From Many, Unum

John Titus
Unum
Published in
2 min readNov 26, 2017

Everything in cryptocurrency is a scam until proven otherwise.

Raise your hand if you lost money in the Mt. Gox debacle. Or the Bitfinex hack. Or if you invested in Confido. Or if you had funds on BTC-e. Or any of the other countless cryptocurrency scams. Hell, if you haven’t lost money in one cryptocurrency scam or hack you probably haven’t been into cryptocurrency very long.

The power of cryptocurrency comes from its decentralized nature, and anytime someone asks you to “trust” them, whether it’s a new cryptocurrency exchange, or a new ICO, or even a new currency, you should be very, very wary. Trust and cryptocurrency do not mix.

I created Unum because I believe a price-stable cryptocurrency is essential to increased adoption of cryptocurrency by businesses, and because I don’t believe any of the existing price-stable cryptocurrencies are a good solution. They either require a tremendous amount of trust (“Sure, we back all of our currency with fiat, you can trust us!”) or are just bizarrely complicated (“Our price stable cryptocurrency is backed by dividends from our 2 other cryptocurrencies which allow users to short one currency…”).

Unum is implemented as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. You can purchase Unum by sending Ether or other ERC20 tokens, like OMG or EOS, to the smart contract. In return you’ll be credited with an amount of Unum equivalent to the US dollar value of whatever you sent in. Send in $20 worth of QTUM, get about 20 Unum. Thus, Unum’s value is backed by the value of many other cryptocurrencies. From many, Unum.

The currency you send in is held by the Unum Smart Contract as a reserve. You can trade Unum for any currency held in the reserve, again on a US dollar equivalent basis. Send in 20 Unum, and you can get about $20 of Ether, or OMG, or any other supported token.

I said “about” because there is a small conversion fee when buying or selling Unum — 0.05% is withheld as a conversion fee, which is used to pay to update the price oracle that maintains the US dollar rates of each of the supported tokens. If you buy or sell $100 with the Unum smart contract, $0.05 would be kept as a fee.

Because Unum is a smart contract, you can audit it’s reserves instantly on the block chain. And because it’s a smart contract, you can review the source code to see what I, the owner, can and cannot do. Most importantly, I cannot withdraw from the reserve. There’s literally no way to do it. I also cannot make money out of thin air by issuing Unum. The only way I can get Unum is to send in Ether or another token — just like anyone else.

You can learn more about Unum at https://unum.one.

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