Uranus Report by 42Fund

Uranus is a global computing platform. It will be used in large computing projects based on distributed computing.They aim to compete with existing centralized cloud platforms – Amazon, Microsoft, etc.

Data and metrics

Hard cap - 35000 ETH
Token Sale: 35%

Token metrics

• Token symbol: URAC
• Hardcap: 35000 ETH
• Total token supply: 3,500,000,000 URAC tokens
• Token ratio: TBA
• Token Sale: 35% for the max. token sale
• Team: 15%
• Seed investors: 3%
• Ecosystem: 7%
• Mining reward: 40%

Social metrics

Telegram: was created on June 1, 2018; active communication began on June 7. The project came into my sight a long time ago and on June 15 the project’s Telegram had only 100 members. As of today, July 1, it has 11,000. The project doesn’t have Airdrop, but they plan to implement bounty. Telegram group administrators answer questions on a regular basis.   

Twitter: the first twit is June 11. On June 15 it had 9 followers and as of today, July 1, it has 500 followers.The site traffic is 570 per day (150 unique visitors). 

Team

The team is from China and in FAQ they say the company was founded in Singapore in March 2018. Executives came from Beijing Cloud Times Technology. 

The company was founded in Beijing in 2011 and is an operating one – it develops desktop cloud hardware/software products and is the first Chinese company owing intellectual property rights in the field of cloud software/hardware products.

• CEO – worked for 6.5 years as General Manager and Board Chairman of a subsidiary of ZTE in Shenzhen, then worked as CEO of Beijing Cloud Times Technology for 7 years. The web-site states he owns 6 patents, registered in the US. 
• CTO – worked for 5.5 years as an architect of Chinese IT companies (was engaged in distributed virtual computing secure delivery, audio/video compression algorithms), then for 5.6 years - as an Architect/Linux Team R&D Leader of Wyse Technology (global leader in cloud client computing).11 developers.

The team involved in the product development is a skilled one – all of them are computer scientists with more than 10 years’ relevant to the project work experience for IBM, Amazon, Symantec, Cisco, Baidy, Dell wyse and other companies. 60% of the team came from the same company the executives did (Beijing Cloud Times Technology). They have team members experienced in cryptology and blockchain.  Couple of them have freshly made LinkedIn profiles, most likely created specifically for this project.  Some of them don’t have any information on their involvement with the Uranus project. 

Advisors

11 advisors. 6 of them are technical advisors.

Technical advisors have huge theoretical and practical experience in computer science and cloud computing.

1. Co-founder and СЕО of Rancher Labs (infrastructure for construction of private clouds for Docker from any cloud or server). Previously worked for 3 years as CTO of Citrix systems, was a founder and CEO of Cloud.com;

2. Co-founder and CIM of Scry.info (rank 102 in CMC, a platform for data exchange based on blockchain), for 4 years worked as Senior IT Architect of IBM Australia, has more than 10 years’ work experience in cloud computing in different capacities, won an award for the best blockchain paper from The International Conference on Web Services (ICWS);

3. Tech Lead & Software Engineer of Google (almost 7 years), worked for 2 years as Director of Engineering of Vivisimo (the company and their Web search engine were acquired by IBM), now he is a CTO and founder of many blockchain startups (based on data on LinkedIn);

4. IT specialist of IBM Canada (3 years), Senior Solution Architect of Sun Microsystem (5 years), Cloud Architect of IBM (2 years), worked for 10 years as a Senior and Chief Architect of VMware (subsidiary of Dell Technologies, providing cloud computing);

5. Worked for 4 years as a Senior Software Engineer of Cisco (responsible for virtual cloud data center architecture), for 7 months – as a Senior Expert for Alibaba (Alicloud), for almost 3 years – as a Cloud Architect of IBM China, for 3 years (and still works there) – as a Chief Cloud Architect of JD Group (a large retail company, operating in Africa).

6. More than 10 years’ experience working for financial technology companies as analyst, co-author of the book "Java SE Practice Tutorial" (Sun Microsystems).

5 advisors:

1. Senior Product Manager of Huawei (product management for cloud OS);

2. CMO of RChaintech (China's first blockchain technology service provider, 3 years’ experience, 46 patents, X bolt v1.3 technology), 15 years’ work experience as a General Manager of IBM;

3. Council member of China Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance (AIIA), founder and СЕО of Tophun Media (hosts technological conferences in China), owns awards for entrepreneurship;

4. СЕО of Hyper.sh (Serverless Container Platform)

5. Co-founder of IOTchain (rank 209 in СMC), founded XiaoMi blockchain tech group.Advisors have lots of regalia and are high-level.One of the advisors, Sheng Liang, confirmed in his LinkedIn, that he knows the team very well and is their official advisor. However, all the advisors but one don’t have any links to the project on LinkedIn. 

In АМА they say the team works together for a very long time (since 2011) and they started working on the project 2 years ago. Formally the project was launched 9 months ago.

Partners / Investors

In the previous version of URANUS site there were indicated two partners involved in cloud containers, but there are no any partners or investors in the new version of the site. 

Technologies

It’s a supercomputer based on blockchain: you give computing power, the system accumulates, distributes and delivers it to the customer. The areas of computing are anywhere from weather forecast to analysis of space orbits and bioengineering computing. They are very proud of "distributed-containers", using which it’ll be possible to connect to existing blockchains by a single click and use Uranus DApp applications.

They are creating two blockchains: Service delivery layer (cloud, computing, fast decentralized pool) and Value delivery layer – a so-called Uranus Chain (operation of smart contracts, DPOS+BFT consensus). There will be two types of smart contracts: ETH type and uraTiller module contracts, using which it’s possible to work with API and make links to your DApp applications. People will be providing their computing powers to a service layer, which will evaluate their Proof of Contribution, based on which people will earn tokens. They describe their structure in a very detailed way: from primary modules, through which users will be connecting to the system, to consensus mechanism and inconsistency of computing system blocks.  

One can see, that the team seeks to work through the project’s structure and Uranus ecosystem on high quality level. The explanation of the token economics in the WP is not as comprehensive.

 They say tokens will be used to: pay for the services, staking in DPOS, reward the owners of computing power. The word ‘token’ is used 6-7 times in the 55-pages’ WP. In FAQ they say that token is used as a carrier to deliver value in ecosystem.In one of the answers in the chat they say that in the beginning they will use the ERC-20 token and later on they will swap it for their own blockchain token. However, there is no any date or plan of token swap at the moment. WP is good in terms of details, but although they claim they have a Technical White Paper, it’s rather strange not to mention the usage of ERC-20 token type first. It seems to be the feature of cloud computing, as RRChain also did not write much about token (but they did specify the usage of ERC-20).

They don’t mention any marketing plan, the growth potential is unclear, who the clients of the project are. The WP they give is a technical one and does not necessarily have to answer these questions, but it’s always a pleasure to see the team answering such questions publicly. Overall, the Technical Whitepaper is a good and detailed one.

 The main repository on Github is impressive – 15,000 commits and active development during 3 years, but then, in 2015, the project was silent and revived not so long ago. Moreover, officially they say the company was founded in March 2018. That’s what I don’t fully understand.

They promise to launch a prototype by September. They say, that a huge part of the current code was not made public and they will show it next month. 

Extras / Resume / Opinion

At the moment there is not enough information on the project to be able to make some firm conclusions.But you can already see some pros and cons:+cloud computing picks up momentum, because that’s what you can create implementing blockchain and that’s what can be in demand

Positive:

• The team works together for a very long time.
• In just 2 weeks’ time the project attracted attention and gathered its audience++/- advisors are suitable - a full set of specialists from various fields, but it would probably be nice to see someone from hype 2017-18 projects.  
• The Github is a strong one, but I can’t quite understand, which part of the code they are going to use, why the development was halted in 2015 and why the company was created in 2018- the project doesn’t have any partnerships at the moment. 

Negative:

• It’s very difficult to assess its team effectively, because most of them have very little information on LinkedIn  -only one advisor and half of the team have links to Uranus on their LinkedIn.
• It’s good when a chat has some typical investors’ questions: “when ICO”, “when exchanges”, “what about metrics” and at the moment these questions come very rarely, so it’s better to follow the chat members’ growth and have a look at the communication at a later time – closer to ICO.
  

The project is, without question, an interesting one, but to be able to make an investment decision it’s necessary to wait till we get information on dates. We should also follow the chat communication and possible changes of team members, advisors and partners.