With Wave 2 around the corner, we’ve got some exciting updates to share with you! This Community Update will cover what we’ve been working on lately, including the latest technical developments on both the platform and the network.
Iterative Release #4
We’ve made numerous changes to the platform in April, mostly focusing on improving the user experience and accuracy of economic features, and facilitating specific aspects relating to uploading games and DLC’s on Ultra.
Our in-house Oracle is now operational , allowing for a highly accurate live on-chain conversion rate and can be used by our entire DAPP ecosystem for free. The Ultra Wallet also now displays, next to a user’s UOS balance, its fiat value. This is made possible by utilizing our Oracle’s live data and allows a user to see their own local fiat currency (Dollars, Euros, etc.) in their wallet.
Among the various improvements to the user experience, here are some of the most notable:
- Updated sign-up and authentication process to incorporate Ultra’s SSO (Single Sign On)
- Brand new web installer
- Improved Ultra Games file downloader
- Improved Ultra Games and DLC uploader
- Improved file system for games and SDK-Direct6
- Upgraded full-screen feature
The Blockchain Team’s Progress
The blockchain team has been busy lately, with a lot of focus on testing and deploying foundational tech that our platform relies on.
We’ve spent a lot of time on our custom, on-chain Oracle which we use for crypto to fiat conversions. Deploying an Oracle securely and ensuring that it has high availability is a challenging task that involves a lot of coordination and attention to detail.
Our core focus has been getting the Mainnet launched. This means that we have been resolving many, many internal dependencies, finalizing policies and permission structures, and going over all the deployment details with our professional Block Producer partners. Infrastructure has already been deployed and we’re putting it through its paces with constant benchmarking, which we in turn have been using to tweak and optimize the network architecture. Our internal security guru (happy birthday!) has been sneakily poking and prodding at all exposed end-points to ensure our network’s integrity. On top of all that, we’re quickly progressing with improvements that we’ll be deploying after the network launches.
Below you can see a report from our blockchain team’s Jira (where the magic happens). This shows a graph of the team’s issue status over the life of the project. The pace is staggering!
As you may know, Ultra’s blockchain is unique in several ways: It has no account creation fees, a resource management designed to allow truly free transactions, Ultra’s own custom NFT standard which meets business and regulator needs, and much more. To develop such a complex and innovative blockchain requires an incredible amount of expertise and diligence and we’re confident that we’ll deliver a blockchain that will not only truly serve the gaming industry but also be the first choice for enterprises looking to deploy to web3.
With the launch of Mainnet, Wave 2, and the public release ahead, we’re continuing to recruit blockchain developers. We expect this rapid increase in completed tasks to continue in the coming months.
Seamlessly Buy UOS with Credit Card
One of our core goals as a disruptive games distribution platform is to allow absolutely anyone, regardless of technical or financial knowledge, to benefit from our blockchain-based solution. With Ultra, gamers will be able to buy, play, and trade games like they would in the physical world, seamlessly and without limitation.
Once we go live on the mainnet, users will be able to buy games with UOS tokens and traditional currencies (USD, CAD, EUR, GBP and AUD) thanks to our newest partner, Simplex.
Simplex is a leading on/off ramps solution in the financial blockchain space and is a widely used financial institution. Simplex empowers its vast network of partners to accept the widest range of payment methods, including Visa, MasterCard, Apple Pay, SWIFT, SEPA, and more. The recent integration of Simplex within the Ultra platform allows us to process fiat payments in accordance with the highest security and performance standards.
Purchase Tangible Goods from Amazon, Walmart, and eBay with UOS
With the growing importance of cryptocurrencies in the global economy, and ecommerce in particular, cryptocurrency users increasingly want to be able to spend directly from their own wallet, without having to use third parties such as exchanges or banks. This is all the more true in the gaming world. We understand that gamers, streamers, and game developers must be able to easily convert their earnings into physical goods.
We’ve integrated Shopping.io into the Ultra platform to give you the freedom to spend UOS with the biggest ecommerce sites such as Walmart, eBay, and Amazon. For you, this means you can earn UOS through various activities on the Ultra platform, such as trading items and NFTs, watching live streams, and participating in tournaments, and spend it on physical goods (like gaming gear or a new graphics card).
Including Shopping.io technology and services into our ecosystem provides a valuable financial tool for the Ultra community, allowing users to use the UOS they earn outside of the Ultra platform.
Welcome to Nada our Growth Hacker!
As we’re working with many game developers to help them integrate their past and future games onto the Ultra platform, we’re ramping up our marketing game. Our content will gear more toward the gaming community, focusing on gaming related content and announcements. In order to achieve this, we’ve hired a talented Growth Hacker from London whose experience lies in social media management and digital marketing within the esports and gaming space.
Starting this month, Nada will keep the community updated on upcoming news surrounding Ultra’s development, including new partnerships, behind the scenes, and the latest games to be added onto the platform.
Our Community is Growing
Wave 2 Community Events
April has been a very exciting month on the community events side! Our friends from @Ultra_Community organized three Telegram game contests and rewarded three winners with Wave 2 access passes. In total, we’ve given away a whopping 26 passes for the highly anticipated release of Wave 2. The seats are limited but we plan to give away a few more in the coming weeks while our dev team refine the build meant to go live on mainnet.
To be in with a chance to gain exclusive access to the platform, sign up now on our website and follow us on Twitter.
Welcome to our Growing French Community
You probably already know that our French audience is the biggest non-english-speaking Ultra community. In order to support our increasing presence in the French crypto space, we’ve created a Twitter account dedicated to delivering the hottest news, the dankest memes, and the most comprehensive guides about Ultra in French.
We’ve had an incredible growth of users on Telegram, welcoming more than 10,000 new members in just a few days and expect this trend to continue in the coming months.
Word of Mouth is Great for Ultra
The impact of our incredible community and the public awareness raised by influencers is amazing for us and everyone who believes in Ultra’s success. Many people are currently on their journey of discovering cryptocurrencies with Ultra and we’re confident that we’ll see a similar pattern of growth as we did recently when gamers start discovering the Ultra platform. Since the platform is specifically designed to empower gamers, our mission statement will continue to spread throughout communities around the world.
We want to finish off by saying a huge thank you to everyone who’s supported us since the very beginning, those who have recently joined us, and the many that’ll discover us in the near future: We thank you for sharing our vision of the future of gaming.
Buckle up, we’re only just getting started!
About Ultra
Ultra is the first entertainment platform providing all key games industry services under a single roof, accessible through a single login.
Built around our PC games distribution store, Ultra Games, our platform will provide access to countless centralized and decentralized services: Discover, buy, play and sell your games and in-game items, watch live-streaming feeds, interact with your favorite influencers, participate in contests, compete in tournaments, and much more.
Ultra has been built to provide endless value for players, a fair playing ground for developers, and a whole new world of opportunities for the games industry.
For more information, visit ultra.io and onultra.io and follow along on Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and Discord.
