In this post Ultra will clarify the Token metrics and allocations to provide an overview of what we’ve done and to lay out our future plans. This also allows us to explain exciting aspects of the project we haven’t covered in other documents.
Ultra raised $6,381,611 between 2 different rounds, the seed and the presale. The terms were as follows:
Seed:
5.21% of all tokens were sold for a price of $0.063
Presale:
3.95% of all tokens were sold for a price of $0.071
0.39% of all tokens were sold for a price of $0.077
We have raised an additional $5mm, with a token price of $0.05 per token on Bitfinex.
This will result in a total of $11,381,611 raised over all consecutive rounds.
Next, let’s examine what Ultra’s strategy is for tokens allocated to the company. We will outline how we plan to use UOS in the future for different strategic goals and how we achieve alignment between token holders interests and companies or actors within our ecosystem.
Core team and future hires (18%)
1 year lockup 1.5 years vesting (2.5 years total)*
Attracting top talent from the blockchain and traditional games space requires vested interest. In the case of Ultra, providing tokens to the team over a vested period strongly encourages the talent to stay within the company and give their best for the product’s success. The value of the token is therefore as important to investors as it is to the team members, aligning their interests.
Team members receive tokens once they have been with the company for 12 months, and then yearly for each subsequent year. As a result, the majority of the 18% of reserved tokens have not been allocated yet.
The team is now composed of over 45 full-time members (globally) and is scaling to above one hundred employees by the end of 2019.
Partners & Advisors (4.8%)
1 year lockup 1 year vesting (2 years total)
To attract long-term supporters of the project we chose to lock-up advisors and partners for one year and then vest them linearly over an additional year. Compared to industry standards, the unlock for partners and advisors takes a long time. Therefore, all of these parties continue to have a vested interest in helping the company after the release of the token rather than focusing primarily on the pre-IEO period.
Content acquisition (19%)
1 year lockup 1 year vesting (2 years total)
Our content acquisition strategy is one of the most ambitious programs in the blockchain space, we are actively speaking with game devs and publishers for AAA games that can bring a lot of new users for each new release.
We actively fund the development of exclusive games on Ultra.The game developers are given a predefined budget for completing development of the game against mutually set and predefined milestones. They receive each portion of the agreed upon funds when the milestones are met. In general, compelling games cost between $1m to $5m in development costs.
With an average profit of 30% on game investments, spending $1m on the development of a game would generate an expected revenue of $1.3m. While at the time of the investments the tokens given to developers will result in selling pressure (keep the staggered payouts based on milestones in mind), we will actually have a bigger buying pressure in the future due to the expected profit on the investment. The goal of those investments are not only the revenue it generates, but key to the acquisition of users, who can only find those exclusive games on Ultra.
Our dedicated team for content acquisition is attending all major video games shows and are connected to all top game developers. Their expertise and relationships ensure the right selection of games that will attract massive interest.
Growth (15.46%)
1 year lockup 2 years vesting (3 years total)
Ultra has identified and developed multiple strategies drawn from past experiences in successful ventures, building product from the ground up to global adoption, and utilizing new fangled strategies to take advantage of new features blockchain can offer in order to create steep and sustainable growth.
Operators
Our strategy is to work with key regional partners to operate Ultra locally, capitalizing on their existing user base, licenses, contacts and expertise. We have already identified and agreed to terms with our first operator, which is in China.
Our regional partners will , handle the local content acquisition, marketing, events, customer support, payments, taxes, licenses,and national regulations, operating the platform locally the same way we do globally
As the platform owner, we ensure the platform is fully functioning, maintained, and new features are added as needed.
We designed our partnership terms to align our interests with the interests of our regional operators, incentivizing them to migrate their entire user base to Ultra (Our Chinese operator currently has 70 million monthly active PC gamers), distribute their games exclusively with us, and align interest with our token holders. Our regional partnerships make Ultra more attractive to game developers, as they will be able to push their games internationally at lower cost and greater ease than it is currently possible.
The UOS we provide to our operators are locked up and vested, making sure that the platform’s incentive is not only to generate revenue but also to increase the value of our ecosystem. Tokens can then be used to incentivize users to join the platform through various contests, giveaways and joint actions with key game media and actors.
User acquisition
Our user acquisition strategy utilizes UOS as an incentive to attract users to register and make purchases on the platform.
For this strategy, we have disabled the cashout feature, ensuring that 100% of these tokens will be used in our ecosystem to purchase content.
Here are several activities examples we will be performing:
- Newsletter to selected user base through partners, providing a link to register and receive UOS on our platform.
- Contests on Ultra, as we are integrating 3rd party tournament platform, large scale tournaments are organized and besides the material offered by our partners and sponsors, Ultra gives a prize in UOS.
- Incentivize users through our social networks to join Ultra (currently access to 10m global audience, and 70 million Chinese audience, through our close partners)
- Events contest in the major game conferences and giveaway of games (Ultra pays the games with its UOS reserve for the winners)
- Ecosystem features giveaway, we provide tokens to targeted users to try out specific new features, for example once we integrate a betting platform, we incentivize users to try it out by providing them tokens only usable on that feature.
- Additional future activities
Influencer program
Ultra will introduce a revolutionary program to push all influencers to convert to Ultra and bring their followers.
Each game developer, publisher, service provider or 3rd party application present on Ultra can decide to reward the sales coming from influencers or any other source, through a dedicated interface for smart contract editing.
Those smart contracts are categorized and made available to any influencer, blogger, or publication who can take the opportunity to promote a game, product, or service and receive a commission once the sale occurs, tracked by our blockchain.
To kick-start the program, Ultra provides an additional % of the commission in tokens from its reserve. The influencer can use it to reward their community and incentivize them to join Ultra. We believe these tokens are well used because it will allow us access to users we couldn’t reach otherwise.
Influencers are an important part of the internet economy, especially in the games industry. We know from experience that a huge part of users don’t watch ads anymore and cannot be reached with traditional methods.
While rewarding referrals is commonly used for user acquisition, our platform excels on the fact that it will be easy for any actor (regardless of size) to generate smart contracts which transparently track all referrals. These smart contracts will then be available to any type of influencers (even the one with 100 followers).
It’s an important innovation only possible thanks to trustless environment. Our platform is a seamless interface between actors and blockchain which is an important part of our strategy because it automatically leads to increased demand for UOS. We are confident we will see incredible results from this referral program, with our end goal focused on obtaining the highest user retention in this industry.
Sponsoring developers
Our main objective is still to attract the best developers into Ultra ecosystem because they provide the content or services players are looking for. We will use a portion of our tokens to sponsor the most talented devs which will take various forms, here are some examples:
Ads “free credit”: Ultra has its own advertising engine which will allow game developers and others to promote their game, services and products to players throughout the platform. Advertising credits will be purchased on Ultra’s Dev center back end with UOS tokens.
Ultra will sponsor advertising campaigns for certain developers by providing them “free credits”.
NFTs “Crafting”: Ultra Games’s developer kit allows game developers to instantiate Non Fungible Tokens on Ultra’s blockchain to represent their game’s virtual items on the blockchain. Ultra’s NFT has a featured allowing game developers to store UOS coins within their NFTs. By doing so, game developers ensure their virtual items have a true market starting value. Ultra will sponsor certain high profile game developers’ NFTs coin crafting initiatives.
Marketing (1.2%)
6 months lockup 6 months vesting (1 year total)
With a more aggressive vesting schedule than the Growth tokens, the marketing tokens will mainly be used for an early push in user acquisition. This will include incentivization programs for signing up, for performing certain actions in the platform, and much more.
The majority of our ecosystem will already be live when our growth tokens start to unlock so those additional marketing tokens will provide considerable support during the early months of the product.
Company reserve (10%)
Only unlocked if 1,000,000 MAU
The company reserve tokens will only unlock upon reaching predefined milestones.
This conditional unlock mechanism increases the commitment of the company because if the milestones aren’t reached then these tokens will be locked up forever.
In general, the company reserve tokens will primarily be used for acquisitions which can include technology acquisitions, software acquisitions, company acquisitions, and more.
In practice, this means that once we reach the milestone, the imminent growth of the platform will be even larger due to the additional available funds.
Conclusion:
This blog post provides clarity not only about the allocation of company tokens but also presents the UOS token as a massive tool in scaling the Ultra ecosystem and acquiring millions of users.
It’s key to understand how the token plays a major role on the platform as well as in the overall strategy of Ultra. UOS is at the core of the Ultra ecosystem, not only enabling revolutionary features but instead being a tool of empowerment for the whole ecosystem and all actors within.
In a future blog post we will outline our token use cases and how the UOS token acts as the essential link between all elements of Ultra.
In the meantime, if you have any further questions or simply want to be part of our community, be sure to join our telegram discussion group: https://t.me/ultra_io
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.
