Week 14 // Nordic
Hello everyone, this week I called in sick for a few days, which did not prevent our bright-eyed and tight-knit team from moving forward.
Since we are still less than 100 days away from our start date, I believe we have earned a strong B+. There are always things we could have done faster, tasks that hogged up more resources than we had expected. Nevertheless, looking back we see we have done a lot, both in terms of product development and promoting Universa Blockchain. Now the next important task is to keep up and speed up the pace, as we see the number of regions, projects and teams growing.
What have we done this week?
First of all, we tapped two new regions.
We have reached an agreement to open Universa Nordic, our office up North. Universa Nordic will start working in Finland and Estonia, implementing Universa Blockchain-based solutions into the digital economies of these countries.
From North to South, we have also agreed to open Universa Kazakhstan, to work with Central Asia’s biggest economy. The first projects using Universa Blockchain will be launched before the end of the year, along with the opening of an education center teaching the basics of blockchain economy and development of smart contracts/smart applications.
Universa and Dagestan
One more thing we did this week is we landed our troops in Dagestan, to visit PERI Innovations. Nickolay Fedorovskih delivered a workshop titled “Blockchain from the Roots to the Latest Generation” and explained what blockchain is, how it developed and where it can be used. We shared the news on Universa Blockchain development and demonstrated how ubiquitous implementation of blockchain technologies can make government finance management more transparent. We will continue developing our friendship with PERI and try to open a Universa HUB in the Caucasus.
Universa and Lanit
Lanit, one of Russia’s top three IT holdings, will open a new business area for developing blockchain projects — Digital Transformation Group, which will be headed by Denis Reimer, the holding’s VP. At least 100 million RUB worth of investment will be poured into the new entity annually. Russian-based Universa blockchain platform will become its first partner.
We keep collecting case studies and building up business development, working with banks and logistics companies. I think we will soon have more delightful projects to announce. CRM contains a substantial list of projects that can get tangible cost-saving and other benefits from blockchain integration. Unfortunately, so far they are all work in progress…
Moving to Malaysia
We are getting ready to open a development office in Kuala-Lumpur. Probably within the next 3–5 weeks we will start moving the first developers over there and have a roadshow in the Philippines and Indonesia. We believe this region, with its population of more than 300 million, will be key to the development of Universa Blockchain in South-East Asia.
The Press
This week I went live on RBC-TV and RTVi with comments on cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
Political experts’ opinions on Universa Blockchain is an exciting reading –
Product
Universa Blockchain Core
- We have released Universa Network 3.2.4 build 2
- Substantially expanded the mechanism enabling links between contracts in different blockchains, to build complex conditions and interactions:
- Designed complex multi-contract links architecture
- Developed methods to use links in permissions
- Implemented stage one: key functionality for verifying links in permissions
- Developed the framework for the following smart contract types: “Currency Account”, “Payment Order for Wire Transfer between Accounts” — done for Alfa-Bank MVP, but good for everyone.
- Done a lot of work to analyze memory usage, identify and fix memory leaks in all components of the network project (node, uniclient, API)
- Found and fixed some minor syncing problems for UDPAdapter, which speed up initial connection and resyncing in case of dropped links between the nodes
- Node statistics are now collected and sent through the client protocol, as part of the job to visualize contract status and network status
- Optimized node operation under critical loads
- Added the code for intellectual recovery of incomplete operations on node restart after an unexpected failure (e.g., critical hardware malfunction)
- Added extra DDoS protection for UDP protocol
- Built a private blockchain for Alfa-Bank, started developing a set of smart contracts with the key MVP functions (account contracts, payment order contracts, transaction register handling).
URS
- UniPayment: rates for all supported currencies are not only obtained (and regularly updated) via UniPayments, but can also be used within URS.
- Since Ethereum, unlike Bitcoin, does not allow sending payments in ether (moreover in ERC20-tokens) from several private keys in one transactions, we started working actively to consolidate ether/ERC20
- Projects for further development and optimizing consolidation: fully automatic consolidation; proper accounting of the current Bitcoin fees/Ethereum gas prices; smart contract for bulk commission sending for consolidation.
OTHERS
- Improved article editing process in KB (drafts, automatic ongoing recording of changes in the drafts, opportunity to return to the draft after a failure or at a later time). This mechanism simplifies editing large documents, which is a must-have for KB: https://kb.universa.io/kb_pages/2#web-client
- Developed “credit card contract” smart contract type for offline purchases
- Started developing protocols and algorithms for syncing offline ledgers used by consumers.
See you next week.
We are always happy to answer your questions in our Telegram channel — t.me/uplatform (EN) и t.me/universa (RU).
Follow the project news at t.me/UniversaNews (EN) and t.me/UniversaNewsRu (RU).
With best regards,
Your Paranoid CEO, Alexander Borodich
