Universa Blockchain: Worth investing in the next Ethereum?

I just recently discovered the ICO for Universa and was intrigued by the way they approach the crypto market, but is it worth investing?

Disclaimer: i'm not a financial advisor and you have to define your own opinion whether or not to invest.

Synopsis

Universa, another new ICO set to launch in a couple of hours. Universa markets itself as the alternative to current platforms such as Ethereum (and Bitcoin). It's most common features are:

• Fast Blockchain protocol (1000x faster than Bitcoin)
• Safe smart contracts
• Light Android client
• Zero knowledge platform (no wallets available).
• Low (fixed) transaction costs (100x cheaper)
• Proof of State

Universa main selling point (among others) seems to answer the call to gain more speed than it's predecessor Ethereum. Universa claims it can reach up to 20.000 transactions per second (tps) while Ethereum could handle 15 transactions per second, according to their website, more on this later.

Looking into the whitepaper a little further you can see Universa allows for more neat innovations while using their blockchain which might make Universa a very good competitor to Ethereum and other similar blockchains.

Team

The team for Universa is extensive and lists names such as:

Alexander Borodich	Sergey Chernov)	Alex Dovnar
CEO, Business Angel, Studied at the Stockholm school of economics, has invested in various other crypto related companies such as Shapeshift.io and is the founder of the #1 crowdinvesting platform in Russia.	CTO, has a grand history in being a CTO in a list of companies and has 17 years of experience in cryptography.	Art-Director, 20 years of experience (the website looks great so that's probably his work).

Last but not least, the advisory board for Universa has a very interesting name to it as well. They are being advised by John McAfee and although he has made some grand statements, he's very active in the crypto community and has a lot of experience business-wise.

The blockchain

Now let's look into Universa itself and look through two of the most notable USP's they ought have over existing blockchains.

Universa can do 20.000 transactions per second

Being one of the main aspects of that Universa is advertising with. How are they able to get to such speeds? The answer lies in how they deal with their transaction and the history of their transactions.

Universa only stores the "hash-of-the-state" of the final balance is stored and saved onto the full blockchain, rather than "traditional" Blockchains that reuire the full accounting of all transactions. This means that each future node connecting to the network would benefit from a size reduction of 99.99% in synchronizing the blockchain.

Next to that, the blockchain doesn't rely on Proof of Work or Proof of Stake but they rely on Proof of State. This means the permission to create new blocks come from participation as a *licensed node. A state can occur at any time and is verified by a trusted actor.

Next to this capability it also allows for asynchronous actions from different contracts to occur out-of-rder and still have the same final hashes of global state as mentioned in the white paper. This is a big advantage over the current synchronous approach of current blockchains. It's like going from the old Internet Explorer 6 websites to the modern day single page applications where everything can be managed asynchronously which enables flexibility.

*Licensed / Trusted nodes

Wait a moment,"licensed node", "trusted node".

What does this mean?

What is required to be a "trusted node"?

Is Universa trying to go for a decentralised-centralised approach where a certain entity controls all of the "trusted nodes"? If the latter is the case, it might be a downside of Universa if you look at being completely decentralised and not tied to a company controlling the nodes.

It's worth investigating this approach further and I will update this post when I know more.

Let's continue.

Safe smart contracts that are actually smart

Smart contracts, in Universa, can be seen as executable scripts stored in a tree structure. They're stored as a key-value pair and each key-value pair can store data such as:

• a fixed value
• binary executable logic
• dynamically executing scripts

They also have the capability to refer to other trees, addresses and more. This enables the possibility for very complex structues and flexibility.

This is very interesting for programmers that would like to program complex situations in a contract or create a full-blown application on Universa such as

• Car sharing
• Shared room or locker keys for hotels, shopping mall and so on.
• Internet of Things appliances and/or smart home (could this mean anything for IOTA)?
• Confirmatoins at toll roads or payments for parking your car.

(Source)

Conclusion

All in all Universa looks like a interesting new approach in the crypto community and introduces quite a few new concepts. The only downside, for me, is the setup of licensed or trusted nodes which might imply a central entity is controlling these nodes.

Other than that, the speed and diversity the platform offers in the form of smarter smart contracts.

Could Universa be the true new Ethereum? I don't know. The speed, low fixed transaction fees and smarter implementations of contracts and money do make it a compelling adversary but it truly depends on how the trusted nodes are implemented and whether they form a dependency in the network which practically make it centralised again.

Personally I do think it's an interesting investment and could offer a new fresh approach to what's currently seen as the baseline.

If you also want to jump on the Universa train, you can do so by using this link: https://check.universa.io/-3DJweh

Just a couple of hours more until the ICO starts!

Have a good day!