Universal Labs (YOU) ICO Review & Analysis – ULabs ICO Review

Universal Labs

The Future Of Personal Cloud Storage

ERC20 Token

The Ubbey network is a decentralized network powered by Universal Labs, Ubbey Box and the Ownership Protocol (OWP), which enables ownership exchange of digital & physical assets in a peer-to-peer way. Once an asset has been registered, it could be transferred directly from one IP to another on the Ubbey Network almost instantly, just like transferring files over peer-to-peer protocols.

Unlike the public cloud, no information about you is collected. Your files are encrypted and distributed across our decentralised network. Only you have access to your data and files.

Store Files At The Best Rates – With Universal Labs’ decentralised global cloud storage network, enjoy highly affordable prices when you store your files in the network – saving up to 90% of storage cost compared to options including Dropbox and Amazon Web Services.
Earn Money For Sharing Your Storage – Share your storage space with the network and earn YOU Coins, a cryptocurrency that can be used to pay for services within the network or cashed out for real-world dollars.
No Downtime – With just a stroke of a key, retrieve your data at any time and from anywhere in the world giving you unrivaled up-time when it comes to accessing your files.

“We are building the world’s decentralised cloud storage network where you get total control of your files while enjoying rock-bottom pricing tied together with personal ownership, maximum privacy and enterprise-grade security.”

Positives

Rock solid team. plenty of computer scientists which is definitely a required field for this sort of project. Keda Che worked at Blockchain Research Lab cosponsored by Harvard University, Fidelity, Citi and Nasdaq. he also provided blockchain consulting services to Fortune 500 companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and Beijing Genomics Institute. Dr. Ryan Yuan worked at Microsoft as Data Scientist and Adobe as Project Lead and Machine Learning Scientist respectively. Extremely strong team here.
Beautiful website. Super easy research for investors. Extensive documentation including a Full Whitepaper available in both English and Korean. Great graphics. Well structured and presented. You don’t really need to jump into the whitepaper to get an idea of what Universal Labs is building which is great to see. A video is also available showing the founder of Universal Labs talking on Fox Business Network TV about the Ubbey Box
Pretty impressive list of partners/investors here. Chaintech Partners, The Dipper Foundation, BoostVC, U-Network and so on. Very strong support behind the team. Developing a hardware solution and distributing it costs quite a bit more compared to simply developing a software-only solution and allowing people to access it through a web portal or desktop client. It’s obvious that universal labs is already “ready to go” regarding the Ubbey Box and it’s development.
Huge $260 billion+ industry in desperate need of decentralization. Providers who currently control the cloud industry (Dropbox, Amazon, Google) are taking huge cuts from their customers in exchange for uptime & services. A decentralized solution like the Ubbey Box will cut operating costs dramatically for users.
Competitors are going to find it hard to compete quickly. Universal Labs is creating a platform that is not easily copied due to the extent of the features they are developing and the hardware they’re distributing. Competitors will pop up in the future, but Universal Labs have taken a step forward here with the Ubbey Box.

Concerns

The Ubbey Box is a clever piece of hardware which allows people who have no idea about blockchain technology to have a physical piece of hardware in their home, similar products include Apple TV Boxes, Chrome Sticks, etc. Adding a piece of hardware also brings a few potential problems such as hardware failure and the closed source nature of the product. Your data can still be accessed if your Ubbey Box fails, so you aren’t completely reliant on that piece of hardware.
Another quick point regarding the Ubbey Box. At the time of writing (June 3rd, 2018), Ubbey Boxes are available for $200 USD (1TB version) and $250 USD (2TB version). Regardless of whether or not you think the price is justified, this adds a potential barrier for people who may not be able to afford it. Regarding the size of the unit, 2TB is considered to be pretty small, especially if you are planning on storing large files on the platform. No doubt there will be more iterations of the Ubbey Box with more storage somewhere down the line but this is something investors/users should keep in mind.
Universal Labs have taken a pretty stock standard blockchain solution that we’ve seen a few times already and have tied it to a piece of hardware designed to introduce those who aren’t tech savvy to decentralized storage. While the sleek piece of hardware has a great look and a point of difference over other solutions that do not have any hardware solutions, it’s really up to the potential customers here to decide whether they need another dongle/box. Not a direct concern for this project, just an observation.