According to their whitepaper, and their standard introduction,
Unification is a decoupled architectural framework that provides generalized state channels for data standardization and interoperability across enterprise tech stacks.
In other words, Unification is a framework to standardize, connect and commercialize company database. It helps companies to create a single, uniform channel for data acquisition, sharing and transfer with smart contracts and blockchain. Data transfers are not done on-chain, rather they'll do it off-chain and will only use blockchain for settlement and metadata checks. Because of this, in theory, data transfer will be quick and secure.
Products, Competitors & Ecosystem
In Unification ecosystem, there are several components:
Babel: Babel is an app for end users and data consumers. They use this as a wallet, keystore, and frontend interaction for the UApp store. Data consumer will also be able to use this app to start data transfers while end users can use this app to manage data permission. Babel will more or less act as a gateway to end users and data consumers in order to interact with the protocol. For example, with Babel, users can disallow location data to be accessed by any apps, or by specific apps.
Blockchain: According to Allie's blog post (one of the Unification advisors), Unification is a blockchain agnostic protocol. As long as the smart contracts can be ported it should work. This happens because data transfer is done via off-chain transactions. On the other hand, blockchain is used to store metadata, which includes data schemas/properties, user permissions and so on. Which is why Unification doesn't need to build a new blockchain, they can use any existing blockchain that has enough scalability to transfer and communicate metadata across network participants.
Haiku Server Node Software: This is an app for data providers. Data providers have to install and deploy smart contracts in order to provide a connection between the existing database and the network.
Haiku Client Software: This is an app for data providers. Data providers have to install and deploy smart contracts in order to provide a connection between scripts and the network.
How the ecosystem works
There are several projects out there with similar purpose or business field (data decentralization). Some of them are:
- Ocean Protocol
It's a data exchange protocol for AI. It helps data consumers to generate data result from AI and has its own blockchain. They don't have effective strategies to onboard customers and there is no data standardization or give end users control over their data.
According to Allie, Ocean Protocol might be the closest competitor to Unification. However, Unification has an advantage as it is just a protocol and not a blockchain per se. It also provides SDK with plentiful documentation to help onboarding customers simpler and feasible. On top of that, Unification also allows end users to decide which data they can share and which is not allowed to be shared.
- Datum
Datum is a decentralized data platform where users can monetize their own data. Users are able to provide data that they wish to monetize into the platform, and data consumers can buy them using DAT tokens. They're going to launch their own blockchain, and their data is stored on-chain.
Because of this, it might suffer from bottlenecks and scalability issue especially if the data is big and there's a lot of transactions on the network. Datum doesn't target enterprise exclusively, rather they're more like targeting end users who wanted to monetize their data. It is difficult for them to onboard business enterprise and speeds up their adoption because end users must understand and familiar with blockchain and stuff since the first time. On top of that, users have to upload/data on their own without the ability to stop apps collecting data that they wanted to keep private.
There will be three types of users in the ecosystem: data providers, end users, and data consumers. Data providers are the company or enterprise who collect data from end users such as social media apps user (e.g. Facebook users) into their database. Data consumers are anyone who requires or wanted to get the data from data providers, such as enterprise, researchers, advertisers, small & medium business and so on. In other words, data providers are the seller while data consumers are the buyer. End users will be the source to generate data.
The Tokenomics & Token Utility
Here's the details of tokenomics according to Allie blogpost.
Hard Cap: 12,000,000 USD
Token supply sold: 25% (20% private, 5% public)
Ecosystem Development: 30%
Market Support: 15%
Founding Team: 12%
Future Team: 8%
Advisory: 5%
Community Distribution: 5%
There will be a total of 1 billion tokens created, in which 25% of them will be sold during the ITO (250,000,000 tokens). The price of the tokens is $0.075 per UND. The mechanism to prevent price drop is quite good. Team tokens are locked up for 3 years, with quarterly vesting. Advisor lockup is between 1 - 2 years depends on their role, with quarterly vesting. The private sale cap is 35,000 ETH, no bonus at all. 50% of the tokens will be released at the TGE, 25% in 3 months and the rest after 6 months. The public sale tokens, on the other hand, doesn't have any lockup.
With this scenario, the possible seller on the first day in an exchange should be private sale participants or public sale participants. Both of them, in theory, wouldn't want to dump their tokens at a cheap price because they don't get any bonuses. Team & advisor lockup is quite good, which prevents dump from the team side and at the same time shows their confidence in the project.
UND tokens will be used in a lot of scenarios in the ecosystem. Some of them include:
- Payment to data providers and to end users by data consumers in order to get data and permissions to use the data.
- A source of revenue stream for data providers because they connect their database to the Unification network.
- A source of revenue stream for end users because they will get paid when there's a buyer and at the same time still control their own data.
- The tokens will act as the standard to value data. It will help everybody to directly exchange their data via buying or selling their data with the tokens rather than doing complex deals of data exchange with other parties. To put it simply, there won't be any more complex barter. Participants can use the tokens to express data value, enabling other parties to buy or sell it and gain access to it.
Conclusion
The competition in the process to provide a decentralized data platform for end users is steadily increasing. Unlike its previous competitors, Unification offers significant advantages that should help them to compete successfully in the data market. With a quick on boarding process, good anti-dump strategies and effective product, Unification might be worth to follow.
This article is created for a potential rewards from Unification bounty program. The writer of this article username in Telegram is 