Ubiq — 2022 and beyond — Luke Williams joins Ubiq full-time
Ubiq is proud to announce that Luke Williams (aka iquidus) will be working on Ubiq in a full time capacity for 2022.
In less than one month, Ubiq mainnet will turn five years old. It’s been a wild ride with many ups and downs.
From the early days of experimental testnets to the major upcoming Orion hard fork, the Ubiq community has achieved so much. All without an ICO, developer pre-mine, VC-backing or any other form of funding — purely on an open-source volunteer basis. However, 2022 will mark a new era for Ubiq.
But first, I’d like to reflect a bit on this occasion.
When I experimented with Bitcoin over a decade ago, it was still CPU minable. After one day of mining, I accrued 50BTC (~50cents at the time). But I thought there was no way anything real could come out of this — the odds were stacked against this obscure internet money. I didn’t give it a second thought until years later. While working on a decentralized multi-layer encrypted messaging protocol, I was struggling to solve one major problem: how to prevent malicious actors from spamming the distributed cache and knocking nodes offline.
It was around then that Bitcoin reappeared on my radar. Having hit $100, it made the rounds in all the major tech magazines. After accepting the harsh reality that I’d likely re-formatted this certain hard drive many times over since my mining experiment, I decided to read the Bitcoin white paper to see what all the fuss was about. The now popular meme “Bitcoin fixes this” could not have rung more true. The solution to my problem was simple — built-in financial incentives. The simplicity and elegance of Bitcoin’s design immediately consumed me. I dived deep into crypto and have yet to swim to shore.
Fast-forward to 2016: Julian (jyap) and I commenced discussions over what would later become known as “Ubiq”. After a bit of exploring, the goal became clear; a community-driven, EVM-compatible Ethereum alternative based on decentralization-first principles. The network would be designed and governed to become unstoppable, without the need to be controlled by anyone, not even us. Ubiq was to be resilient to both external and internal threats, even to time itself.
How can a blockchain avoid centralized influence, whether it be in the form of a single source of funding or a cult of personality? How can we increase the odds of standing the test of time and not succumb to state bloat? Where are other projects succeeding and where are they failing? How will the ecosystem look two years from now? Ten or twenty years from now? How can we ensure the protocol treats everyone equal? How do we remove gatekeepers from the system?
And then, on January 28, 2017, we laid the foundation for something that we hope will outgrow us all and Ubiq was born. To this day, jyap and I, despite having never met in person, work side-by-side to build our shared vision into a reality, one block at a time.
But it hasn’t been easy. Ubiq mainnet launched at a very different time in the crypto space. Although it was never our intention to compete with Ethereum, people didn’t know how to classify us. From our perspective, Ubiq was simply an alternative chain that would one day bridge with Ethereum to become part of the etherverse. But this was before the days of bridges, so for many, we were instead perceived as a competitor and labeled as a potential “Ethereum killer”. They were simply unable to see the bigger picture.
Without going into too much detail, it’s fair to say that as a result, many doors were closed to us. It became clear, despite our best efforts, that we were on our own. Despite no funding to begin with, and very little outside support, Ubiq continued doing what we do best — keep on building.
During this time, Ubiq built its governance system and token, Escher, multiple wallets, ERC-20 tokens, DEXs, privacy protocols, DAOs and NFT projects. We’ve built out infrastructure and tooling, all while maintaining parity with upstream go-ethereum.
Many of the early decisions we made panned out, with a full archive node currently consuming only 21GB of storage and a mining DAG that still supports 2GB GPUs. Various changes made along the way, such as Flux and Ubqhash, have resulted in the network experiencing zero downtime, no 51% attacks, no double-spends, no state interventions, no network restarts, no unintentional hard forks or chain splits. The network has only experienced perfect health. With a flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystem now emerging, Ubiq prepares for its next evolution via the upcoming Orion hard fork which introduces 4x faster blocks, increased mining rewards and fee-burns to counter inflation.
Despite our consistent track record, our biggest bottleneck to-date has been the lack of adoption by major exchanges. Listing fees became popular amongst exchanges in 2017, heavily favoring ICO and pre-mine projects. This has significantly reduced access to UBQ for many people. Missing out on these large listings hindered us from amassing user interest and garnering widespread publicity.
On the bright side, we now have Uniswap v2-based Shinobi. We have a bridge to Polygon, which allows wrapped Ubiq to easily move between the Ubiq and Matic ecosystems. We have more bridges coming in early 2022, removing the need for centralized exchanges all together.
True decentralization is encoded into Ubiq’s DNA. It has always operated as a community-led project, on a volunteer-basis, where members dedicate their time, skills, and resources to push it forward. We believe this is integral for Ubiq to continue remaining decentralized. Any clout within the community is purely based on contributions, not position. Governance is performed by the users of the network, and only them.
Maybe this is why the Ubiq community is so amazing. Or maybe, we just got incredibly lucky. Somehow, in all the chaos that is crypto, a culture evolved to welcome all and truly value decentralization, privacy, and freedom. A gathering of doers from all walks of life, who, despite having diverse opinions and beliefs, always keep an open mind and respect one another. Cipherpunks, hackers, miners, traders, gamers, trolls and misfits, we’ve got it all. With the seemingly growing polarization all around us, I’ve seen Ubiq community members discuss controversial issues with grace, always knowing when to put differences aside to work on a common goal. It’s been awesome to witness. I’ve made countless friends in the community, some of which border on family.
Something we have tried to encourage within the community is independent sponsorship of developers and contributors. We have experimented with Gitcoin and Github sponsors with some success, but nothing substantial enough to replace a source of income. That is, until now.
I am very excited to announce that thanks to a small group of diehard Ubiq fans that would like to remain anonymous, I will begin working on Ubiq on a full-time basis in 2022 with plans to continue into the future.
Developers working full-time will give us the opportunity to complete items such as improving our bridges, bringing everyone the latest Sparrow and launching new Escher voting at a faster pace. We will also be able to observe the crypto ecosystem and more quickly adopt new technologies. Although volunteers alone have got us this far, the volunteer model has also resulted in development moving at a slower pace and other areas, such as seeking partnerships and attending podcasts getting neglected altogether.
Ubiq will no longer hide in the shadows. The sleeping giant will awake. Ubiq is ready for the next level. I appreciate every single one of you for being an important part of this journey, this experiment, this shot-in-the-dark we took in 2017. We are still here.
Things are just getting started. Buckle up. Beast mode has been activated.
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/XaqzJB4
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
