The world is evolving at a fast pace with the advent of many technologies. All aspects of the world’s economy are showing tremendous improvements these days and would continue from generations to generations. This revolution has extended its arms to the area of the “Sharing Economy” with the advent of the **UChain project**. The **UChain network** will bring a great deal of transformation into this sector. Let me briefly introduce you to the sharing economy.
Just as the name implies, to share a valuable asset. The sharing economy is a cooperative peer-to-peer economy involving three parties. Thus, the provider of an asset, the platform or medium for exchange, and the recipient of the asset. Currently, the market size of the Sharing Economy has been estimated to grow up to over 500 billion American dollars by the close of 2018, yet, there are many issues confronting this economy. Without any interventions put in place, these problems will continue to hunt down the sharing economy. Here comes the **UCHAIN NETWORK** - **The next generation Distributed smart network blockchain for the sharing economy**.
**UChain** is the first public infrastructure blockchain distinctively designed for the global sharing economy. The aim of implementing this remarkable project is to build its underlying blockchain network to solve the current problems of trust and data abuse of the sharing economy.
The execution of this idea will be carried out in collaboration with other enterprises. Currently, UChain has many selected investors and will form a strategic plan of partnership with many companies in the years to come. The set of functions and protocols applied to allow **UChain** to create an application with SDK’s which can access the features or data of an operating system.
UChain is based in Canada and Shanghai. U-Bicycle is known to be the world's leading Internet company specialized in shared travels and hence contributes to the sharing economy. It is currently the mother company to many leading eastern companies such as U-Car, U-Park, Grab-cycle, X-Bike. As part of UChain's effort to help the sharing economy, UChain will join the ranks under the umbrella of U-Bicycle and the tech will be implemented into existing U-Bicycle entities immediately.
Well, the answer to this question is quite clear and simple. I will explain with three major problems that are hunting the sharing economy of iconic companies. Iconic companies have been categorized into eight main sectors. We have those that deals with accommodation issues, Shared Accommodation (Airbnb); working issues, Shared Work-space (We-Work); Shared Services (TaskRabbit), Shared Transportation (Uber, Didi, Grab), Shared Resources (Open Garden), Shared Knowledge (Quora), Shared Medical Services (Medicast), and Shared Education (Coursera, KHAN). The aims of these companies in the sharing economy are very clear but, excessive transaction cost, the problem with trust, and users’ data leakages are the main challenges to these companies.
***Excessive transaction cost***
Centralization of many businesses has created a situation where the cost of transactions on keeps rising daily. The sharing economy is no different from this current situation. The reason is that most companies inflate transactions to step-up their daily and annual profit in order to get going in the business race. This inflation leads to excessive transaction costs over time. A crucial relation is that of Uber’s. Uber's key profit comes from commissions with the rate starting at 20% and varying (usually higher) at different times and locations.
***Lack of trust in the sharing economy***
The key component to facilitating engagement in a business transaction is trust. Trust is accomplished by means of building a good customer care relationship. Trust is very critical to the sharing economy, yet the application of traditional technology has not been able to eradicate the problem of trust between people through technical means.
***Data leakage and abuse***
As you know, the sharing economy comes with a lot of benefits but requires that individuals, to be able to access services or utilise such platform have to provide some personal information for registration. The data collected may be monetized by selling them to other companies. If the data stored in a centralized system, as many platforms prefer, it becomes susceptible to a breach by hackers.
***Peer-to-peer Network***
The project team will build a decentralized peer-to-peer blockchain network with a smart contract to eradicate intermediaries and build trust within the sharing economy. The blockchain incorporated within the sharing economy will also mitigate the issue of high cost of the transaction in this economy.
***Distributed data storage***
Encrypted data shredded and stored on different nodes to improve data security.
***User credit passport***
Cross-application user credit passport with a proprietary credit rating algorithm to effectively record user behaviour on the network.
***Token incentive***
The sharing economy is yet to experience great benefits. As part of Urchin’s project, a tokenized ecosystem will be introduced to increase the participation and engagement of both users and enterprises.
The project, as drawn by the expert team of Uchain takes the form of layers with four major components or layers. The core blockchain layer, the API / SDK Layer, the service layer, and the application layer.
***The core blockchain layer***
Uchain core blockchain layer will have the distributed shared ledger which is a peer-to-peer distributed storage technique that applies a Distributed Hash Table based distributed storage protocol, with data being indexed by file content (Hash) instead of a file path of a uniform resource locator. Multiple nodes will be available on the platform to store larger files on the network. Uchain project is here to help the broken shared economy. Therefore, as part of its effort to build a strong and reliable network, the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm is chosen to speed up the transaction on the network.
***The API / SDK Layer***
The smart contract on the Uchain network operates on virtual machines that support compiled languages such as the C++, Solidity language, and convenient standard storing language (SQL) or commands within a smart contract storage system. This layer will facilitate multiple users participate in formulating a smart contract. The contract will also be spread through the P2P network and stored on the blockchain. Smart contracts embedded within the blockchain are automatically executed.
***The service layer***
In simple terms and for easy comprehension, the service layer will consist of the account management module, responsible for the identity authentication of the user's account, policy management module, to provide the user grant and management of users’ data; the system management module to monitor system configuration and the smart contract module which has two forms, the standard and the custom contract.
**The application layer**
**Uchain Ecosystem**
There are two major roles that drive the UChain ecosystem, the users and the developers. The users of the UChain ecosystem are categorized as service users, independent service providers, and enterprise service providers. You can download the whitepaper from the website here https://uchain.world/ . They either use or provide services on UChain network. Independent developers or UChain foundation developers create and maintain the infrastructure of UChain. They interact with each other, establishing their distinct values to make UChain a better ecosystem.
**The Team Members**
The project has a great team. You may want to visit the website here https://uchain.world/ and read more about the members profile. The whitepaper is also available here: https://uchain.world/css/img/pdf/uchain-whitepaper-dbe5656d6c.pdf
**Relevant links to UChain Project**
Website: https://uchain.world/
Whitepaper: https://uchain.world/css/img/pdf/uchain-whitepaper-dbe5656d6c.pdf
Official telegram: https://t.me/UchainEcosystem
UCHAIN Announcement Telegram: https://t.me/UchainAnn
UCHAIN Bounty Telegram: https://t.me/UChainBounty
UCHAIN Twitter: https://twitter.com/uchainecosystem
UCHAIN Medium: https://medium.com/@uchain
UCHAIN Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/UChain/
**Authorship**
Steemit username: @steemramos
Bitcointalk username: Sergio444
Profile url: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1884908