We are very pleased to announce today that the development of Ultra’s protocol has been completed. It will now undergo real-world testing through a Public Testnet.

We have been working on our blockchain technology for the past two years. Today is the day we let the cat out of the bag by covering some of the unique properties of the Ultra blockchain, with a focus on the changes we have made at the protocol level.

We’ve built the Ultra blockchain because no existing technology met business requirements of the first application built on top of our technology: Ultra games. Our team believes blockchain technology use-cases in the gaming industry are an excellent fit, but they lack pragmatic technical solutions to meet the real-world requirements.

Many blockchain technology use-cases can only be economically viable if blockchain transactions are free. Ethereum and similar technologies require users to pay variable amounts of cryptocurrency fees in order to have the network execute a smart contract, which hampers adoption by mainstream applications and consumers.

Here are a few examples of transaction fees that are incompatible with or problematic for Ultra Games:

• Buying a virtual asset that costs 0.10 USD and paying a transaction fee that costs $0.62 USD.
• Playing a game that requires users to trade assets between each other countless times while having to pay $0.62 USD transaction fees for each transaction.
• Sending all kinds of messages on-chain to create an immutable record.
• Converting or transferring small amounts of currencies like rewards, influencers marketing incentivization, and all kinds of micro crowd engagement strategies.

The EOSIO protocol was created to address some of the issues that plagued the blockchain industry at the time, including these transaction fees which would at some point come in the way of mainstream adoption. In our opinion, it was the best working technology out there which we could fork to achieve our business requirements, to provide “truly free transactions”.

EOSIO managed to get rid of transaction fees by integrating an innovative concept called “resource staking”. Staking on EOSIO, simply explained, means that if you own and temporarily lock up 10% of all EOS, you own 10% of EOS’s total blockchain network resources.

Unfortunately, while staking solved the transaction fee problem, it created two other problems: forcing complex responsibilities on end users and asking them to pay upfront to use the system.

Before you can do one “free” transaction on EOSIO, you are forced to jump through all kinds of hoops:

1. Buy the RAM to reserve your EOS account through a friend or a 3rd party service.
2. Buy some EOS somewhere and send it to your new blockchain account.
3. Stake (lock-up) some of your purchased EOS to get CPU/NET resources.
4. Optionally, you’ll also have to buy RAM depending on what you’ll be doing on the blockchain.

Think about a gamer who just wants to buy a game or an exclusive virtual item sold on Ultra Games. Using EOSIO, he would have to study how to buy a blockchain account, how to buy cryptocurrency and how to stake CPU/NET in order to buy what he wants. Worse, for steps 3 and 4, he would have to study and understand staking dynamics to be able to calculate what he needs to have enough daily CPU/NET resources. At the end of the day, if he doesn’t have enough CPU/NET resources, his transaction will fail.

Many of our readers know how blockchains work but while these steps might look easy to you, they are extremely complicated for everyone else and thus prevent us from addressing the mainstream PC gaming market. A platform like Ultra Games shouldn‘t cater only to techies. It should be accessible to users who can’t deal with complicated stuff, including kids.

Ultra Games is a PC games distribution platform that is meant to be accessed by millions of mainstream consumers. Blockchain technology enables us to provide them with new opportunities, such as innovative rewarding interactions, new community experiences, collecting truly rare assets, or creating and monetizing their own user generated content.

We’ve spent tens of thousands of man hours on R&D to be able to provide Ultra’s users a truly pure blockchain user experience. We can’t realistically force our users to deal with a complicated onboarding process and we refuse to have them pay an upfront registration fee to access our platform. Instead, our users are able to register an account for free like any other “legacy” platform out there.

The tech enabling users to have a blockchain account for free and do truly free transactions on-chain is the Ultra blockchain. It is invisible to the end user, while also being a non-custodial solution. Users own their keys which they have generated themselves, and they make transactions on the Ultra chain directly without going through a third party.

From there they can safely interact with the Ultra platform and its blockchain ecosystem without even noticing it!

The Ultra blockchain will also likely prove beneficial for all EOSIO blockchain developers out there: our smart contract layer is 100% compatible with current EOSIO deployments. Migrating business smart contracts to UOS is trivial and enables developers to leverage Ultra’s user base — without limitations, excessive costs, or user onboarding friction.

To sum it up, below are the core focuses the Ultra protocol has for achieving these objectives:

• A free user account creation strategy.
• A simplification of resource management that merges CPU/NET into a single more comprehensible “Ultra Power” resource.
• A complete redesign of resource management that enables end users to execute truly free transactions.
• Functionality for corporations and businesses to get transaction execution priority regardless of the network state.
• A decentralized non-custodial key recovery mechanism that even kids can deal with.
• A new RAM marketplace protected from speculators, to keep RAM at its lowest price possible and help developers lower their operational costs.
• An increased Transaction/sec throughput.
• Many more features, including our NFT standard.

We have been testing our blockchain privately for a while, and we are now ready to deploy our public testnet with our block producer partners scheduled in August, leading to a complete benchmarking of our new blockchain solution.

We can’t wait to tell you more. As you can see, there is a lot to unpack and a lot of technical explanations ahead. Next week, we will start by presenting the new Ultra Power resource.

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.