If you are bullish on NFT use cases and the intersection of Blockchain and Gaming, and are not yet aware of Ultra (UOS), you are missing out on a project that is in pole position to become the leader in the space.
While other projects have been rushing to market on unscalable tech, Ultra has been quietly building out the infrastructure to handle what will be the first truly mass-market blockchain application: Ultra Games. Through partnerships with gaming and technology giants, Ultra plans to rapidly grow its platform in to the millions of users when it launches to the public over the next few months. If successful, UOS will be a top 10 token by this time next year.
Before we begin, it’s necessary to give a very brief introduction for people that don’t know anything about the project.
Ultra will be the first entertainment platform providing a variety of games industry services under a single roof, accessible through a single login: discover, buy, and play games, watch live-streaming feeds, interact with your favourite influencers, participate in contests, compete in tournaments and much more.
Ultra is not just one thing, it is a large and complex project with multiple components. With a team of 70+ full time staff, they have built their own blockchain (a heavily modified version of EOSIO), an application ecosystem that sits on top of the Ultra Blockchain, as well as the first flagship application for that ecosystem: Ultra Games — A blockchain based, mass-market ready games distribution platform.
Now that’s out of the way, here’s 7 reasons why UOS is the best investment you can make in the cryptocurrency space in the back half of 2021 and why it will be a top 10 project within the next 12 months.
The Ultra platform has been in development for over 3 years and has recently achieved some major development milestones, including the launch of their mainnet in July, and the release of the first publicly available wallet-only version of the Ultra client in August. The next milestone is the release of the full client (which includes the Ultra Games app).
Ultra is being built for a mass-market audience, and will therefore need to be able to handle millions of users out of the gate. In order to ensure everything scales properly and works as intended, the team is on-boarding users to the full client in 3 waves prior to the full public launch.
Wave 1 is already underway and includes a handful of early testers.
Wave 2 is imminent and will include hundreds of testers and early adopters.
Wave 3 is to commence shortly after wave 2 and include thousands of users.
As you can see, things are about to start ramping up quickly over the next few months as users finally get their hands on Ultra. With the full public launch we can expect a major marketing push targeting the mainstream gaming sector in coordination with partners like AMD.
Ultra has signed over 150 game developers and publishers to provide content on Ultra games, including some powerhouses, and there’s a lot of speculation as to who those big players are. With the upcoming launch, we will also finally get a look at Ultra’s much anticipated launch line-up of game titles, which will provide confirmation of some of Ultra’s content partners.
The combination of Ultra’s most anticipated milestone with the simultaneous confirmation of multiple partnerships, including major publishers, would be a massive price catalyst for UOS.
We are yet to see any decentralised applications break out into the mainstream and the reason is pretty obvious — The user experience of most dApps is awful and there are typically a number of painful and confusing hoops the user must jump through in order to get started. Private keys, wallets, crypto exchanges, gas costs etc. At the same time, consumer expectation that apps be simple, intuitive, and work seamlessly has never been higher. Many projects and their supporters seem confident they will eventually go mainstream in spite of these significant hurdles to on-boarding users. Meanwhile, Ultra has removed these hurdles altogether.
Private key management — Creating an Ultra account is as easy as creating an account with any app or service. Provide your email address and phone number (anti-spam measure) and you have just created a blockchain account. No more writing down 24 keywords on a bit of paper.
Zero account creation and transaction fees — Would Twitter ever have gotten off the ground if it cost $10 to create an account and 50c to send a tweet? Just about all dApp users will incur some sort of up-front cost in addition to ongoing transaction fees. Creating an account on Ultra and sending transactions is 100% free for all users.
The philosophy of Ultra is that in order to succeed as a mass market product, users should not even be aware that they are using blockchain technology. In other words, they should get all the benefits of blockchain without any of the drawbacks.
Ultra has solved blockchains most challenging hurdles to mass adoption. With the infrastructure built and in place there should be nothing holding it back when Ultra ships to the wider public later this year. With the right content and promotion through its major partnerships, we could quickly see Ultra become one of the most widely used and recognisable projects in the space.
Partnerships will play a major role in Ultra’s plans to rapidly grow it’s userbase at launch from a few thousand early adopters to millions of mainstream gamers. A couple of their major partnerships have already been revealed in AMD and Ubisoft. Here’s a look at the nature of those partnerships as well as what’s to come.
Ubisoft: The gaming giant behind franchises like Assassins Creed, Far Cry, and the Tom Clancy games. Ubisoft is a block producer for Ultra (currently producing blocks on Ultra’s mainnet) and is the first ‘confirmed’ content provider for the Ultra Games platform.
AMD: Tech giant and technology and marketing partner for Ultra. AMD will distribute free games to their customers that will be redeemable on the Ultra platform — which will be install-able directly from AMD drivers. It’s estimated AMD will bring 1 Million users to Ultra per month.
Chinese operator: Ultra also has a partnership with a yet to be named Chinese gaming giant with a reported 70 million monthly active users. As Ultra’s ‘Operator’ in China, they will be responsible for all regulatory compliance matters, marketing efforts, user acquisition, as well as signing up local game developers.
At this stage we are left to speculate on who the partner is. I won’t speculate here as that would be wholly irresponsible, but anyone is free to google “China 70 million monthly active users PC gamers”.
Content and Ecosystem partners: Ultra has signed agreements with over 150 developers/publishers to release content on the platform, some of whom are currently developing exclusive content for Ultra.
Other Partnerships: Ultra reportedly has several other big partnerships yet to be announced. We won’t speculate as to who they may be, although there have been some not-so-subtle clues about the identity of at least one big technology and/or content partner (yes, bigger than AMD).
Ultra already boasts some of the biggest partnerships in crypto — partnerships that serve as a giant confirmation of the quality of what Ultra is building, and also which have the potential to bring millions of mainstream users into the blockchain space. According to the team, we will see a cascade of partnership announcements leading up to the public launch, which will be a very exciting time for UOS holders.
Despite very strong fundamentals, Ultra is still undeniably flying under the radar, sitting outside the top 150 on Coinmarketcap. Smart people will see this as an opportunity rather than a drawback, since despite being up on the IEO price, UOS has yet to go on a major price run.
In discussions about potential price targets for UOS, one project that is often used for comparison purposes is Theta, given the fact they have the same token supply of 1 Billion, they have a partnership with Ultra, and they both operate in the NFT/Gaming space.
Earlier in the year Theta went on a run from $0.70 to $15 in the space of 3 months 🚀🚀 . Consider also that Ultra arguably has a much greater scope than Theta (Theta.tv is one of many applications that lives within the Ultra ecosystem).
As you can see, UOS has seen some strong price action as more and more people are discovering the project, however, compared to Theta, UOS has a lot of room to run. With the right catalyst (see reasons 1 and 3), UOS looks primed to go on a ‘Theta’ like run.
If Ultra achieves just a fraction of what it’s set out to do, we will see numbers much higher than what Theta has achieved. You can read more about price predictions for the UOS token here.
With the success of the likes of NBA Topshot and Axie Infinity, NFTs have seen an explosion of interest this year. Putting the hype aside (we’ll come back to it), we know just by looking at the current NFT landscape, that developers have not even scratched the surface of future use cases for NFTs — mostly because current implementations of NFT tech have very limited functionality. Ultra plans on changing that with the release of their own next generation NFT standard.
We are not going to go in to detail about Ultra’s NFT since we just did in a recent article you can read here, but here’s a brief bullet point summary of some key features of Ultra’s NFT standard.
- All games sold on Ultra are NFTs, meaning they can be resold, they can be rare, they can even be signed by the developers or artists.
- Revenue split functionality is built into the NFTs, meaning devs can share in the revenue from secondary market sales. Tradability, revenue split, minimum resale price, geofencing (and more) are all things devs can easily set when they publish their games.
- Digital item NFTs can be easily incorporated in to blockchain and non- blockchain based games within Ultra’s Token Factories. Ultra’s cross platform SDK means those NFTs can exist on any platform (Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo etc).
- Devs can permit the monetisation of user generated content encouraging high quality post-launch content for users, and opening up a new revenue stream for themselves and the modding community (win-win-win).
- NFT marketplaces on Ultra will be decentralised (trustless) and non-custodial, meaning there is no centralised service that holds your NFTs, they stay in your wallet until sold.
Once again this is barely scratching the surface of what will be possible on Ultra in terms of the ability of developers to monetise and promote their content, as well as players’ ability to earn and use their NFTs.
Now back to the hype. NFTs are going to revolutionise the gaming sector. Projects that merely hitch their wagon to the NFT hype train may do very well in the future. Ultra, though, is a project that aims to be the leader in the NFT space by offering unmatched functionality and providing a mass-market gateway to millions of users for developers, advertisers, and big brands — in the Ultra platform.
UOS is a utility token tied to the usage of the platform. All purchases of games, virtual items and services within the ecosystem requires the use of UOS tokens. However, users do not have to pay in UOS. Users can purchase their content in fiat (e.g. credit card) and an automatic conversion from fiat to UOS happens invisibly on the backend.
Users with no working knowledge of cryptocurrency are still participating fully in Ultra’s token economy causing a constant and increasing demand for the token as the ecosystem grows.
We did a detailed dive in to the tokenomics of UOS here (as well as some price predictions), but here is a another brief bullet point summary of the main use cases for UOS and how they drive demand for the UOS token.
Content 🎮: Users can purchase new content on the platform using UOS or the fiat currency of their region. Fiat payments are converted to UOS invisibly on the backend (purchased from exchanges).
Staking 🔒: Developers who require a lot of network resources will need to stake for transaction priority, in order to ensure their games and applications run smoothly. Users can also stake to their favourite developers and be rewarded in UOS and other perks.
Mining ⛏️: Ultra will have a one click mining solution provided by CUDOS. The profits from mining are automatically used to purchase UOS on the exchanges and delivered to the users wallet.
Advertising 🔊: Users can opt in to be subjected to Ads on the platform. If they do they will receive a 50% share of the advertising cost in instant UOS payments each time they view an advertisement.
NFTs ⚔️: Every NFT minted on Ultra requires a small amount of UOS to cover the RAM cost (and prevent spam). Additional UOS can be ‘locked’ in NFTs, giving them more value. Users can ‘break’ NFTs to retrieve the locked UOS.
Game Dev and Acquisition War Chest 💰: Ultra will lock 1% of their share of sales revenue away (in UOS) for at least 2 years to fund exclusive games and/or bring new services to the platform.
The team estimates that for every $1 spent on the platform, 40c will be retained in UOS through the various incentives and utilities of the token. If Ultra achieves its user growth targets, the demand for UOS on exchanges as a direct result of platform adoption will significantly outpace the supply, resulting in equally significant organic price growth for the token.
Referral systems are nothing new, however, consider how much better smart contract based referral systems are. Referral systems in the gaming industry right now involve middlemen, are not available to everyone, slow to payout, and lack trust and transparency. Blockchain based referral systems are trust-less, fully transparent, and are paid out instantly.
In the context of what Ultra is building and who they’re building it for, it’s an incredibly powerful feature. The Ultra platform will have two separate referral programs: a user referral program, and a content specific referral program. Let’s look at both separately:
2-level User Referral Program enables anybody to refer other users to join the Ultra platform and earn UOS every time they make a purchase. Forever. The graphic below explains the system in more detail.
Ultra’s user referral systems provides a powerful and continuous financial incentive for individuals, influencers, developers, media outlets, and even large corporates like AMD, to promote Ultra to their friends, communities, audiences and userbases. Since they are rewarded for each and every referral, the bigger their audience, the greater the revenue potential — and hence a stronger incentive to participate. For corporations like AMD and Dell, with hundreds of millions of customers, the potential revenue would be massive.
The flow on benefit for Ultra would be equally massive since all those that have referred a significant number of users have their interests aligned with Ultra’s and would become permanent evangelists of the Ultra platform.
Opt-In referral program allows influencers, streamers, gaming websites or literally anybody to promote content available on Ultra on behalf of developers and get a percentage of the revenue of each sale they direct to the platform. This feature is opt-in and customisable at the time developers publish their games on the platform. Example of the developer interface below:
With thousands of games releasing every year on Steam, visibility is a major problem for game developers. Hiring a publisher that demands 30–40% revenue share (on top of Steam’s 30% share) makes it extremely difficult for devs to even recoup their development costs, which is a genuinely sad state of affairs for the industry.
Ultra’s revenue share is a godsend to game devs since it gives them powerful new ways to promote their games through crowdsourcing. The system is highly customisable too, which opens up some creative possibilities for marketing strategies. Here’s just one example of what will be possible:
Example: A developer could enable a revenue share of 50%+, but only for the first 1,000 units. This would result in a rush of influencers trying to aggressively promote the game to capitalise on the limited-time offer. By the time the offer had ended, there could be enough “buzz” generated by word-of-mouth to sustain sales of the game going forward.
The system taps into the already significant “influence” content creators have over the purchasing decisions of their followers, and it opens up what would be an irresistible new revenue stream for them.
With incredibly strong fundamentals and long term promise, combined with some major milestones over the next few months culminating in the full public launch of its long awaited platform , there’s likely never going to be a better time to invest in UOS.
The Ultra platform is available NOW. You can download the wallet-only client which will automatically update to the full client when it becomes available. Secure your username, and start inviting your friends so you can earn back some of that money they owe you.
Thanks for reading this article! This is by no means an exhaustive look at the project. If you like what you’ve read and want to do more research, you can find dozens of hours of content here. You should also join Ultra’s Telegram, and follow them, and us on twitter!
If you’ve seen enough, UOS is available to buy on Bitfinex, Kucoin, AscendEX, and Uniswap.
Disclaimer: This article was written by enthusiastic members of Ultra’s community. We are veteran gamers and current testers of the Ultra platform. The sign-up button above uses our own referral link. We also own some UOS.
