Following our partnership announcement with Theta, we hosted an AMA featured by Wes Levitt from Theta and Nicolas from Ultra on Wednesday 16th September 8 PM CET.
Below is the transcription of the 1 hour long AMA. You can also find the original version on our Telegram discussion group starting here: https://t.me/ultra_io/93075
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
I will ask some questions to Nicolas and Wes, built from feedback and questions I have received from the community.
These questions will be then followed by a live Q&A, where you will be free to ask any question.
The objective of this AMA is to learn more about Theta and Ultra respective visions, and about the partnership.
It also has the objective to strengthen community link between Ultra and Theta, as I believe we share the same value and vision of the future. 😉
Nicolas and Wes welcome here!
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
Hi everyone!
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Hello everyone! Thanks for hosting us
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
A pleasure! let’s start with some regular questions 😊 Wes can you present yourself, Theta and the role you have in this company?
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Theta Network is a decentralized video delivery protocol and blockchain that allows viewers to share video they watch peer-to-peer, earning token rewards for contributing their excess bandwidth to the network. As a user, you can effectively earn tokens just for watching the content you love. For video platforms, you can save more than half of your content delivery (CDN) costs by integrating Theta video delivery, and gain a more engaged, loyal userbase by offering token rewards.
At Theta Labs I serve as Head of Strategy, where I focus on business operations, Theta community relations, and marketing since joining Theta in late 2017. Prior to working at Theta Labs, I worked in real estate finance for a mortgage REIT and a private equity firm. I had followed/invested in crypto for quite a while personally, but began looking at the space full-time after I took a blockchain course from Dawn Song (now founder of Oasis Labs) while I was studying at Berkeley.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Nicolas can you also present yourself, a bit about Ultra, for people that just joined us.
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
Of course, I’m the Co-CEO of Ultra, driving the business / marketing / operation / finance of our company. I’ve been in the games industry for many years (set up 3 game companies prior to Ultra), with my co-founder and Co-CEO David (who handles the product vision and development). I’ve been following the blockchain space since 2011, first mining then a bit of trading, until today as the technology matures and becomes viable for mass market purposes.
Ultra is the first entertainment platform providing all key games industry services under a single roof, built around our PC game distribution platform, 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.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Nicolas, can you continue and give us more information about the partnership with Theta and the vision of Ultra when it comes to integrating ecosystem partners?
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
We are excited about the partnership with Theta as it allows our users to get direct access to game live streaming from within Ultra, without the need to go register on a 3rd party platform, visit a new website, etc.. This comes well into place with our full spectrum solution for gamers, where all their gaming activities are available within Ultra, we are currently selecting new gaming services to be added alongside live streaming.
The synergy between Theta and Ultra is amazing as it really improves the experience on both platforms, viewers of a stream being able to receive NFTs (games, virtual items, tournament ticket entrance…) or streamers earning UOS by promoting games available on Ultra are two great examples, but also watching a live stream of a game before purchasing it.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Thank you, we hope to see more synergies like that in the future Wes can you tell us about Theta’s vision, what are the primary goals for you? 😊
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Sure, primarily our vision is to decentralize video and data delivery for all major use cases, starting with video streaming. We believe a decentralized edge network of millions of connected devices can more efficiently deliver the increasing amount of data used every year, and with token rewards users can be incentivized to contribute their devices to this network.
With Theta blockchain live on mainnet and in production on our THETA.tv video platform, our goal now is to export the technology to other video platforms that can benefit. Already several platforms such as MovieBloc and Littlstar have started using Theta Network, and we’re in progress with several more and in testing with Samsung, which has invested in Theta Labs.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
I heard about Samsung it’s really incredible, well done! We have now a question directly from the community! Question from Michael:
“Hi Wes, I saw the exciting news about the Binance PUBG tournament. Is it safe to say this will be the first of many Binance hosted tournaments that utilises Theta’s Blockchain technology? And Why do you think Binance is so interested in gaming?”
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Hi Michael, yes we’re very excited about the Battle of Asia coming up next week! The finals will exclusively on THETA.tv and a Binance website section powered by Theta. If user response is good, we’d love to make it the first of many! Esports in general is growing i revenue and views in the double-digits year over year, so it’s no surprise Binance is interested in this fast growing content space.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
At Ultra we are big fan of Esports as well, really nice to see crypto projects going to this field! I have now a question for you Nicolas!
Ronald Crypto basically wonder if we have more partnerships such as AMD or Ubisoft coming up and if the team “Have seen much interest from existing projects (On ETH, EOS etc) regarding migrating to Ultra? If so, have there been any big names?”
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
We did receive many demands on how to migrate to Ultra, once we’ll have the documentation available to the public we’ll be able to let developers prepare for the migration, from EOS it’s very simple and has so many upsides, from Ethereum it requires some work but the upsides are even bigger.
On the partnership side, we do have several big partners in the pipe, we’ve been quiet for many months and recently started revealing new partners as we are getting closer to launch, so the short answer is Yes!
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Awesome! 😁 We have a question from Ultraloyalist for Wes and Nicolas: “Thetas patents are very interesting. Ultras patents are still a mystery.. will we get a look after mainnet or sauce first?” maybe Wes you can tell us more details about this patent, and Nicolas you can tell us a bit more about the patenting process from Ultra.”
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Yes that was great news to receive that patent recently. The patent Theta Labs received for decentralized streaming methods is important to protect the Theta protocol and existing tokenholders.
While the Theta blockchain itself is open-source and always will be, to ensure transparency and auditability to tokenholders, the streaming methods and peering intelligence we’ve created is now patented. What we didn’t want to see is someone fork the existing protocol including all the streaming technology, and cut out the existing tokenholders and replace them with their own, hurting all the existing Theta tokenholders and everyone in the community that’s helped develop the protocol.
Here’s the direct link to the patent if you’re interested in checking it out:
http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=10,771,524
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
In Ultra’s case, we do have patents in progress, we are not pushing yet to the patent office to avoid revealing publicly some key information about Ultra’s feature set and how some key elements are done differently than the competitors like Steam.
There are a lot of technologies we developed that are patentable though and we’ll probably push several patents at the same time when the time is right.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Another question from the community Michael for Wes: “In your latest blog, Mitch confidently states that Theta is nearing explosive growth and adoption. Are you as confident as Mitch and can you please outline what are going to be the main contributors to this growth and adoption over the next 12 months?”
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
For sure, I share Mitch’s confidence in Theta Network! I’m confident that Theta is approaching a sharp growth curve as we go into 2021, with Theta Mainnet 2.0 live, Video-On-Demand (VOD) support coming soon, and the broader crypto market looking favorable. We also see tailwinds in the streaming community as more and more streamers are fed up with the largest platforms deplatforming, demonetizing, or otherwise not treating them fairly. These streamers are eager for a decentralized alternative.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Michael added to this question: “Does Theta have any major technical hurdles to overcome before it can scale to be a reliable and high quality mass market solution for video streaming?”
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Yes there is certainly more work to be done scaling Theta protocol, but I wouldn’t characterize it as any major technical hurdle or breakthrough necessary. Because groups of users peering to share video works best in local areas, a new user doesn’t need to connect to millions of potential Theta users — just 5 or 10 in their local area. For the Theta blockchain itself, most scaling up of new users can happen with peer groups forming off-chain (i.e. layer 2) and settling periodic payments on-chain, greatly increasing the effective throughput.
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
Definitely in agreement with this, hopefully the synergy between Theta and Ultra can start transforming the industry for the better, pretty sure many of our users will be excited to start streaming
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Saša has a question about Ultra referral program: “Will referral codes be available right at launch and do the early birds in here get anything “special”? I personally know of a few professional COD gamers that have 50k plus views on their streams currently”
I’d like to complete the question by asking if Theta will promote Ultra and benefit from its referral program, it’s obviously interesting for Theta.tv streamers, but I’m wondering if there will be direct promotion to the Theta.tv users?
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
Referral codes will be available shortly after launch, before we start the heavy marketing campaign. We were discussing actually on what we could do for our early supporters in addition, feel free to share to our team any ideas popping up! What is great as well for streamers is the promotion program, so they can actually earn directly from the sales of the games they just promoted, in addition to the referral program.
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Yes, we’re working on promotion opportunities between our userbases as Ultra platform goes to launch. There’s obviously a big overlap with Theta.tv/Ultra users both in crypto and gaming so we think Theta.tv users will be natural users of Ultra platform too
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Interesting thank you for your answer, the following question is a bit more technical from Steve M “It feels like a cumbersome solution to have a new wallet and a new token for every dApp released on Ultra. Can you talk about the future relationship/ integration between the use of UOS & TFuel tokens? I.e. will TFuel also be included in the Ultra Wallet (vise versa), will there be a UOS/TFuel pairing? two ways peg, Atomic swap or interoperability node?”
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
Ultra developed an automatic conversion system to accept fiat payments (Paypal, credit card, etc…), so once we get the fiat money, we purchase on exchange UOS to finalize the transactions (oracle on-chain). It works the same way with any crypto payments, so on the user’s side Ultra will come with a single wallet and payment system, our intention is to have all 3rd party apps supporting UOS which our SDK facilitates.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Thanks, we actually had lot of questions recently about UOS and Staking… the community question is this one:
“Are there any (potential) exciting ideas that could incentivise the average gamer who does not operate a business on the platform to stake & sponsor their excess Ultra Power?”
I’d like to ask to Wes to complete this question if Theta at a company level could stake UOS to profit from higher quality service? I’m asking it as a purely speculative point of view, and as a vision about how companies will operate in the future on different ecosystems and blockchains.
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Sure, if Theta service on the Ultra platform can be improved by staking, that’s something we are open to. We are crypto-native as a company, stake THETA tokens as part of network operations, and see staking as an essential aspect of blockchain operations at the company level.
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
Yes, anyone can stake for any company or service they like and get rewarded by the network in UOS for basically “sponsoring” free transactions to users/apps. Another interesting aspect is that staking UOS will benefit directly the gamers who will be receiving NFTs (games, exclusive virtual items, vouchers, …), .so imagine if you have some virtual items that can only be accessible by staking for your favorite games, and this NFT can also be resold on marketplaces, it ties really well into the loop.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
👍 Cooperation between blockchain based companies will be interesting for sure. Nicolas I would be interested in your thoughts as well, would Ultra be keen to stake other blockchain companies’ coin for example to allow or use services in another blockchain?
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
In short, yes. Blockchain technology has often time a different model than traditional service providers, such as AWS; our company doesn’t think twice when we need a new server to enhance our product/performance, blockchain has a different approach which sometimes requires staking to receive this extra capacity or performance, it’s only logical to stake a token if it allows us to fully take advantage of a solution, it’s a new and fair economy where you also invest in your partner’s success.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Very nice, thanks, it has been already 40minutes we want to keep some time for the live Q&A so it will be my last question. I wonder what you guys think about the future of blockchain, do you think “crypto projects” mission is to replace industry leaders such as Twitch or Steam, or to offer a different experience and basically co-exist?
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
I think the most likely outcome is for blockchain alternatives to take significant market share and rival the existing dominant players, but more importantly with innovative new use cases they can actually increase the market size. For example, in the case of Theta Network we think rather than just take existing video market share, creating a more rewarding and engaging user experience can actually attract new viewers to the space, not just convert existing ones.
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
I think we will see initially new companies like Ultra and Theta spearhead blockchain technology adoption, and later when the test cases have been proven, we will see major brands introducing blockchain functionalities to their business as well. Ultra’s SDK is designed for this actually, not just intended for games but also to facilitate the integration of blockchain features in existing apps. Legacy solutions will have to evolve if they want to keep up with the new business models arising, but will be lagging behind as network effects on blockchain will be massive.
Live Community Q&A
Sypher [Community Member]
Hey Wes! as an old theta supporter it was really exciting for me to see the theta partnership. I still have some of those stickers you guys sent me ;-)
Whats next for theta?
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Hey Sypher, it’s been a while! Thanks for the support. Next up is smart contracts coming to mainnet and VOD support, but big picture the focus is always more platform adoption and Theta usage!
Pierre [Community Member]
When will we have a precise date of the platform launch?
Will it be announced only a few days/weeks before launch?
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
It will be announced a few weeks before yes though we might offer early access to a few, testing out the platform!
OOooo [Community Member]
Nicolas can you tell us about more about NFTs and how it will become possible to use it on theta for example?
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
We will publish more details about our NFT technology a bit later though in terms of interactions with Theta for example, streamers could distribute to their community (or while watching, have a chance to win) a NFT, game, exclusive virtual item, tournament entry ticket, … or even a voucher to purchase a specific game.
We saw that was pretty popular with Valorant, receiving access to the beta only if you won it by watching a stream.
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Wes actually I have another question for you, PUBG mobile is a great game, but when we will see a Starcraft tournament on ThetaTV? 😁
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
That’s a great idea! We are in the process of expanding content on THETA.tv Korea app and brining on more Korean-language content there, and I know historically Starcraft has been huge in Korean market, so perhaps that’s the right venue to do that.
Karl [Community Member]
What do you see going forward to reward users to share their bandwidth more? Also, what are the plans to remove the scammers from any Theta posts?
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Increasing the userbase of THETA.tv and other platform on Theta will help this, because this increases the chances you have peers nearby and therefore opportunities to share bandwidth.
8Figs — UOSoldier [Community Member]
and about the beta when we will know if we can get access?
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
You can register on our website ultra.io to apply for it, we will share more details and select gamers who will receive early access
Mike Hunt [Community Member]
Are early access users allowed to stream or upload video of their experience?
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
It will be possible yes, currently the devs on it are under NDA but once it’s open to users, we’ll be closer to launch.
Genki Suzuki [Community Member]
Nicolas will we be able to use tfuel to buy ingame item on ultra platform once it goes live?
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
It will be possible around launch, we will first have the fiat to UOS, then open to crypto currencies such as tfuel, it will be seamless for users
Emmanuel [Ultra.io Community Manager]
Wes is a busy man! I think it’s time to let him go 😁
Thank you for your time! It was super cool. Can’t wait to see more about this partnership in the future. Long live to Ultra and Theta! and of course thanks to Nicolas as well!
Nicolas Gilot [Ultra.io Co-CEO]
Thanks for the great questions, thanks Wes for stopping by!
Wes Levitt [Theta Head of Strategy]
Thanks for hosting us Ultra team Nicolas and Emmanuel! We’re looking forward to next steps in our Theta / Ultra collab and we’ll have to do this again after launch
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.
