Ultra stays ahead of the curve by bringing sustainable blockchain technology to gaming and entertainment
We see the effects that energy consumption has on our world every day and we refuse to ignore the issues. Instead, we ensured our technology leads the industry by delivering a sustainable blockchain usable by everyone. Today, we’re proud to announce that the Ultra network has been assessed thoroughly and is now officially CarbonNeutral® energy usage certified!
What makes Ultra’s Blockchain Carbon Neutral?
Ultra’s blockchain differs from Bitcoin and Ethereum’s Proof of Work (POW) consensus algorithm in a number of areas. Most notably, our blockchain requires far less computing power to secure the network’s transactions while other networks require larger computing capacity to be more secure.
As you may know by now, POW is extremely power hungry, so much so that it accounts for energy consumption equivalent to entire countries. This is particularly astounding, considering both networks combined can handle no more than 30 transactions per second.
However, Ultra’s blockchain consensus model, called Proof of Authority (POA), is an eco-friendly and powerful alternative that increases the level of security while drastically reducing energy consumption and substantially increasing transaction throughput.
You’re probably wondering, how can Ultra’s blockchain achieve equivalent or higher security than Bitcoin and Ethereum while using considerably less energy?
It all boils down to two fundamental principles:
- The consensus algorithm: How can we ensure that bad validators can’t fake transactions on chain?
To put it simply, Bitcoin and Ethereum deploy a lottery style mechanism that randomly assigns a miner the responsibility to validate and broadcast a block of transactions. To win this lottery, hundreds of thousands of miners around the world execute a compute-intensive algorithm. When someone cracks the winning lottery ticket, they have the right to broadcast it on the network, win 1 bitcoin or 1 ether as a reward, and start the next lottery cycle for the next transaction. Validating transactions in this manner means that all the other losing lottery participants (miners) consume electricity “unnecessarily” because by design, these networks rely on artificially inflated algorithm complexity to ensure nobody can cheat.
On Ultra, the process starts in a similar fashion: Block Producers are entities that receive and validate transactions from blockchain users to earn UOS coins. These transactions all have signatures that are verified by Block Producers against the user’s blockchain public key, and if all checks out, the transaction is passed on to the rest of the Block Producers on the network. Once all the Block Producers have reached a consensus, the transaction successfully reaches “finality”.
From this simplified explanation you can see that, unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum’s POW, Ultra’s blockchain doesn’t need to artificially inflate computing complexity to work. Instead, we only execute optimized signature verification codes, resulting in an efficient consensus algorithm that requires significantly less power consumption to perform faster transactions.
2. Decentralization: How many transaction validators are considered enough to validate transactions on the network safely?
To answer this question, we had to find a sweet spot by balancing decentralization and power efficiency. In other words, we had to decide how many Block Producers were needed to achieve optimal network characteristics.
By analysing Bitcoin’s network, we can see that the network is controlled by two mining pools that, combined, control more than 51% of the network. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s network is primarily controlled by three mining pools.
With this in mind, we chose to assign seven designated Block Producers for Ultra’s blockchain. Specifically, each Block Producer on Ultra’s network holds an equal share of the mining pool. This makes Ultra’s blockchain, effectively, more decentralized and secure than Ethereum and Bitcoin while still having a solid level of redundancy in case of network or hardware problems.
Considering Ultra’s Mainnet is live and running with seven Block Producers, we’ve proven that Ultra’s blockchain is capable of offering extremely fast and secure smart contract capability without harming the environment.
“Being carbon neutral is important for Ultra. In fact, we’ve gone beyond carbon neutrality by offsetting multiple times more than our measured emissions.”
David Hanson — Co-CEO of Ultra
The steps taken to make UOS green
We officially initiated our carbon neutral project with Natural Capital Partners, the leading experts on carbon neutrality and climate finance, in May of 2021. Natural Capital Partners is a trusted entity helping companies such as Microsoft, Logitech, and Sky achieve important carbon emission objectives. Together, we examined how Ultra’s blockchain affects the environment and calculated our blockchain nodes’ CO2 emissions to offset it through various renewable energy projects.
“It’s so important that more and more businesses of all sizes are stepping up to take climate action. Ultra’s efforts to reduce its emissions and resulting CarbonNeutral certification are great examples of companies taking their environmental responsibilities seriously.”
Sherah Beckley, Client Solutions Manager
From the assessments completed on Ultra’s blockchain, it has been verified that the energy powering it is officially carbon neutral. We’ve consequently been implementing more in-house efficiency measures, purchasing renewable energy, and are working with external emission reduction projects to ensure we’re actually carbon negative.
Being carbon neutral certified is not only a huge and vital step for Ultra, but also for any company that’s interested in utilising blockchain technology. Considering Ultra’s blockchain is carbon neutral, brands can now confidently choose our infrastructure to elevate their products and services beyond what was once considered impossible.
What makes Ultra’s blockchain technically carbon negative
As well as ensuring Ultra’s blockchain is green, we’ve made it a priority to support renewable energy projects globally, offsetting the carbon emissions that we do omit from our blockchain.
“Having an eco-friendly blockchain was one of our goals from day one. With the tools, resources, and determination to reach this goal, we’re very proud to be one of the first sustainable blockchain projects in the world. We’ll continue to take steps to ensure we do everything possible to maintain and exceed our current efforts.”
Nicolas Gilot, Co-CEO of Ultra
We’re proudly supporting India’s green growth through the West India Wind Power project. Our contribution helps enhance renewable energy capacity to meet the growing energy demands in the region.
Through this project, we’re helping provide affordable and clean energy by contributing to increasing the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix. These projects provide clean electricity to displace electricity that would otherwise be powered by fossil fuels.
We’re also facilitating decent work and economic growth by giving back to the local economy and livelihood of residents through the creation of jobs.
And finally, we’re supporting the development of sustainable and resilient energy infrastructure to provide room for industry development and innovation.
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 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.
Ultra has been built to extinguish the frontier between blockchain and mass market, between dApps and apps and between legacy virtual items and NFTs.
For more information, please visit https://ultra.io, and follow along on our main Twitter account, our gaming Twitter account, Youtube and Telegram.
