We all know that creating and maintaining a Blockchain is extremely complicated and is something that goes well beyond the skillset of your average developer. This becomes increasingly complex for any business that wants to integrate blockchain technologies into its operations in a secure manner and compliant manner. 

Business owners would need to hire experts if they wanted to integrate any sort of distributed ledger into its business model. However, experienced blockchain developers are very scarce which makes them extremely costly for a business to be able to lock down and hire.

Without the expertise, businesses and corporations pretty much have zero options when it comes to integrating any form of blockchain into their operations.

This is what the problem is that Unibright is trying to solve. 

Unibright is attempting to take enterprise blockchain adoption to the next level by connecting them with Ethereum and other blockchains. Using their platform, the day to day activities of any corporation can easily be integrated into a blockchain infrastructure without the need for writing a single line of code.

A study from Deloitte showed that over 53% of business leaders stated that blockchain is a top 5 strategic priority for their business. A further 59% believed that blockchain will completely disrupt their industry.

However, the adoption of blockchain in the enterprise sector is still chugging along at a very slow pace. The uncertainty involved with integrating blockchain, the struggle to understand how it works, the cost of the integration, and the effectiveness of the impact that it would have on the enterprise prevent CEOs from taking the leap to integrate it into their system.

Well, Unibright is aiming to close the gap to make this leap possible for CEOs via a unified framework. They have created a template-based workflow that makes it easy for anybody to integrate and connect their existing business model to a particular blockchain.

In this article, you will find everything you need to know about Unibright from what it is, to how it works, and who is behind the project.
Buckle up, you are about to learn about a project that has an incredible scope if it manages to gain some solid traction within the enterprise industry.

What Is Unibright

“Unibright makes it easy to integrate Blockchain technology into existing business”

This is the headline on the homepage of the Unibright website and it accurately presents what Unibright is in nutshell. 

The team behind Unibright has created a framework that makes it easier for companies to integrate blockchain into their existing business without the large costs involved with hiring a developer and maintaining the blockchain.

Unibright can pretty much be considered as a Blockchain as a service (BaaS)company as it provides blockchain solutions to enterprise businesses that have no access to creating one themselves. 

Their solution comes with a visual workflow that allows users to easily create and launch smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain (and others) without the need for any coding or blockchain expertise. 

The team has created a bunch of templates to make it easier to get started which include things such as invoice creation, asset life cycles management, multi-party approval, and batch tracing. The fact that it is template based allows it to target a wide range of businesses that can simply come and select a template that is most appropriate and customize it to their needs.

Users select their use case and create a custom workflow based on that template in a very user-friendly and visual manner.  

Unibright is a unified framework that simplifies all blockchain integration through its platform. 

Technology Behind Unibright

The entire UB Framework is separated into 4 distinct tools.

• UB Workflow Designer
• UB Contract Lifecycle Manager
• IB Explorer
• UB Connector

These four tools help businesses to integrate their processes into blockchain without a single line of code needed. 

UB Workflow Designer 

A visual workflow that allows users to create a blockchain-based solution with zero coding skills whatsoever. Users can choose an existing template and then customize it toward their own needs. This solves the problem of needing expensive developers to come and code enterprise-specific blockchains.

UB Contract Lifecycle Manager (LCM)

This is the central part of the entire system. It allows users to transform the visually designed workflow into smart contracts on a specific blockchain at the push of a button. It generates smart contracts for the most appropriate blockchain automatically. 

UB Explorer 

The UB Explorer is used to monitor all ongoing processes. Users can search for smart queriers across smart contracts and businesses related systems. The explorer provides both off-chain and on-chain data in the dashboard.

UB Connector

The UB Connector connects off-chain business Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)/IT systems to the blockchain by using the Unibirght smart contract solutions. It basically connects the existing IT landscape with smart contracts through the predefined smart adapters.

All of these individual components are connected through the Unibirght Contract Interface (UCI). This maps out the method of implementation for the main structure and state variables derived from each component mentioned above. 

UBT Token

The UBT token is an ERC-20 token that is used as fuel to pay for services and to perform transactions across the entire network. It is the only method for anybody to access the Unibright framework.

It pretty much acts as a voucher for the framework. Users must deposit tokens into the framework wallet so they can be used as vouchers which will pay for one “connection” on the framework - such as a connection between a legacy business system and a blockchain. 

Furthermore, this deposit must be able to cover the costs for the operation for at least 30 days which means the funds are locked within the platform and are taken off of the market. Additionally, once they are locked up, they can never be withdrawn to be sold on the market again. Instead, users will have the option to re-buy tokens that are locked up to use them in the framework again, however, they cannot be withdrawn to be sold on the open market.

This effectively reduces the supply of UBT over a longer period which should lead to an increase in the cost of UBT if the demand increases. 

You can find out more about the token here.

The History Of Unibright

It all started with their ICO in May 2018 which sold out of tokens within 10 days. They quickly reached their soft cap of $2.2 million during their sale and immediately started their development phase. 

The team went on to host a Hackathon in late-May 2018 with Microsoft Germany and Zühlke for them to gain an understanding of how smart contracts work and how hard they actually are to code manually. 

Unibright was ready to showcase the Unibright Demo in October 2018 which premiered the beta version of all the components of the Unibright Framework. This was the first time the entire project was introduced to the public eye.

It went on to reach the “beta stage” by December 2018 as they met their self-imposed deadline to get the product out by the end of the year. 

The project then went on to leave the Beta-status in March 2019 when they announced that the Unibright Framework was product ready. This made Unibright software ready to be used in live scenarios for enterprise solutions after 3 months of demo testing without a single minute of downtime or any major bugs. 

This marked the major milestone that Unibright wanted to reach - to get their product into a live scenario and work fluidly. 

Now we have tackled the initial history of the project, let us take a closer look into the team behind Unibright.

Core Team Members

Marten Jeung is the founder and CEO at Unibright. He was previously the CEO of Unibright’s parent company, SPO Consulting, which has been in the business integration sector for over 20 years and has provided software solutions to clients such as Siemens, Samsung, and Lufthansa. He has a master’s degree in Computer Science who has is a gap bridging middleware specialist with expert level knowledge on SAP Integration.

Stefan Schmidt is a co-founder of Unibright and is the acting CTO. He also has a master’s of Computer Science along with 20 years of experience in business modeling and software architecture. 

Ingo Sterzinger is the lead backend developer and acting CIO for Unibright. He is a full-stack developer with 15 years of experience in web application development. 

Partnerships

Unibright has built a long list of partnerships thus far in their journey to elevate the adoption of enterprise blockchain integration.

Their first strategic partnership came in 2018 with NEM. They added the NEM oriented code generation to the Unibright framework and also received blockchain training and certification through the Global NEMsp Network. 

The partnership also involved the addition of NEM adapters to Unibright’s integration platform to connect the NEM framework to existing IT landscapes. 

The team has also partnered with the likes of Lufthansa and Microsoft Partners as they come together to host hackathons.

Conclusion

The concept behind Unibright is very simple: Bring Blockchain solutions to the enterprise world to expand adoption - and they have created a very user-friendly and intuitive solution to make this happen.

Unibright actually has a working product that puts it in a league of its own. Enterprise business leaders can actually use Unibright to integrate blockchain into their running processes in a method that requires no onboarding of blockchain developers to build and maintain a blockchain.

The success of Unibright now all relies on how many enterprises they can get to use the Unibright framework.