Ubiq Monthly Report — September 2018
Hello everyone and welcome to the first monthly report in Ubiq’s history. As per our recent news updates we are making this a regular feature on the blog, keeping our community up to date with recent developments in the Ubiq ecosystem.
This report contains several key updates around development progress, community projects and marketing activities.
Let’s dive straight in.
Governance Updates
Ubiq Community Operations Call
With the recent re-structuring around official communications, several team members have been assisting with the production of new content and managing operational tasks, in order to free up the core team to focus on development and networking. With this in mind we have established a monthly operations call to discuss areas of focus and delegate responsibilities.
We held our first closed meeting on the 8th of September where we discussed priorities, team structure and ownership of actions. We started several new projects off the back of this discussion which we hope to share with the wider community soon.
ESCH Airdrop #3
We have scheduled the third Escher airdrop to start on block 608,600 and run through till 638,600 (Approximately the entire month of October). The ratio is set at 3 ESCH per 1 UBQ for this airdrop and we will make an announcement when this goes live.
UIP2 results
Voting for UIP2 has taken place between blocks 588,800 and 602,800 with a participation rate of 25.34%.
UIP2 Participation rate
The voting was a close race between options 1 (BTC) and 2 (ETH) right until the finish. However the community has decided to sell the BTC forks for ETH. This will prove useful to our development team as attention will now turn towards building a bridge to the Ethereum network where the ETH can pay gas fees while testing.
Ethereum taking 53.54% of the total vote, closely followed by BTC with 36.49%
Development Updates
Spectrum v3 now LIVE (Ubiqscan overhaul)
Ubiqscan new user interface now LIVE.
We released version 3 of Spectrum on September 22nd. It is the first open source release which involves a complete re-write of all associated codebases. The new interface utilizes vuejs and the API uses Golang. There are two compatible data aggregators, one in Nodejs (the reference code) plus a Golang implementation that Angellox has been working on. Moving forward the golang backend will replace the nodejs code entirely.
The new code performs vastly better than the previous code that was being used by Ubiqscan. Spectrum v3 covers all existing Ubiqscan functionality, plus more. There is still a lot planned that will be added in staggered releases. Improved mobile support, internal transactions, and contract code validation are planned items with the most importance.
Offchain data used by spectrum will be stored in a decentralized manner so other explorers or services running on the network can easily integrate and utilize this data (such as contract code, address tags/alerts/flags).
This will allow contract developers to submit their code for validation on location, while making it available to everyone, removing a central point of failure for this important data. This update aligns with the collaborative work with the ‘Open Source Block Explorer NOW!’ groups YouTube open calls, hosted by Griff Green (from GivETH), which members of the Ubiq team have been part of since its inception.
UIP1 Update
Work on the new hashing algorithm has been taking place since June and has gone through multiple iterations and testing.
Preliminary development has now completed and is entering the public testing phase. 20 miners from the community have volunteered to run the new algo on the testnet, allowing the core team to make observations and adjustments where necessary. Development and testing are taking place on a private repository that will be made public upon completion of the project.
We will implement the upgrade as a hard fork and the changes will largely be to the DAG file. Therefore the hashing will remain the same in terms of speed across all hardware. We aim to implement the network upgrade in 2018, once we have confirmed its stability.
The algo will be called UBQhash and will lead to greater independence in the mining ecosystem, bringing greater chain security as Ubiq won’t be affected by what happens with ETH mining changes, be it reduced rewards or moving to Proof of Stake.
The update also includes a new feature called Exponential Subjective Scoring, which we will explore in a blog post soon.
Advertising / Marketing Updates
New Community Manager
As part of the new community focus on marketing, we would like to announce a formal position for Kris Lester as the new Ubiq Community Manager.
Alex is still very much a part of the core Ubiq team, but will now be the Business Manager, focusing on expanding our corporate reach within the blockchain space.
New positions for Alex and Kris
We designed this position to provide a layer of leadership within the marketing and communication functions, to streamline the decision-making process.
Kris is working on expanding the reach of our articles by working with 3rd party crypto-news sites, engaging the community via competitions, streamlining the reporting process and building the Ubiq brand.
Some of the work he has been focusing on is detailed below.
Medium Re-vamp
As Medium grows in content, there is a need for introducing a filing system for the different content being written. We have introduced a tagging system which allows the content we are posting to be easily accessible, instead of scrolling through an archive every time you need to find a guide, or a translated report.
Current sections on medium covering the different content we will publish.
We have also re-designed the look of the front page of the blog, to bring Medium more in line with the Ubiq brand. We will continue to roll out new features in the coming months.
Ubiq Research
One new section in Medium we would like to highlight is a featured page for Ubiq Research. There are several articles we plan to release soon in which we aim to address frequently asked questions about the functionality of the Ubiq ecosystem. The articles posted here will explain the design choices the developers made when building Ubiq, explaining the philosophy behind these decisions and why we feel they offer security and stability to the network.
We would also like to invite the community to volunteer research ideas for this page. We are always open to new ideas and projects that involve our awesome community.
Invest In Blockchain
Ubiq has now had their first article go live on Invest in blockchain, with a description of the whiteblock analysis, benchmarking Ubiq against Ethereum.
A link to the article can be found here for those who have not read it. https://www.investinblockchain.com/benchmarking-ubiq-against-ethereum/
Blockfolio Signals
The team joined a call with Blockfolio to discuss the addition of Ubiq to blockfolio signals.
Signals is a built-in feature within the Blockfolio mobile application, which allows us to post relevant information to all users who track Ubiq in the app.
We aim to use this system to increase awareness of our activities to Ubiq investors who may not be present on our discord or following our other social media channels. Another planned use of this system will be to notify users of upcoming governance votes (UIP) or Escher airdrops.
Token Fest
Long-term community member ‘Dogedoggerton’ (Doge for short) represented Ubiq at ‘Token Fest’ in Boston from 13 to 14 September.
‘Powered by UBIQ’ Stickers handed out by ‘Doge’
Doge was kind enough to hand out several Ubiq stickers at the event and had several interesting conversations around custodial services for banks.
His general takeaway was that the future seems bright for Crypto. A lot of innovation and talent is being brought into the blockchain space and big money is pouring in or waiting on the sidelines to enter.
Several large firms were in attendance such as Circle (backed by Goldman Sachs) and Deloitte (one of the big 4 accounting firms).
Circle advertising at Token Fest
Deloitte’s view on the Crypto market evolution
Blockchain Seatle
Alex Sterk was in attendance at the Blockchain Seattle event on 11–12 September represented Ubiq in the networking sessions.
Ubiq Artwork
Regular discord member ‘Tunachum’ has continued to contribute artwork to Twitter and the Ubiq discord. We are assessing a longer term use for his work but you can expect to see more of his art being posted on our social media channels.
A sample of Tunachum’s work
You can follow him on Instagram here. https://www.instagram.com/tunachum/
Advertising & Marketing Budget (UIP3)
We have pushed UIP3 to GitHub and humbly request feedback from our community. UIP3 sets out a framework for the team to begin to use our marketing budget, balancing the need to engage the community on key decisions while allowing the Core team the flexibility to decide when opportunities present themselves.
We are also assessing paid advertisements and will look to test run these soon.
Many thanks to discord community members: Danbainbridge, Saintgermaine, Phantom and Dogedoggerton for donating 1000 Ubiq to run an advertisement test. We will report back on the effectiveness of this soon.
Other News
Ubiq was recently featured in the ‘2018 Standard Catalogue of Cryptocurrencies’ book by 
https://twitter.com/CryptoUbiq/status/1043059239235870720/photo/1
- CryptoUbiq
Miscellaneous
New Game
ERC20 Exchange recently announced the development of a new crypto game, built on Ubiq.
SuchMoon is in development. Members who are interested in following the progress of this can follow them on twitter.
https://twitter.com/ERC20Exchange/status/1039953597944012800
- ERC20Exchange
And that’s a wrap for this month. As usual, we recommend following our twitter account and joining the discord conversation. We are always ready to answer any of your questions.
Thanks for checking in and be sure to follow the blog, Twitter, Github and join Ubiq Discord to help collaborate with the best community on the internet.
Ubiq Discord: https://discord.gg/HF6vEGF
Medium blog: https://blog.ubiqsmart.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ubiqsmart
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CryptoUbiq (Ubiq Community)
GitHub: https://github.com/ubiq
Website: http://ubiqsmart.com
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