Ultra Mainnet Launching Tuesday, June 29th

Blockchain-powered game distribution platform Ultra will launch their mainnet after months of testing on Tuesday, June 29th. They announced this data in a blog post. The network uses 7 block producers from around the world, and will open to the public next week.

Blockchain purists might argue that 7 block producers, or validators, is hardly decentralized. However, for Ultra it has been important to produce an easy-to-use blockchain, no transaction fees, with low operational costs that follows all laws based on regulations and tax compliance. Furthermore, the UOS blockchain needs to be secure, protect intellectual property, and handle enough transactions.

They consider the announcement of Ultra's mainnet launch an important milestone to become a fully-fledged blockchain infrastructure capable of empowering gamers and developers alike. The Ultra ecosystem consists of a couple of services and applications:

• Of course there's Ultra Games, the blockchain-powered game distribution platform
• Developers get access to Ultra Games Dev Center, to manage and publish games
• In addition there's a business-centric regulatory compliant NFT standard, Ultra NFT
• There's also Ultra Authenticator, a universal blockchain transaction management tool
• Developers can use Ultra Cloud, an SDK for games and apps
• While anybody can access Ultra Chronos, a searchable blockchain history database, or blockchain explorer
• However, the Ultra Wallet, a crypto and NFT wallet with cross-chain assets swap capabilities, will be the first thing people get access to.

What will happen after Ultra mainnet launch

Launching Ultra mainnet is a big step. After the mainnet launch, a Wallet-only client will be released where users can create an account and reserve their username. After creating an Ultra account, and logging into the client, there's one application: the Ultra Wallet. Here users can swap their ERC-20 UOS tokens from the Ethereum blockchain to the UOS blockchain. Here users can also buy UOS using a credit card.

After the release of the Wallet-only client, a second phase of the closed beta will happen. Here a selected group of users gets access to additional features within the platform. They will also be able to purchase games and play them directly within the Ultra client. More details about the closed beta wave 2 will come in the coming weeks.

What is Ultra Games?

Ultra Games is a digital distribution platform for gaming products, providing all key games industry services under a single roof, accessible through a single login. They will provide access to 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 Games sounds a lot like steam, but instead using blockchain and NFTs. It has its own UOS blockchain, its own UOS token for online payments and a system for NFTs. These NFTs can be games or additional content. Because these games can be NFTs, there’s an actual market cap on the games. Therefore limited edition content is actually limited edition, provable by the blockchain.

Ultra will be accessible on PC and the Atari VCS game console. At the same time the gaming company will make some of its classic games available through Ultra. The entire Ultra platform will integrate into the gaming console. Users can buy, download, play, trade, and stream games. In addition they can trade in-game assets and create esports tournaments.

The game distribution platform is also working together with The Sandbox. Together they want to create cross-chain interoperability for non-fungible tokens. This will mean that the ERC-721 and ERC-1155 protocols will be compatible with the UOS blockchain. As soon as this is functional, it will be easy for other blockchain games to move their product over to the UOS blockchain. Free and fast transactions would be an additional benefit of such a move.