What is the Sharing Economy?

A place where people offer their "Idle Resources" through a 3rd Party platform for other people in exchange for money. The sharing economy has been one of the rapidly growing industries we have seen in the last few years.

Uber owns no vehicles; AirBnB no rooms, yes, they are part of the sharing economy also known as the peer-to-peer economy. A more technical definition according to Ms. Robin Chase would be;

Idle Resources + Platfrom + Public Participation = The Sharing Economy

The sharing economy can be applied to a lot of industries, for example, accommodation, transportation, work spaces, education and medical services.

Sharing Economy Sectors:

• Shared Accommodation (Airbnb)
• Shares Workspace (We-Work)
• Shared Services (TaskRabbit)
• Shared Transportation (Uber, Didi, Grab)
• Shared Resources (Open Garden)
• Shared Knowledge (Quora)
• Shared Medical Services (Medicast)
• Shared Education (Coursera, KHAN)

Current Problems in the Sharing Economy

Before we discuss how UChain aims to further build the sharing economy industry by developing and implementing an innovative blockchain ecosystem into the sharing economy, lets take a look at some of the current shortcomings in the collaborative economy.

High Transaction Cost

Since a 3rd Party is always involved you cannot execute a true peer-to-peer transaction because of the nature of centralized sharing economy businesses. For Example, UBER profits from its 20% commision rates and sometimes limiting the supply of their sharing service to maximize profits. These costs are added to the user along with transaction fees via some payment gateways.

Mutual Trust

In order to make a transaction possible between the consumer and the supplier, Trust is a key factor in the sharing economy. Currently, there is no technical solution, therefore, different intermediary platforms facilitate transactions to reduce financial risks and to build a mutual understanding between the two parties, which adds more costs to the sharing economy.

Data Breaches and Abuse

Due to the benefits, the sharing economy brings to users and suppliers, more and more people register for these services by giving out their identity information especially during registration phases. Currently, most services store this information in centralized databases and a server breach or a data abuse would cause a lot of sensitive data to be at risk. Also, some companies use these data for promotional campaigns as well, against users' will.

UChain is using blockchain technology to solve the current problems that the sharing economy faces.

It can achieve a tamper-proof, decentralized and fully autonomous ecology that everyone can participate in, which coincides with the nature of the sharing economy. -https://uchain.world/

Blockchain to the Rescue

The true beauty of blockchain lies in decentralization, which is an open source data storage and processing ability that’s based on a consensus mechanism.

UChain expects to reduce the cost on transactions nearly by 20% by cutting off 3rd parties inbetween users and the service providers. Transactions will be handled by the UChain smart contract and cross chain hosting technology to ensure authenticity, legitimacy and compliance through a credit passport mechanism bringing them much smoother experience.

UChain will establish a digital credit passport to verify members. There UChain keeps a record of all transaction activities in distant nodes created in the blockchain making a tamper-proof, decentralized condition along with the concept “chain of trust”. UChain sharing economy service providers can access these credit passports, but any personal data can only be accessed by the data owner with the use of a private key, as it is safely stored on the blockchain.

UChain is creating a DApp infrastructure platform similar to Ethereum and Neo although focussed exclusively on the sharing economy. All UChain tokens are initially minted as Ethereum based ERC-20 tokens. The UChain mainnet is set to launch in the Q4 of 2018, at which point all the ERC-20 based UCN tokens in circulation will be swapped for native UChain mainnet tokens.

Sharing economy enterprises like Uber and Airbnb will undoubtedly be coming to the blockchain eventually and rather than using a general purpose platform like ETH, they will issue their own token and build their application on top of the UChain ecosystem using UChain's API's and SDK's. As more-and-more sub-projects are launched on the network, UChain will develop its own Decentralized Exchange (DEX).

The UChain Ecosystem https://uchain.world/

UChain is being developed by the people behind U-Bicycle, a successful bike sharing business based between China and Canada and operating in 3 other countries. U-Bicycle already has 300+ employees and over half a million bikes that are rented to 30 million users on a daily basis.

Official Token (UCN)

The basic unit of UChain is UCN and in order to join or leave the Uchain, UCN should be sold or bought. UCN will be the basic value unit used to pay for services through the platform or earned by "sharing" idle resources. UCN can also be paid for advertisements deliver through the UChain advertising system

Staked UCN (UCP)

UCP is just UCN with voting power.
UCP is not exchangeable or tradable

Staking: UChain will incentivize holders who keep UCP for a long time by granting them UCN, the distributing rate will be dynamic so people who hold and lock UCN for a long time will get extra bonuses.

The Team

Although UChain was only founded in September 2017, it has an impressive team of developers with a strong background in the sharing economy backed up by some blockchain and financial services based pioneers on the advisory board.

Roadmap

The roadmap lists a main net launch in Q3 2018 followed by UChain's first DApp for U-Bicycle in Q1 2019.

UChain is the first public infrastructure blockchain specifically designed for the global sharing economy.

UChain’s official channels:

• Website: https://uchain.world/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/UChainEcosystem

• Medium: https://medium.com/uchain

• Telegram: https://t.me/UchainEcosystem

• Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/UchainAnn

• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/UChain

Thanks for reading, to stay up to date follow me to check out my blog.
Telegram: @wishmantha