AMA Bitmax 27 August 2020 prior listing (original link to AMA: https://t.me/BitMaxioEnglishOfficial/475164)
Shane Molidor [Bitmax Team]
Hey everyone! Let’s start the AMA with Ultra, shall we?
Really excited to be joined here today by Nicolas Gilot & David Hanson the two co-CEOs of Ultra, as well as Emmanuel Gimenez, who serves as the project’s Community Lead.
As per usual, I’ll start things off with a few questions for the Ultra team before opening things up for Q&A. I’ll reward the top 5 questions with a UOS airdrop.
Nicolas, David and Emmanuel, can you start things off by giving us a quick overview of Ultra as a gaming distribution platform? Please be sure to tie in the role / utility of the native token, UOS.
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
Ultra is an Entertainment platform with at its center a video game distribution service.
Around Ultra Games, our game distribution service, you’ll find live streaming services, tournament platforms, item trading platforms, cloud gaming and more. Some of which we build ourselves some of which are established video game industry actors everyone knows and loves.
Ultra’s blockchain powers the ecosystem with new innovative functionalities. Open marketplaces, NFT digital assets for games, virtual items, dlcs, user generated content, and more.
Ultra comes with a dual referral system, that allows anyone to promote the platform and earn UOS in exchange or promote products to earn a cut of its sale in UOS as well.
Ultra’s blockchain is unique in its form as it’s designed to fit mass market needs: no user onboarding cost or friction and no transaction fees. To make this possible we developed a mechanism that allows people to stake UOS coins on behalf of companies to allow them to sponsor their customers free transactions. Staking UOS to do this will reward users with UOS.
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
UOS is used across the entire platform as the main currency, even if players can use paypal/credit card, every game or item purchase means that UOS will be bought on exchanges to finalize the transaction.
If a game developer or a brand wants to advertise on Ultra, they actually purchase UOS, that is then used to pay for the advertisements, the player watching the ad receives a % of it in UOS as well
When any payments are done within Ultra using other crypto currencies (BTC, ETC, …), it follows the same process as for fiat, the currency is exchanged for UOS and used to process the transactions
Shane Molidor [Bitmax Team]
Thank you! I always love seeing a self enforcing / sustaining economy with use cases that necessitate the purchase of the token.
Can you speak a bit about Ultra’s competitive differentiation within the industry? I think the elephant in the room is definitely Steam — would love to hear you speak candidly about how you intend to capture market share from them (and others).
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
We never wanted to make a Steam Copy, we think Steam is outdated and there’s room for making a new modern platform. We embrace the open culture and in this spirit, Ultra’s platform will contain many 3rd party services, apps and dapps.
Additionally, Ultra will be the first gaming ecosystem with a full spectrum blockchain solution. It’s designed for mass market needs and comes with a powerful SDK that allows game developers but also application developers to integrate new blockchain functionalities in their products with virtually no effort. Blockchain technology will open up a wealth of new possible functionalities and innovations players around the world love to experience before everyone else.
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
Steam is a closed environment, if any developers using Steam’s SDK would like to distribute his game elsewhere, it’s a big undertaking as they have to recreate the features of the SDK themselves (for example if they use Steam’s leaderboard system, outside of Steam, it won’t work).
Ultra’s SDK has full feature parity with Steam, which means for the first time, the game developers can publish their games on Ultra from Steam without any hurdle, making Ultra the perfect alternative for the game developers.
We already started engaging with developers, for a few years now, and gathered already over 150 game developers and publishers that accepted to be part of Ultra; including some leading companies in the space. We were initially game developers, so we know what they expected of a new platform and it seems what we built resonates well with them.
Shane Molidor [Bitmax Team]
You’ve announced some pretty exciting enterprise partnerships this year — do you have any more planned for the near future? How does a partnership with a gaming juggernaut like Ubisoft positively impact your business operations?
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
We will announce in the coming weeks and months a series of partnerships, that will better clarify what Ultra is all about. Our b2b business model is very solid, everyone we talk to find good reasons to be on Ultra.
We have the desire to work with Ubisoft deeply on our NFT technology and we believe we are strategically positioned to be able to offer them everything they need to leverage blockchain technology for their mainstream technology requirements.
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
Having key partners like Ubisoft or AMD clearly has a positive impact as that shows the largest players in the games industry also believe that Ultra has what it takes to be beneficial for the space (and for them).
Ubisoft understands the blockchain space and could see that technically, we are offering the first mass market solution that works for the games industry, regulatory compliant, tax compliant, highly scalable, exactly what you need to have to work with the largest companies out there.
Shane Molidor [Bitmax Team]
One thing I always ask projects — what arguments could a token speculator make to suggest that UOS is currently undervalued? Phrased differently, why might someone be bullish on the long-term price performance of UOS?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
To me, if Ultra captures 1% of the gaming market in Europe and USA, it will most likely be the most used blockchain in the world already. Gaming market is huge and it keeps growing up :)
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
Take the example of GTA, selling like 800m$ in 24h, it’s a blockbuster. If you only have one single game that is successful on Ultra (doesn’t need to be $800m sales of course), it means that there will be a tremendous interest for UOS. One single game is enough, and we signed over 150 game devs and publishers.
The platform is going live at the end of this year and we didn’t really start speaking about our partners besides AMD and Ubisoft, so I believe we will see Ultra catching more and more eyes over time.
It will be an interesting time for us, we had to keep everything under wrap for a long time as we also don’t want to offer too many information to the leading companies Steam and others, on what we have under the roof, until we launch
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
A good example is Virgin Music. They came from nowhere but became globally successful after they signed the “Sex Pistols”, everything blew up from there for Virgin.
Shane Molidor [Bitmax Team]
Okay last question before I open things up to the community — why did the Ultra team choose to list with BitMax? 😎
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
We have only one policy at Ultra when it comes to cooperation: We work exclusively with solid partners that are excited about our project!
Bitmax and Ultra are in contact for a long time now, and we have both genuine interest in each other I believe.
We respect Bitmax for what they’ve accomplished with a very unique platform and community!
As you know Ultra is an ecosystem where crypto exchanges could also be integrated, we are looking forward to such in-depth cooperation in the future.
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
We have a partnership signed with a major Chinese Video Game industry company, they will operate Ultra in China for us and have 75 million monthly active users. Bitmax caters to the Chinese audience which is something we appreciate.
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
We think of Bitmax as one of the leaders in the space, the efforts Bitmax puts into growing its community and the innovative features they built parallels very well what we are pushing for at Ultra, leading and innovating in our space
Community live AMA starting:
ADE SUKARDI IBHC Question:
1.if there are some developers launching new games , how do we check that the game is very interesting for us to buy as a game player ? If the game that we buy it’s not good with our expectations, can we resell it to other players that want to buy the game ?
2. how is the safety with our money or our UOS token from selling item games ? I mean some security in ultra platform
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
1. All games are NFTs on Ultra, if the developer agreed on when they published their game (which is a token on Ultra), yes you can resell it, the beauty of our system is that it’s super easy to use even for game devs that knows 0 about blockchain, and also that they are incentivized to use our blockchain features because they can take a revenue share on each transactions.
2. Ultra is designed to be Ultra safe. 😎
John Question:
Why did you choose to build a UOS token on the ERC-20 blockchain ecosystem? Why not on some scalable blockchain instead considering that Ethereum has many scalability issues?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
UOS is not “built” on Ethereum, we just created an erc20 that will be swapped in the future to native Ultra blockchain coin.
Akira Question:
Many projects are doing partnerships & progressing in mainstream gaming areas as well, Does Sandbox have a strategy to become a top player and hold it for longterm?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
We are not Sandbox 🤨
But we are in contact with them, we know their CEO very well and we are both members of the BGA alliance!
Aditya Question:
Ultra is becoming one of The Giant in gaming Industry, But main Problem with most of the gaming Platform is, It is most complicated for Newbies or Non- Tech background people,
How will Ultra Provide an Absolute smooth & Accessible platform to all of them?
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
Ultra’s blockchain is very unique in its design because of its resource management.
We built Ultra’s blockchain because other blockchains are too complicated and too expensive for the user.
Our design shifts the complexity from users to developers and swaps the cost from users to stakers, either game developers or even users who can earn some UOS rewards by staking in exchange for offering free transactions to users.
We developed a 0 friction onboarding solution and a 0 friction foolproof decentralized non custodial blockchain account recovery mechanism
Ashwini Question:
What are the plans to Integrate with some Great Gaming projects? How will ultra revolutionize Online Gaming ?
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
We have a team dedicated to content acquisition made of industry veterans, our CSO used to be the head of Apple games and Sr Director of Google Games as well, that’s how we manage to speak to the right companies to find the right games, and Ultra’s appeal seals the deal
Elly Question:
For every Project Building the Ecosystem & Network is always a challenge, Isn’t it?
How does Ultra deal with it?
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
We build the blockchain network, and we build the ecosystem running on it, work with partners to drive tons of users to the first application within the ecosystem, which is our game distribution platform.
Offering a mass market ready blockchain and the users using it, is very appealing to any developers, which makes it a virtuous circle (more users, more devs, better content, more users, … -> )
Rimjhim Question:
Recently, Ultra Introduced their Software Development kit, How will it Help in the development of Platform?
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
The SDK allows game developers to easily migrate from their existing platforms (Steam, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, …) to Ultra, which means more content on Ultra.
It’s blockchain functionalities offer new revenue streams to game developers, making it a no-brainer for them as distributing their games on Ultra means making more money for the same game (30% commission VS 15%) but also new ways to monetize (2nd hand resale, nfts, …)
CryptoBro 🇳🇱 Question:
What efforts is/will Ultra be taking to ensure growth of users on the platform once it launches? Will there be a marketing campaign, maybe in cooperation with strategic partners like AMD or Ubisoft?
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
Ultra is driving users through many innovative ways, such as distribution of NFTs through influencers and other channels, only redeemable on Ultra, or the organization of large tournaments (in partnership with leading tournament platforms), that will be occurring on Ultra.
We worked a bit already with AMD but the big promotion will occur closer to launch, as Ultra will be offered to download from within their drivers, and through other channels.
Satish 💲 Question:
What is the benefit of Blockchain Gaming platform over non-blockchain Gaming platform?
Why should anyone choose Ultra platform?
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
Blockchain technology allows us to create an open playfield, where games generate content (NFT) which can be traded, but also used in all kinds of ways in and out of the platform. Additionally, Ultra Games, the game distribution service , tokenizes all games published by game developers through what we call “token factories” . Once a game developer set the sales and trading parameters of their game token factories, the token factory is ready for business: It will sell games to anyone who sends the proper amount of tokens on it but also it will give commissions to anyone who promoted the content. That means, that outside of Ultra, you will see 3rd party game stores start selling content game developers published on Ultra. This means more marketing for game developers, more sales of their games and faster growth for Ultra.
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
The benefits are huge.
Compared to traditional publishing platforms we take less fee in general, but when it comes to blockchain we basically allow game developers to generate new stream revenue thanks to our new features such as NFTs.
For players and “influencers” it will be exactly the same, we have powerful referral systems backed by our blockchain technology (smart contracts referral basically…).
In short, a platform like Ultra is creating new source of revenues for everyone,
Astle Question:
How will EOSeoul’s Partnership help Ultra To grow Further & Vica- versa?
How Important was this Partnership for both the Projects?
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
EOSeoul is definitely a great partner, their technical knowledge is impressive and they are contributing to run Ultra’s blockchain.
In addition to their expertise in the blockchain space, their head company Neowiz is a very known developer in Korea and their games are popular.
Jonathan tross Question:
Due of covid, Gaming platforms like these have seen a huge No. of Users coming day by day, what’s Your View? How has the response been from Community?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
Unfortunately the truth is that Covid is an advantage for all online services. 🤷🏼♂️ I personally hope it ends quickly even if it means less online economy, gaming also needs live events such as E3 or live esport competition!
OjanPayah Question:
Why ultra team didn’t make a world competitive game league to make the ultra famous ?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
It’s totally part of our plan, everyone loves esport at Ultra!
And we will soon announce partnerships around that, which will make it a real possibility
CryptoBro Question:
What are the plans for after the Ultra platform has been launched? Will there be a new roadmap for the release of some of the other services (mobile app, streaming service, esports etc.) you have been talking about?
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
We have a roadmap that spans for 3 years 😂. Lack of innovation capability is certainly not our weakness. I think in short we will focus a lot on Ultra’s application ecosystem, working with game developers to build amazing blockchain driven mechanics and further advance our NFT technologies.
John Question:
How do you verify the projects and contents of the games that you’re implementing on your platform? How do you ensure that they don’t include some malicious content?
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
Game developers need to pass a KYB (its like KYC but for Business) before they can have keys allowing them to publish on Ultra through our Game Developer Center. Additionally we have an anti virus running on all files they upload, its done the same way on Steam or other platforms basically.
Cjay Question:
Q: Following the project for 2 years, you talked about non-custodial key recovery by hardware. Can you go into detail or give some updates here? Is this still on the roadmap?
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
There’s of course the classic hardware wallets such as Ledger stuff we will support, then there’s a software based solution that will come by default in Ultra, which is non custodial and decentralized allowing every single user on Ultra by default, even without a hardware wallet, to recover their keys effortlessly and safely. Those who don’t like that can switch to hardware wallets. Lastly, there’s a new breed of hardware wallets that’s being worked on by major chip manufacturers but I can’t talk about it because of NDAs. When its ready, in short it does hardware security but you won’t have to buy hardware ;).
Fadang Question:
Speaking of Ultra, what does the economic model look like and what role does it play in the entire DeFi?
If your network allows the generation of multi-generation tokens, will it dilute the value of Ultra token?
David [Co-CEO Ultra]
I think we’ll see some really interesting DeFi use cases with Ultra’s NFT. Because games are expensive pieces of properties, and often we can also see virtual items priced north of 100 dollars, someone could rent a NFT to other players in exchange for a UOS rent fee while the borrower would put some UOS coins as collateral. Additionally, I can very well see products asking for payments but supporting Ultra’s NFTs, such as a tournament platform could say ; to enter the tournament you need to pay 5 dollars, or give us 7 dollars worth of any kind of NFT.
Nilwan Question:
Marketing is a central element for every project, so that everyone knows the potential that a project can bring is vital to achieve the goals set. What is your strategy to attract new users and investors and keep your project long term?
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
Market adoption. For a platform like Ultra, it means having both the content and the users.
On the content side, we are already good to go with the games, and we also have several known game services that will be integrated within Ultra (live-streaming, tournaments, esports wager, etc…)
On the user acquisition, we have multiple strategies to drive it, including key games distribution, tournaments with large prize pool, and multiple other strategies that you’ll see unfolding over time. One of the key is also our operators, which are large corporates that will operate our platform in their region, such as our Chinese partner (75m MAU).
Elly ♂️ Question:
Could You talk about some Dapps development on Ultra Platform?
What role its Native Token plays in the ecosystem?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
I can’t talk specifically about DAPPS development on Ultra, but I can say that any EOSIO smart contract can be on our blockchain also, so it opens up a lot of possibilities.
Native token in the ecosystem is very central, since any developers can trigger our app payment, and all transactions are done in UOS.
Also UOS is needed if you do “a lot” of transactions on our blockchain, so you will need to stake them if you are a very demanding user, a service provider or a game developer that uses a lot of blockchain features.
John 🇫🇮, [27.08.20 14:45]
How does the NFT (non-fungible token) crafting work?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
That’s a good question, but quite complex it would need a very long answer.
We will have dedicated article about NFTs coming up soon connect to our announcement channel to be updated when they are out:
But in short they can be crafted in the backend, almost “manually” (but very easy), or by our SDK “automated”.
Cuong Pham Question:
How does the team perceive retail investors Ultra token holders? Where do you see value in ‘us’ and what could we do to support your work most effectively?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
We see value in crypto communities because they can clearly help evangelize blockchain technologies to their friends. We know that a good portion of “crypto guys” are also gamers.
Even if our project is designed around making the blockchain almost invisible, I think having people explaining the tech and why new features are possible will be a very good thing! Only crypto communities can do that 😊
Astle Question:
What are the plans to attract NoN-Crypto people towards the Ultra Platform?
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
We target mass market audience, so as mentioned earlier we made the platform mass market ready, gamers don’t need to understand blockchain, private key, wallet, transaction fee, and anything else that usually ties with the word blockchain. We focus on bringing what gamers love into Ultra, and offer them the opportunity also to earn money by using the platform, who wouldn’t want to transform their 300h gameplay on World of Warcraft into UOS?
Rimjhim Question:
Do You Think NFT Tokens Have Big Potential in the Gaming Industry in future?
Nicolas [Co-CEO Ultra]
Models are changing over time, we saw premium games, then free to play, NFT is the next model and it will bring much more value to the users than anything else before, while still rewarding the developers for their hard work.
On Ultra, every game is a NFT, which means it can be traded, the dev can get his commission, the players can get money back after he’s done with its game, the time he spends is monetized as well as he is earning virtual items (NFTs).
NFT is also a powerful marketing tool when you are given those tools to promote your content, which Ultra does.
Aditya Question:
What is the main problem do you see in the Blockchain Gaming platoform Currently? What solution does Ultra provide to solve it?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
I will speak for me, because even in the team we could have different views.
To me blockchain games are great Proof of Concept but a lot of them are too focused on the monetization aspect. There are clearly some “blockchain games” that seem very interesting.
The difference with Ultra is that we will have any type of games, blockchain or not, and we will evangelize the use of our blockchain features with the objective of having the next big game also using blockchain! 👍
CryptoBro Question:
Ultra seems to have connections throughout the gaming world, what have been some of the responses from big developers when pitching the Ultra platform? Have there been any concerns you are taking into account?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
We are VERY active on the gaming scene for the past 3 years, Ultra went to basically all important gaming shows around the world.
We have a specialized team for our relationship with game developers including big names such as Edward Moalem
Basically we designed the platform with game devs in mind, that’s why our SDK is so powerful and convenient for them (they can develop a game using Ultra SDK and publish it on any platform…), and that’s why our blockchain is so easy to use even in the backend.
We attracted so far more than 150 game devs I think it’s quite an achievement.
john_Anger Question:
How Ultra is extending its use cases through partnerships, Milestones and upcoming plans?
Emmanuel [Lead CM Ultra]
To say it simply, we are now building the framework, and we will announce our first partnership “ecosystem” and we will go toward developing more of our ecosystem in the future.
We will announce partnerships that are made for gamers, but as we progress will extend Ultra possibilities beyond gaming.
Gamers need gaming services but also a lot of different services, since almost everyone is a gamer in 2020.
AMA Bitmax 27 August 2020 prior listing (original link to AMA: https://t.me/BitMaxioEnglishOfficial/475164)
