UChain - Blockchain Foundation for Sharing Economy

The concept of sharing economy, which lately swept global markets in a flurry of successful startups, changed in some way how we approach ownership versus utilization paradigm in our daily lives. Normally, if I need something, say, a power drill, I buy it, i.e. become an owner of this thing. If we get deeper into the situation we would realize a certain paradox. While initially, I bought the power drill because of its utility, namely, its usefulness during house renovations, after that, it can lie idly for years, and this is what the concept of ownership boils down to in many cases. In other words, ownership means that I keep certain things, not using them and preventing anybody else from using them as well. Which is kinda insane, to think about it. Sharing economy somewhat upended this concept of ownership, tapping into the potential of things to bring profits to their owner through their utility. It's even strange that it's considered a novel concept because this was the initial idea that fueled the emergence of trade of goods at the very beginning. In a nutshell, sharing economy is a system, allowing anybody to lend and borrow things we normally own without utilizing them, such as spare rooms, cars, tools, etc. It can be anything, including even somebody's skills and free time. The emergence of the Internet made the realization of this concept possible because initially, the most intractable stumbling block on the way of the widespread lending and borrowing was lack of information and limited means of communication. I would need to know who is interested in borrowing a certain item in my area, plus, a certain amount of background information about this person, allowing me to be sure that he's not going to wreck my precious possession while using it, and so on. Speaking of the current situation with sharing economy, while the most obvious applications of this concept, such as renting spare apartments or underutilized cars, are already successfully implemented by the big companies like Airbnb or Uber, the idea still holds a lot of potential in other areas.

Here, I begin to wonder, is it really so, that only big companies can create conditions for sharing economy to thrive? Essentially sharing economy lies within a paradigm of peer to peer interaction, and organizing this kind of interaction through a big centralized corporate-owned platform seems a bit counterintuitive. Here I think about the huge success of the BitTorrent protocol and some of its underlying features. For example, BitTorrent networks are completely self-organized and not owned by anybody, therefore they are free for all participants. Lack of central management guarantees the consistency of the network's rules, in other words, that they are not going to be changed overnight on a whim of the platform's owners. Also, a decentralized nature of such system makes it both censorship resistant and robust. In other words, the system consists of hundreds of thousands of computers all around the world, and it doesn't have any central point, which failure could bring it to a halt. It virtually impossible to block torrents because to do that one would need to somehow shut down all those myriads of computers comprising it; the system doesn't have servers, presenting a single point of attack. Similarly, torrents are hardly affected by failures and blackouts of specific network segments; the system, spanning innumerable sub-networks and areas of the Internet, stays afloat, continuing its operations as usual.

Which brings us to the concept of blockchain based platforms. Indeed, blockchain has much in common with the BitTorrent paradigm, described above. It's decentralized, which makes it much more reliable and robust than traditional client-server architecture based platforms. Really, to think about it, for example, all Airbnb operations are run on a limited number of company's servers. For example, in case of a massive DDoS attack on those servers, the whole thing can be put out of commission in the blink of an eye. Also, the company itself can go bust, which would also paralyze all the Airbnb activities all around the world. Which sounds a bit apocalyptic, the way things stand now. None of those things can happen to the blockchain based project. First, blockchain similarly to torrents is a decentralized system, not having a single point of failure. To bring such a system down one would need to successfully attack most of its nodes that can number in tens of thousands. The second important thing is that a blockchain platform normally doesn't have a central authority. In its initial stages the system's rules are established by its developers and enshrined in platform's algorithms (e.g. smart contracts) but after the system goes into production, it's impossible to change those rules without reaching some sort of consensus among all the platform's participants. The system's data and algorithms are replicated among its multiple nodes, so in order to implement some changes, all the nodes need to agree on respective software updates. This is why blockchain based platforms, in most cases, are also self-governed platforms. To make possible further development, a platform from the beginning includes specific protocols and procedures, allowing its users to come to an agreement regarding changing the platform's rules and algorithms.

In a certain sense, the concepts of peer to peer sharing economy and decentralized self-governing blockchain platforms are somewhat ideologically close. So the blockchain based implementation of such projects seems like a logical step. Here where the UChain project comes into view. In a sense, it's a blockchain framework, allowing to realize an unlimited number of applications on top of it. One of the platform's key advantages is its implementation of network consensus algorithm, allowing it to support industrial scale level of transaction activity. The protocol is part of the Ripple project's architecture and it's based on reaching network consensus through the voting process among trusted nodes. Without getting deep into technical details, this algorithm (RPCA) doesn't rely on heavy calculations (like the proof-of-work) to ensure that its participants have an incentive to maintain the system in the correct state, which makes the system much more "lightweight" and fast compared to the Bitcoin networks. Also, RPCA is better than Proof of Stake consensus algorithm in a sense that it lacks delays of the former, related to waiting when the sufficient number of nodes would reach a consensus. It makes RPCA much faster and capable of processing amounts of transactions comparable to those of traditional payment systems like VISA. Ripple consensus algorithm and based on it blockchain architecture comprise a foundation of the UChain project, on top of which are built several service and application layers, providing authentication and security services, APIs for independent developers, systems to maintain ratings of users and enterprises, forming the top layer of platform's architecture. As I mentioned above, UChain project's platform is not designed as a specific sharing economy service, rather it provides a platform, supporting an unlimited number of such services.

UChain project partners with U.B. Group Holding, an organization owning a large number of enterprises related to shared travel, including U-bicycle - one of the largest bicycle sharing platforms in the world, U-car - an innovative car sharing service, LocalKing - Taiwanese transport sharing company, to name a few. This strategic collaboration combined with UChain project's pragmatic approach to the problem of applying blockchain to real life scenarios makes it look like one of the startups that have enough support, understanding of both tech and economy, and common sense to actually succeed.

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Authored by: faragly (@popeye_the_sailor)