Ultra Token Sale Review

This is with regards to the latest token sale on Tokinex as of 13 July 2019. This is only meant to be used for educational purposes. Do not take this as an investment strategy or advice.

So.. What is Ultra?

Ultra is a PC game publishing platform and marketplace the seeks to demolish the current distribution monopoly through the focus of:

• Incentivising Developers with greater revenues and instant payouts
• Providing effective marketing tools that help to increase user acquisition efficiently
• Introducing new revenue streams with the use of some familiar blockchain project strategies
• Establishing a token-based economy.

Ultra believes that developers are frustrated with the current state of the gaming distribution market and that introducing blockchain into the space will help to distribute control, increase transaction transparency, promote developer innovations and potentially help developers to create another market.

This shows that the key focus of what Ultra has in mind are on the developers and their game releases, meaning that user acquisition and market traction is their top priority. A good move for starting out once everything is ready.

Why Blockchain?

Ultra will utilise a network (They are building one on top of EOS' base) to:

1. Process transactions in a distributed manner
2. Protect user accounts with a recovery mechanism that does not involve sharing of his/her secret key

This means that Ultra will have to maintain a certain stash of funds in order to maintain and develop their network further, which includes everything from the top to bottom. Although EOS is not a bad network to build with, this choice of development will mean that they have development baggage of a blockchain network on top of the other services and tools they are building for users. We will discuss later on the methods or ways they have to help sustain this economy.

A distant competitor in the same space "The Abyss" is built on top of the Ethereum Network, meaning that protocol changes or developments won't be a cost at all for them and this means that they can fully focus on the projects that make a greater impact to user interaction.

Sustainability strategies

So what we're looking below are the ways Ultra have planned out on in order to create a sustainable ecosystem. It has been very well thought of and clearly introduces a few systems to ensure every party is gaining from something.

Advertising

With the introduction of a Demand-Side Platform (DSP), Ultra can enable publishers to advertise on Ultra with some analytical features that will help to purchase advertising space specific to the publisher's demographical targets so that the expenditure on advertising is maximised. Apart from that, a Basic Attention Token (BAT) similar strategy is observed, where users are able to opt in or out of the advertising functions and will be incentivised to enable as they will receive a cut of the revenue from the advertisements.

This would mean that the advertising ecosystem in Ultra is pretty well-rounded. The publisher gets his coverage, the user can get his revenue from seeing ads and the ecosystem gains small commission for maintaining the advertising platform.

Game tokenisation

With the introduction of Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFTs) in Ethereum (ERC-721 for example), Ultra adopts a similar strategy to further increase the use cases of blockchain in game publishing. This would mean that:

• Game subscriptions can be done on-chain, allowing the publisher to leave the subscription management to the network.
• In-game items can be tokenised, promoting the chance of creating a secondhand market for these items.

Vestings and Supply Control

Game Acquistion

Ultra is planning to acquire exclusive games for their platform, which would mean that players playing these games would have to exclusively use Ultra in order to continue playing their game/s. This helps to increase adoption in a very effective way since the entire game would be migrated over to work on top of Ultra.

5% of all game sales profits from Ultra will go to a "War Chest" that are vested for 2 years. When the tokens are unlocked, these tokens will be used to acquire new exclusive games for Ultra that will potentially "force" players in those games to migrate over to Ultra, essentially onboarding new customers through an acquisition strategy.

Reward System

In the ecosystem, users also have a high level of advantage for getting onboard Ultra:

1. The amount and duration held for Ultra Coins in their wallet
2. Total expenditure on Ultra
3. Monthly time played on Ultra

These points will reward users with Free games, in-game items, game vouchers or even merchandise, incentivising users to interact with Ultra to be rewarded.

Mining

I honestly have no idea why a miner is involved in the platform. Ultra's mining program will mine the most profitable coin and swaps these coins through a liquidity provider of some sort in order to payout the miners in Ultra Coins. The key advantage here is that all currencies that are mined will eventually be injected in Ultra, increasing its market cap and volume.

Earnings

Users can also earn Ultra Coins apart from game-related rewards.

1. Referring players of game developers,
2. Beta Testing,
3. Viewing ads,
4. Reporting Bugs,
5. Writing Reviews

and a few other options will reward the user in Ultra Coins for contributing to the ecosystem. This again would help to drive network activity.

So what's the conclusion?

Well, Bitfinex is investing in this, they have planned out thoroughly on how to compete with Steam specifically, meaning that the sole focus here is to attack the game publishing market directly through several features and key adoption channels that will definitely accelerate adoption.

They claim to have a "tested" adtech, I don't see linked evidence anywhere on the paper. But all in all, everything is very well thought of. Key focus is to ensure that the advertising platform is properly developed and released in order to ensure that this revenue stream would work else it will be very difficult for Ultra to sustain such a big ecosystem.