Uranus (URAC) AMA with Wolf Crypto

8 min readAug 1, 2018

We held an AMA with Uranus (URAC) in our public Telegram channel on July 31st.

Uranus is a ubiquitous sharing platform that aims to be the Airbnb and Uber for computing resources, enabling computing-power services beyond the conventional public clouds. By interconnecting countless computing resource contributors and users, the Uranus project empower redundant resources in the world. Establishing an expandable public blockchain and an innovative distributed-container technology that provides efficient, cost-effective and decentralized computing services for all users.

You can visit the Uranus Telegram channel for further details.

Here’s what Uranus’s CEO James Jiang had to say in the AMA.*

*This AMA has been edited for clarity.

WC (Wolf Crypto Telegram Member)

Welcome to another edition of Wolf Crypto AMA, this time with Uranus.

Great to have you here James!

Hello, everyone. Nice to talk with everyone in here.

TEAM & TEAM GOALS

James can you please tell us a bit about yourself and what lead you to founding the Uranus Project?

I have 12 years experience in tele-communication, 6 years experience in Silicon industry and 7 years experience in open source software development.

About Uranus I had a conversation with a top expert in cloud technology 2 years ago. He planed to use container technology to link and aggregate small data center and to build another public cloud service platform beyond Amazon. There would hundreds and even thousands of such of data center there.

I think technology wise it is a feasible. However, business wise would be very difficult to provide a consistent service pricing and technical support. This is where blockchain technology is coming to the picture.

The Uranus dev team seems to have a lot of experience in blockchain and software development. Can you expand on team’s background?

Yes, we have more than 20 people dedicated full time and we have 12 full time developers on this project.

How do you plan to disrupt centralized public cloud services such as Amazon and Microsoft etc ?

The market we are focusing is distributed computing, so we will be supplementary to public cloud, not disrupting the public cloud.

On the other side, public cloud is difficult to serve application based on distributed computing.

Our target is to build computing infrastructure using sitting idle computing resources to serve application based on distributed computing.

“Uranus aims to be the Airbnb and Uber for computing resources” can you please explain how you aim to achieve this and whether the team has the necessary skills to fulfill such a lofty goal?

We use blockchain technology to link and aggregate computing resources contributed by numerous resource owners and build an open infrastructure.

Our team members have at least 5 years commercial grade software development experience. Our CTO has been working in a role of software development team leader and software architect for about 15 years.

THE URANUS PLATFORM

Regarding container technology, what would be the requirements to run these containers? And from a profitability point of view, would the user make more money by having a container with higher specs, or would it be based on the utilization?

We have a specially developed so called distributed container technology which can fit into most of the less than 5 years old PC technology and the incentives will be based on utilisation. However, the specs does impact the utilisation.

So your program won’t melt my PC?

No, it wouldn’t, it is just like application installed in your PC.

Can you give some specific use cases of Uranus?

For example, IoT node management, that is a big market, voting and advertisement, and solving the large task by using distributed computing technology such as similar to volunteer computing projects.

Volunteer computing like SETI?

Yes, that is one example.

What are the current issues with public cloud solutions and how will Uranus fix them?

It is difficult for public cloud to support distributed applications.

Take IoT nodes as an example, the information from a sensors need to be process locally and timely.

For computation, mostly we need lots of data, can I ask, will the data be decentralized or centralized? And how will the data be downloaded to each node?

The concept are different to conventional public cloud. For example, we won’t download a data from a central point.I believe the data in different question mean different thing. So to answer your question. I may need to present you architecture blockchain and distributed computing. I may not have enough time in here.

For more details please see our Whitepaper.

How big is the cloud services market the Uranus product will look to gain a foothold in?

1. This is not a conventional cloud service.
2. The market has not been set up yet.
3. By our calculation, about 70–80 billion USD computing equipment sitting idle in China market. Worldwide will be few times more.

There are 60 million PC’s sold in China each year!

COMPETITORS

What are some competitors in this space?

In term of market target, technical approach and team experience. We don’t see any competitors yet.

Similar projects like Golem and SONM are using distributed computing as well, not sure if they’re necessarily competitors though.

Yes, there are some other projects base on distributed computing or grid computing, but we haven’t seen in their market in well defined market and the issue of how to adapt their applications to suit all kinds of different software and hardware.

PARTNERSHIPS & INVESTORS

What is the relationship with ChainTED? It’s my understanding they have incubated the project..If this is the case, what does this involve and when did they start on the project?

ChainTED did not incubate Uranus. ChainTED provides comprehensive package of advisory and marketing service to Uranus included but not limited to token metrics design, community management and development, exchange listing, networking, marketing and post ICO service etc.

Can you talk about some of your partnerships?

As mention above, ChainTED is one of our major partners and we do have a couple of technology contractors moving forward. We need a few partners in our ecosystem such as resource as a user and application developers.

Our technology contractors and ecosystem partners have not been added into this yet.

TOKEN UTILITY

How does the token function within the Uranus ecosystem?

Token is the “blood” in this ecosystem, it supports the exchange of the computing resources via token.

So its a true utility token in that sense?

Yes, it is a utility token.

As a individual are there any benefits of me using the Uranus token?

That depends if you are resource contributor, resource user, application developer or solely as a token investor.

ROADMAP & STRATEGY

Can you provide a brief overview of your roadmap and strategy?

We will have our beta version product by the end of the September and will start our internal testing users by that time as well.

I will launch the mainnet on January of next year. We expect to put on a few dozen thousands real users by that time.

At the end of 2019, this should be around a million users on the platform.

How much of this is planned to be completed by Q2 2019?

Around 100k — 200k users by Q2 2019.

More important to the amount of users, we have to establish an ecosystem of resources as a contributors, resources for users and application developers.

Regarding cross-chain, are there any particular platforms you plan on working with at first?

No, current application plan for the first stage does not involve cross chain.

Does Uranus have a demo we can check out?

Around the end of the September will be our user friendly beta product.

ICO, TOKEN METRICS & EXCHANGES

When will the ICO be?

We are currently starting our private sale and our public sale will start an couple of days after the private sale is finished.

What is the hardcap for the ICO?

We are raising 35K ETH for the ICO.

What is the percentage of tokens available to the public and team? Does the team have a lock up on their tokens?

The token sale for the public would be 35% of the token sale and the team receives 15% of the tokens. The team lockup will be unlocked 1/3 of the token after 1 year, the rest of the 2/3 token will be unlocked equally in every month at the following 24 months after 1 year.

So the total lockup period for the team is 3 years.

I know this probably isn’t something you can discuss but have you budgeted for the increasing exchange listing process?

Yes we do have a budget for certain amount regarding the exchange listing process, but we also will focus on few major exchanges, not only the quantity of exchanges, we will instead focus on quality.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

We very much appreciate your time here today James . Best of luck during the ICO and looking forward to hearing more about Uranus as the token sale progresses!

Thank your very much everyone, everyone has asked good questions and we enjoyed answering all of them!

Here are a few more Uranus links for those interested. If you have follow up questions they can be asked in the Uranus Telegram group,

Website: https://uranus.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Uraners
Whitepaper: https://uranus.io/static/Uranus-Technical-WhitePaper-EN-V2.7.pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/Uraners
ICO Drops: https://icodrops.com/uranus/

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Uranus (URAC) AMA with Wolf Crypto

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Written by Wolf Crypto