UniformFiscalObject, or UFOcoin as it’s commonly known, is a project that has been around for quite a while, since at least 2014.
It’s easy to mine and I’ve hit a bunch of blocks myself, mainly via neoscrypt autoswitching at Prohashing, but also via “fake solo” mining on mecrypto.club. By “fake solo”, I mean that I was the only one mining on the pool at the time, and received 100% of the reward (minus fees). Fake solo mining is a nice way to get most of the benefits of solo mining, while still getting credit if you do a bunch of work and stop mining and someone else immediately hits a block after you stop.
Development and community activity for UFO appear to be slow and sparse.
The website looks rather nice and has updates from this year, and the wallet looks and works like those of most Bitcoin descendants with no extra frills.
The Reddit only has about 100 members with only 4 posts in the last 3 years. That’s OK, not every project is active on Reddit.
The Twitter, although not widely followed, seems to be alive, even though posts are infrequent.
Their Github is not very active, with only 5 commits since 2019.
I didn’t check the Discord, which might be far more active.
Graviex is the primary exchange for UFO and it has pretty good liquidity with a small buy/sell spread. It’s pretty strange that it’s not on more exchanges, especially since it’s been around for 7 years. Maybe it was on more, but it was dropped for lack of volume.
The all-time high price of UFO was around 0.6 cents USD in 2018 and the market cap peaked at about $18 million at the same time. Now it trades around 0.1 cents and a market cap around $5 million. Charts show this is neither a pump-and-dump coin, nor was it a coin that peaked shortly after release and went into steady decline. With a max supply of 4 billion UFO, it’s no surprise that it’s trading for a fraction of a cent given its relative obscurity.
IsThisCoinAScam ranks it pretty low, mainly due to incomplete information.
Either UFOcoin is pretty active for a dead coin, or it’s pretty dead for an active coin. Either way it is a good lubricant. It’s in solid rotation at some auto-exchange pools, including Prohashing and Zpool, and I first heard about it by hitting a block via Prohashing. The 90 second block time is a nice balance between fast and slow, and block times faster than 60 seconds are overkill.
The main problem with its popularity is that it doesn’t have a dedicated use on its own, which is also true of the vast majority of cryptocurrency. This means that it’s pretty unlikely that UFO’s price will fluctuate much and it may always be a sub-cent coin because it’s “just another crypto”.
Overall UniformFiscalObject has some good parameters, but it doesn’t have enough going on to ever become a “big deal”. Even so, I’m sure I’ll mine a little now and then, either by choice or by autoswitching pool decision. I just won’t be holding a huge supply of it.