Conventional blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin are slow and clogged. With transaction costs continually growing and settlement speed getting progressively slower, Universa aims to establish a simple protocol for cheap, fast app and blockchain creation.
Universa managed to raise an impressive amount, selling over $28 000 000 worth of tokens in less than a month.
The Universa protocol is a standalone blockchain. It is powered by the Universa Network , which is composed of collected core nodes and backed by the so-called “Notary Cloud” which essentially is a secure signed document service. Nodes in the Universa platform are operated by licensed and authorized partners, as opposed to being operated by untrusted actors from the general public. All node operators are rewarded with transaction fees for their participation in the verification and execution of smart contracts. Business data is also controlled by a central figure and is fully regulated and encrypted. The platform emphasises on improvements that are needed for business adaptation, like tokenization and contractual agreements.
Universa’s blockchain is very optimized and capable of handling well over 20 000 transactions per second. It does so by eliminating the need to see the full history of all transactions, which can be kept in side-chains by the actors responsible for executing them. State changes are performed by trusted nodes and contract executions happen on-chain, verifying their output by a 90% consensus algorithm in the creation of each new block.
Being a business-oriented network, Universa’s primary function is to verify state and execute smart contracts. Instead of waiting a new block to be mined, state changes can occur at any time in less than a second, approved by a consensus and verified by a trusted actor. Separate contracts maintain their own chain of state and contracts can perform actions simultaneously with other contracts, without blocking or affecting them.
There are several red flags red flags with Universa. To start, they had a heavily paid marketing campaign, and while that’s usually not a bad thing, it was done in an unethical fashion, with paid facebook likes provided by low quality accounts in order to falsely inflate popularity. Another red flag was the huge hardcap of $90 000 000 dollars, which is quite a lot for what essentially is a centralized, faster Ethereum. Also, the controversial figure John MacAfee is their advisor. To those who are unfamiliar, John was involved in multiple scandals including the huge Verge pump and the blatant pump and dump scheme disguised under his “coin of the day” tweets, where he used his influence in the crypto sphere to falsely inflate the value of currencies and tokens he chose.
Caution is advised when investing in project such as Universa. The team’s methods of promoting the project are quite questionable to say the least, not to mention that Universa’s blockchain is nothing close to exciting or revolutionary, and very few businesses will have the need or even bother to integrate the platform into their infrastructure.
