At the Crypto Bazar forum focusing on developing and regulating the crypto-currency market in Russia, the creator of the Universa platform Alexander Borodich, who is the former top manager of the largest Russian IT company Mail.ru Group and now the head of the Venture Club venture fund announced the plan to attract over $100 million during the new ICO.
Universa is expected to make a rival to such financially successful projects as Tezos ($230 million) and EOS ($200 million). According to Borodich, the founding of Universa can be compared to the revolution in trade, after the advent of paper money, or the Internet, after the appearance of HTTP.
“The dependence of blockchain on mining process and its high expenses resembles the dependence of gold coins on the price of gold,” says Borodich. “Universa offers an easy and cheap way to produce smart contracts or smart banknotes – sort of a capsule with an emitter’s payment obligation.”
The Universa unique feature is a thin protocol and a fat client, unlike Ethereum, which uses a fat protocol. Each vendor, supplier, or market player will be able to provide their own local service within Universa, independent of the others, and to perform payment transactions in any tokens or currencies.
Borodich considers important that Universa does not act as a cryptocurrency provider. Universa provides a blockchain technology and interface for creating smart contracts and applications based on the Universa blockchain, where Universa smart contracts can be applied in the same way as a car “smart key,” in the car-sharing services, hotel business, entertainment centers, SPA, “smart houses,” at gas stations, toll roads, and parking lots.
Borodich gave an example of applying Universa in the cargo delivery business: “The label on the RFID system (the method of automatic object identification, which uses radio signals to read or write data) equipped “smart seals” is recognized by the terminal, and the user receives the cargo description, as well as any necessary details. To accomplish this, one only needs a Smartphone with a Universa blockchain mobile node.”
Universa presents many advantages in comparison with its competitors: Universa’s speed accounts for 10,000 transactions per second, while in Etherium, the number is 15, and in Bitcoin – from three to six. In addition, transactions in Universa are ten times cheaper and do not depend on mining.
The Universa ICO start will be announced in the near future. You can follow the project news on http://universa.io, or at the official group Facebook.
The experts at the forum mentioned Russian projects being popular with investors and noted the fact that the capitalization of the cryptocurrency market crossed the $95 billion mark. Thus, MobileGO ($53 million), SONM ($35 million), Polibius ($ 31million), Waves ($16 million) raised tens of millions of dollars in a couple of months. Along with the crypto-investors and founders of ICO-projects, the speakers at the Forum included the Russian State Duma representatives and the heads of the industry specific sectors at Russian leading banks.