Indiegogo Crowdfunding Campaign

We've recently launched our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign and are offering early and exclusive access to certain perks. So that backers can reserve and join early on, without any hassle or going through public contests (i.e. Slots attribution, DAO or DAS integration), which will occur upon UDC launch.
The funds gathered will go towards building UDC infrastructure (i.e. server & other hardware, mainly for the PKI, which is obviously too sensitive to be migrated to the cloud), network resources for the next couple of months and software development. In exchange, we're offering different types of rewards:

• Personal accounts from any normal or Premium Slot, while those from official Slots are conditioned to the rewards below. Since they're permanently linked to a key pair, they're essentially lifetime, therefore attributed in a first come first served manner.
• Slots, enabling those interested in becoming Managing Entities to select their own without competition and start developing their services and user base in preparation for UDC launch. Currently, 1 and 5 year leases are available but, as you may know, the Slots attributions work similarly to domain names and can therefore be indefinitely renewed.
• DAO and DAS smart contracts modules, although each limited to 10 projects. Basically, this enables anyone with a project or idea for a DAO or DAS (Distributed Automatic Service), to be integrated into UDC, to propose it and have us build it. All the while, retaining complete ownership over the developed software, including the fees generated by them.

Currency Details

Unified Digital Currency or UDC, is a new digital currency, focused on becoming the global exchange medium, by facilitating international commerce, attaining ubiquitous adoption in local commerce and creating a new digital ecosystem that goes beyond the financial aspect.

UDC differs in a number of points with relation to other cryptocurrencies. For starters, it uses 2 separate chains to operate, a Ledger chain that focuses on the currency and monetary operations, and, a Network Management Blockchain (NMB) which deals with the network itself and its participants (network organization/participants registry/Slots allocations/public keys registry/DAS and DAO registry/...) and thus provides a completely open and transparent currency.
Another big difference is in the network's architecture, it is multi-layered and essentially decentralized and distributed at all levels. It isn't forked on any existing currency and, as such, uses an original code base and protocols. And, although the worker node of the network (Validating Node) is still in development, it's nearing completion (refer to the Progress section).

UDC also has a central bank, called WorldBank, which has to responsibility and authority of:

• Issue and remove currency from circulation^[1]
• Guarantee exchanges and maintain UDC's fiat reserves
• Oversee the attribution of all Slots and their category (official, reserved, premium, normal)
• Create UDC's community and cooperate with it to maintain the Validating Node and vet all incorporated third-party services
• Act as an intermediary to resolve and litigate complains for end-users and participants

On the other hand, the WorldBank does not have the power to perform some other actions such as:

• sign transactions without the proper private key
• execute transactions externally or bypassing the network (everything goes through the network)
• modify Ledgers or Network Management Blocks (they are permanent and created exclusively by the network)
• access any account it doesn't own
• submit transactions without sufficient funds
• control, own or allocate undisclosed nodes/accounts/services/... (everything is transparent and disclosed through the NMB)

UDC itself is pegged to the 10 most prominent fiat currencies, each selected for their relative importance computed using public formulas and official data, greatly reducing its value volatility. Since the value is pegged to those currencies, it has an extrinsic value and is backed, at all times, by an equivalent amount of fiat reserves.

• United States Dollar (USD)
• Euro (EUR)
• Japanese Yen (JPY)
• Pound Sterling (GBP)
• Swiss Franc (CHF)
• Australian Dollar (AUD)
• Hong Kong Dollar (HKD)
• Canadian Dollar (CAD)
• Singapore Dollar (SGD)
• Chinese Yuan Renminbi (CNY)

It is also organized differently, purposively made simpler to enable greater adoption for the average person. Addresses are substituted with short, 10-character long, account numbers (3 letters + 7 numbers). They are still cryptographically protected, as each is uniquely linked to an unchangeable ECDSA key pair. Accounts are in turn regrouped into Slots of 1 million accounts, represented by the 4-character prefix (3 letters + 1st number). These Slots will be managed by independent third-parties (Managing Entity), who can activate new accounts, define and receive all transaction fees and through which the transactions are submitted. This allows organizations to become their own payments providers and offer services to their costumers without any intermediary. In exchange, Managing Entities have to operate nodes, thus help the growth and diversification of the network. Any other organizations or individuals can also operate worker nodes, although, this network functionality is designed to be abstracted from the end-user and therefore not required.
In its current specification, the network can use up to 175.760 millions accounts, regrouped into 175.760 Slots. Certain Slots are managed directly by the WorldBank, the official Slots (UDC0-UDC9, DAO0-DAO9 and DAS0-DAS9), while others, are currently reserved, pending institutional opportunities (GOV0-GOV9 and all country codes as defined in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3).

Finally, similarly to some other cryptocurrencies, UDC supports multiple forms of monetary transfers, smart contracts and event-based triggers through different standard transactions, Distributed Automatic Services (DAS) and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO).

_[1] It is a fully transparent process since it is accomplished through normal transactions, exclusively involving the official account UDC000000


News & Documentation

You can read the latest news and announcements directly from our website, this post or any of our social media feeds.
Any other documents or specifications relevant to UDC are also accessible directly through our documentation page.

• UDC: A Digital Currency for Unifying Global Commerce - whitepaper
• Core differences between UDC and fiat currencies - post

Features

• The monetary unit is called Uni and is composed of a sub-unit, unicent, related with the ratio 1:100
• Value pegged to the 10 most prominent fiat currencies and backed constantly by equal reserves
• Central bank with the authority of issuing currency (transparently and openly), removing (owned) currency from circulation and guaranteeing exchanges
• Decentralized and distributed network with a multi-layer architecture
• Short alphanumeric accounts, cryptographically protected by unique ECDSA key pairs (prime-based curves, 256bits+ key length)
• Slots organizing ranges of 1 million accounts, which are managed by independent third-parties (Managing Entity)
• Transaction fees defined independently by the Managing Entities, DAO or DAS
• Supports several types of pre-defined transactions
• Supports smart contracts and automatically triggered transaction through DAO and DAS
• Transactions registered and published near real-time
• Ledger chain governing the currency and providing periodically a complete overview of its state
• Network Management Blockchain to independently, and openly, manage and organize the network and its participants

Specifications

• No premine or ICO
• Monetary supply: proportional to its reserves
• No mining, PoS or PoW
• No block rewards but fair redistribution between worker nodes
• Self-correcting network mechanisms
• Transaction execution^[2]: near real-time
• Ledger duration^[2]: 1 hour
• Network Management Entry execution^[3]: immediate
• Network Management Block duration: 30 minutes

_[2] Unlike other cryptocurrencies, with UDC, transactions don't require additional confirmations when validated and published by the network, and so, they are permanently confirmed even before its Ledger is closed and published. For further explanations please refer to the whitepaper.
_[3] Network Management Entries follow different validation processes than transactions and are immediately validated and applied by all nodes.


Roadmap

1st Half 2017:

• Requests for investments and partnerships for UDC's general development.
• Complete the first operational version of the Validating Node.
• Complete WorldBank's infrastructure.
• Launch UDC's Public Key Infrastructure.
• Publish the detailed network's communication protocols and standard for the creation of DAOs and DASs.
• Candidacy proceedings for Slots allocations and, DAOs and DASs proposals.
• Construction of the final Genesis Ledger and Genesis Network Management Block.

2nd Half 2017:

• Launch of UDC and its network.
• Integration of the Managing Entites, DAOs and DASs.
• Search for local and worldwide currency exchanges partnerships.
• Begin incentives for UDC ecosystem development and local adoption.

Progress

• Network Consensus Protocols: completed
• Network Communication Protocols and messages formats: completed
• Validating Node: almost completed (c++, ~13k lines)

• Communications: 100%
• Multi-format keys support: 100%
• Transactions support: 100%
• DAS modularization: 90%
• DAO modularization: 90%
• Ledger support: 100%
• NMB support: 100%
• Network synchronization: 90%

• WorldBank's functionalities: half-way there

• Signing Node: 90%
• private API (for its users):60%
• public API: 20%
• public Data Tracker: 80%
• final website: 10%
• official developers' community: 0%

• UDC Public key Infrastructure: incomplete, definitive root and intermediate CA certificates will only be created near UDC's launch

• Structure/Specification/Organization: 100%
• Certification APIs/Services: 10%
• Test PKI: 100%
• CAs certificates: 0% (to be created pre-launch)
• PKI servers: 0%

Translations

• 汉语 (Chinese)
• 한국어 (Korean)
• Português (Portuguese)
• Français (French)
• Deutsch (German)

Team

Founder

• name: Rafael Afonso Rodrigues
• email: rafaelafonsorodrigues@gmail.com
• profile: Currently finishing my Master's degree in Engineering and Computer Science, to further develop my competences in this area, after having obtained a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering. Previously, I also attended a Bachelor's program in Business Engineering and Economics.
• residence: Brussels, Belgium and Lisbon, Portugal.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to

• btcdie for the Chinese translation of this announcement
• rolings for the Korean translation of this announcement
• sazonk for creating the Medium Blog page
• syahril for the German translation of this announcement

any bounty campaign sir??
i would reserve indonesian translation
thanks

true, but unlike those entities, the ones i propose don't have any power or control over your money, only "you", the one with the private key, do.
Anyway the description i put in here is just a simplification and don't go into much details. You can always check out the whitepaper i put up!


Thanks for the translation! added to the main post.

I've added the medium blog page to the main post, thanks for creating it!



None for now since UDC has not yet launched. But, i'm already aware of the requirements and obligations necessary within multiple countries. Although, the choice of the first country will depend on the initial resources.
With the envisioned goals of the currency, being able to independently hold reserves across multiple regions will be a necessity anyway.

I'm glad you're aware of the legal requirements of some countries. However, you will face many hurdles if you require all of the mentioned currencies to be active on UDC for your project to go forward. Expect a long road ahead. You should think about how you can program it for one currency first, deal with the legality of your system on it, and then expand to other currencies.

UDC is not a decentralized currency, as you claim in the abstract. There is a central entity of issuance. There are many points like this that require further review of your text and ideas.
You never mention why UDC is better than current payment processors in the related work, yet you compare to them towards the end of the paper.
You also never mention why the problems that have occurred with decentralized cryptocurrencies exist, while you describe them.
You don't mention how UDC deals with fiat currency fluctuations, which will be a huge issue for exchanging.

When you are in Lisbon lets meet. I would love to talk to you about your project.
I am sure you will have a great master's thesis, if you are using UDC for it.

depends where/how you request for investment

well, the WorldBank will have an exchange for dealing with trades affecting the monetary volume (so basically for issuing and removing currency).
For the trades that only convert an amount of currency into another (e.g. USD <=> UDC), the goal is to have 3 groups of methods:
• independent exchanges platforms, possibly with more options (the WorldBank will only perform trades with the pegged currencies);
• traditional online deposits/withdrawals services
• local deposits/withdrawals services, either independent or through partnerships (e.g. stores, ATMs, ...)

For all groups, there's a huge incentive as the companies providing such services can use their own Slots and therefore set their transaction fees freely (at least for their side).


Not in this case, I understand that it is used interchangeably when dealing with altcoins forked on bitcoin, but UDC works differently.
UDC's value being pegged to other currencies, whenever it is issued (removed), the traded fiat currencies are added (removed) in their entirety to the reserves.
Since its value is backed by those reserves, they cannot of course be used for anything else than that.
Therefore i'm using investment in the traditional sense, as in into the WorldBank's company/foundation, to be used for supporting its infrastructure.
Also an ICO has no effect in this case, be it for 5 Uni or 5.000.000 Uni, since the reserves are equivalent to UDC's monetary volume and don't affect UDC's value for someone else.


Thanks for your input, although if you take a look at the Features and Specifications, you can see the main differences and possibly understand why someone would pick one over the other.
Speaking for myself, i do see why i or the average person would prefer UDC over Bitcoin, since it has advantageous features (otherwise i wouldn't have put them), but i'm kinda biased of course


Well first off, thanks for taking a look at the whitepaper.And i also want to state that UDC is not my master's thesis, it is a completely separate project that i'm pursuing regardless.

Speaking about the central bank, the thing is, the issuance and removal of currency has to centralized of course (having multiple authorized organizations would create an incentive to fraudulently issue currency IMO).
However the rest of UDC is decentralized (some parts probably not in its initial phase, depending on the number of participants), because it can operate regardless of the existence of the WorldBank.
The Validating Nodes (workers and publishers), Signing Nodes (set fees and submit transactions into the network), Data Trackers (provide all information) are all decentralized, therefore the monetary operations are themselves decentralized.
Even in the hypothetical case that the WorldBank stops existing, the only change is the monetary supply becomes limited to the current volume.

But you're right, i glossed over some parts in the whitepaper, i tried to focus more on what is UDC, but will try to complete them in future versions.
Also yeah, the plan is to start somewhere (preferably within the eurozone due to its size) and then expand.

thanks for the insightful comment, i'm sure your involvement will be profoundly missed.
By the way, you might have realized, based on my name and residence, that i'm not a native speaker. English is actually my 3rd language, so there's that.

edit following your new response: everyone can see your posts history, so try to act high and mighty all you want, but your actual contribution to this thread was null, regardless of how you formulate your comments.

wow no ico no premine

good job dev good luck