Benefit of the Children
At the conference, organized by Universa and the Public Chamber, we discussed how new technologies can help children, charity foundations and organizations. Several foresight sessions were held during the conference, to try and imagine the perfect services and systems of the future, which would address the issues and challenges faced by foundations, non-profits and public organizations.
The Public Chamber, Universa Blockchain and RACIB signed a tripartite agreement at the “Innovation and Technology for the Benefit of Children in Russia” Forum to develop and apply blockchain technology in schools, charity, adoption and medical examination procedures. Russia is one of the first countries to start blockchain integration in various aspects of the public services sector. The blockchain platform would include schoolchildren’s portfolios in electronic form, with all their awards, diplomas and skills earned. In the future it will help an employer to see a jobseeker’s actual experience starting from childhood. “Technical innovations are developing so fast, our children are much better with the Internet technologies than we are. Mastering the technologies is becoming a basic requirement for human wellbeing. Particularly important are new technological solutions for children with special needs, as they allow these kids to enter the big world, rather than staying in a reservation”, says Diana Gurtskaya, Chairman of the Public Chamber Committee for Support of Family, Maternity and Childhood. In another important update from the Forum, the establishment of Association of Blockchain Funds, focusing on digital charity, was announced. “The blockchain can be used to show how exactly the donations were spent, as it allows tracing and verifying everything”, says Alexander Borodich, founder of Universa Blockchain.
Global Challenges Summit / Astana Economic Forum
Eurasia’s largest forum, opened by the President of Kazakhstan, Steve Wozniak, Ban Ki-Moon and many other legendary speakers, I was allocated a very exciting section — Future of Money, with the managers of IBM, PWC, TechGarden and RocketSpace. I was happy to share my view on how the money of the future would look, why cryptocurrencies would move to a supra-national level, and how worktime can be tokenized. After the presentation, we talked to TechGarden about opening a Universa lab in Kazakhstan.
Russian Blockchain Week
At the plenary meeting, Universa defended its reputation as the fastest blockchain for financial transactions, a blockchain that can help tokenize the production sector of the economy and eradicate corruption. Our heated discussion was upheld by — Sergey Solonin (QIWI Russia), Sergey Polikanov (Sberbank), Dmitry Marinichev (Internet-Ombudsman, entrepreneur), Ilya Dimitrov (Association of Electronic Trading Sites), Evan Luthra (CEO & Founder — El Group International) and Pavel Novikov (Director of the Center of Financial Technologies. Skolkovo Foundation).
After that, I presented my Future of Blockchain report, reminding of the forecasts I made at the last-year’s Russian Blockchain Week, most of which turned out to be prophetic. I also made new forecasts for the year ahead — more on those in a separate article.
After that, I had a long discussion with the forum participants, explaining why decentralization will prevail over current closed IT infrastructure in many industries, starting from government reporting and workflow systems and ending with tokenization of natural resources and supra-national cryptocurrencies.
The biggest recent event for Russia was SPIEF — St. Peterburg International Economic Forum
Our visit was so intense, I spent an entire week afterwards trying to sort out all the contacts, tentative negotiations requests and meetings. These three days were the most productive ones I had in a long time. This is a rare occasion when you can schedule a meeting with the bosses of BMW, Gold Sachs, information technology ministers of several countries, heads of large companies and foundations and billionaires at the same time — and they will all be happy to reserve half an hour for the conversation. Under normal procedure, scheduling and holding these meetings would take quite a few months and a lot of flights. And with SPIEF, it was all done within three days and on the same venue.
Zemfira party by Universa
But it all started the night before, when Kommersant and ourselves arranged a social gathering with Zemfira concert for the guests of the St. Petersburg Forum. This was a great opportunity to gather the key customers and visitors — and discuss partnership opportunities with the most evasive top executives in an informal setting ☺
The party was a huge success, the cocktails and the concert were terrific, and everyone we invited was happy. They say this was the best SPIEF pre-party in all its history.
But let’s get back to business ☺
Meetings / interviews non-stop. Meetings and interviews with the press followed every 30 minutes, two days in a row. By the end of day two, I was pretty much exhausted. But I had my panel presentation — Blockchain and the State — scheduled for Day 3 ☺ So we continued working from 8:30am to 10:30pm, running mostly on coffee and on the enthusiasm of seeing how many people I meet were eager to implement blockchain. Thanks to my faithful assistants, who kept helping, scheduling, organizing, making calls and homing me in on my vis-à-vis at the huge Forum venue, in a sprint of 30-minute meetings. Whenever not in a meeting, I was chased by TV, radio and magazine reporters asking for interviews..
Blockchain and the State
My presentation at the country’s main event was shared with the Central Bank, the Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Innovations, member of the Board of Directors Deloitte US, Intel VP and a member of the Ethereum Advisory Board. The debates were fierce — I strongly recommend you watch the broadcast, particularly Yury Pripachkin’s speech and my comments on the Central Bank’s viewpoint.
During the panel presentation we had a heated discussion with Olga Skorobogatova, First Deputy Chairman of the Russian Central Bank, who claimed existing blockchain technologies are not fast and mature enough to be used for interbank payments or issuing supra-national cryptocurrencies. I insisted that any attempts to develop pilots using the first-generation blockchains are guaranteed failure, and one has to use the latest technology, particularly Universa Blockchain. As a result, we agreed to have a meeting with the Central Bank and take a look together at how our technology can be applied to the Central Bank needs.
At the same time, I tried to make it clear to my colleagues that we are not trying to digitize old paper-based processes using the blockchain technology, but rather our goal is to make a quantum leap into a new process, built from the ground up, which uses all the advantages of digital transformation and distributed systems. Not evolving paper-based processes into digital ones, but reinventing the workflow in the digital paradigm.
The entire session can be seen here –
Presentation pieces edited together.
LiveCoin now lists UTNP
The Press on us –
#Development
Report on May 29 iteration
V2
- Chatle & Node API using scala, squashed a few bugs in JS API
- Added a framework for testing JS API
- Key addresses, CRC32, extra algorithms in the SHA family moved to universajs v2
JS API
- JS API
- Account registration
- Registering/deleting a nickname
- Finding a contact
- Sending messages in a chat
- Registering a contract
- Checking contract status
- Obtaining a list of products (U packages)
- Preparing an order for a product (U package)
- Obtaining the cost of registering a contract
Universa MainNet
- Version 3.4.12 released
- UNS1 contract: distributed storage of the name register for addresses (keys) and origins
- Distributed time-based paid storage
- Consensus-based synchronization
- Payment in U inside the registration transaction
- SLOT1: refactored using test operation results
- Java API expansion:
- Simplified working with tokens with additional issue,
- Simplified UNS1 and SLOT1 contract creation
- Automatic search for stored contracts using the existing (public) contract loading interface
KB
- Added the basic structure and lots of documentation on various aspects of the operations, including:
- Contracts Service: a factory for working with contracts in Java API
- Contract references: a detailed description of the mechanism for linking between contracts and building graphs of interconnected contracts
- Mobile interface for reading articles
- Added the possibility to add flowcharts and diagrams as a special markup type.
UNICLIENT
- Minor updates, simplified work with contract IDs
- Fixed network connection error for local operations
UNIXCHANGE
- Automatic Ethereum consolidation
- Good commissions recommended for Bitcoin.
- Commissions for Ethereum. In addition to using ethgasstation API — our own heuristics, that only need to access the pool on a geth node.
- Added a reinforced state machine algorithm that keeps track of all transactions and logs them into a database compared to outgoing transactions, to ensure more reliable operation with valued contracts
- Transaction-based mechanism for storing revisions of valued contracts
- Rewritten the hypertoken export logic to return incorrect/failed/cancelled contracts/payments whenever possible
- Started work on making an integration interface for token issuers, to make the issued tokens available via web
MISCELLANEOUS
- Two open-source projects that we use in our work were uploaded to Github. These include improved and updated versions of open-source products:
- https://github.com/UniversaBlockchain/web3j
- https://github.com/UniversaBlockchain/nanohttpd
- Rewritten a web scanner that automatically reads the configuration and checks availability of all nodes: https://xchange.universa.io/network
Stay tuned!
We are always happy to answer your questions in the Telegram channel — t.me/uplatform (EN) and t.me/universa (RU).
Follow the news in t.me/UniversaNews (EN) and t.me/UniversaNewsRu (RU).
Sincerely yours, Paranoid CEO, Alexander Borodich
