A New Years Update from The Co-founders
A lot of concerning things happened in 2021. We saw countless attacks on the democratic process in several countries. The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan. Cuba arrested thousands of critics after the largest protests in its history. In the United States, the Capitolium was insurrected and the democratic process was halted for a better part of a day. In Russia, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was imprisoned after returning from Germany to Russia. In Brazil, president Jair Bolsonaro attacked the legitimacy of his country’s elections, prompting that “democracy is dying in Brazil”. In China, the government further tightened its grip on Hong Kong and started beating the war drums towards Taiwan. Belarus diverted a private passenger jet in order to arrest a prominent critic - prompting the European Union to impose sanctions on the country.
If you add up the global democratic erosion that is currently happening on top of having an Internet infrastructure that is continuously becoming more centralized, you end up with an unprecedented threat to people's freedom. From a historical perspective, the situation is unique. If you centralize servers and make it easy to control infrastructure and information, you give totalitarian regimes and governments complete control of what's running on the Internet. This becomes a huge threat to people's safety. Not only on the Internet but in everyday life as well.
This shows how important it is for Unigrid and similar projects to push forward. We need to fix it - sooner rather than later. If businesses and the people are in control of their data and infrastructure - with services hosted on a redundant network, this threat diminishes greatly. With no single point of failure, the Internet and the services running on it become resistant against interference and cannot be influenced or taken down.
Sale extension
The Unigrid Foundation still has tokens for sale from the first round. We have therefore decided to extend the sale throughout January. Even though we have already raised enough to finance the project completely up to the next round, this allows us to finalize some of the talks we have in place and fully take advantage of many of the marketing channels we are utilizing.
After January, the next option to purchase tokens / gridnodes will be in Q4 of 2022. At that time, the price will increase as development progresses further. This means that this January will be the final month where you are able to purchase Unigrid at the current $1 price point.
Blockchain Fest 2021
Blockchain Fest was a really great experience for us and we made a lot of new friends and forged many new contacts at the event. Unigrid also received a lot of attention and recognition. Rather than exclusively being a bunch of nerds hunkering down in some coding sweatshop, it also showed us how important it is to attend these events.
In our speech at the event we talk about blockchain scaling and how past and current solutions don't really measure up to the requirements needed by a globally adopted network. We also talk about Unigrid and how our architecture differs from previous attempts.
Attending Crypto Expo 2022 in Dubai
Following the success of Blockchain Fest 2021, we are also happy to announce that Unigrid is sponsoring Dubai Crypto Expo during March 2022. This event will be another opportunity for us to spread the word about what we are building and allow us to attract additional community members, investors, backers and partners. We are also pleased to see that several members from the community are joining us at the event in Dubai.
If you find your way to Crypto Expo, make sure you visit the Unigrid booth (#10 on the floor).
Token distribution
The first token distribution is still scheduled for January. That means that even if we are extending the sale period slightly, we will distribute this first batch this month. As soon as we are ready, everybody that has taken part in the sale will receive an email with instructions on what they need to do to receive their tokens.
Important upcoming changes
For anyone interested in actual development, we have started pushing some of our changes to the Janus Java repository (https://github.com/unigrid-project/janus-java). Shortly, we will also start pushing some changes to the core of the Unigrid daemon as well (https://github.com/unigrid-project/daemon).
These are some of the initial changes needed to enable us to do the token distribution and realize the future vision of Unigrid. If you are a community member with suggestions or just want to help out and learn more about Unigrid, we happily welcome pull requests as well.
See you in Dubai!
