Upland Receives $1.5 Million Investment from EOS Network Ventures in $7 million Series A Extension

The EOS Network Foundation (ENF) is pleased to share recent news from Upland with the EOS community, EOS Network Ventures (ENV) has made a strategic investment of $1.5 Million into Upland, the web3 Metaverse Super App. This is part of Upland’s Series A funding round, in which they secured $7 Million in total funding from several investors, including ENV, Animoca Brands, C3 Venture Capital, and angel investors. This news will play a major role in growing the GameFi and metaverse community on EOS, while driving demand for the network from its ecosystem of over 3 million registered accounts. Upland users are granted a full EOS account as part of its onboarding experience, which abstracts away private keys and resource management to provide a web2 experience for user acquisiti.

Check out the official announcement below and keep reading to learn more about both EOS Network Ventures and Upland. At the end of this piece, we’ll be discussing how you can start getting involved in the Upland metaverse.

https://venturebeat.com/metaverse/upland-raises-7m-for-virtual-land-web3-metaverse/

Lowering the Barriers to Metaverse & GameFi on EOS

ENV is a venture capital fund whose mission is to attract capital investment and deploy that capital for the benefit of the EOS Network as a whole. The organization is in the process of making a number of strategic investments in alignment with this mission. Upland is an important part of that vision, bringing an accessible metaverse to the EOS Network and helping to foster an engaged community of gamers, developers and notable partnerships with projects like FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ and FIFA World Cup Australia & New Zealand 2023™.

Upland is a Metaverse Super App mapped to the real world that aims to bring the future of the immersive web to life. The application appeals to both players, creators and developers, offering a number of ways to engage including virtual property trading, world-building, collecting, and fun competitions like car racing. The platform also empowers entrepreneurs to establish businesses in the Metaverse that help foster a healthy digital economy powered by UPX, the native currency of Upland, and Spark, a utility token that fuels value creation.

EOS has been an important part of Upland’s design ever since it launched. In a recent interview with Decrypt, Upland co-founder Dirk Lueth noted this importance.

‘“We couldn’t use Ethereum because of their gas fees,” said Leuth. After some analysis, the team decided EOS was the “best blockchain” for their needs, and he claimed that Upland is now minting 80 NFTs per second thanks to the blockchain’s technical features. The EOS Network Ventures investment suggests that backers are still trying to grow the ecosystem.’ Read the full article.

Upland also features a strong 3rd party developer ecosystem that allows new projects to be built on top of the Upland Metaverse. Every independent project built using the Upland SDK is also essentially being built on top of the EOS blockchain, which hosts their accounts, transactions, tokenomics, and NFTs.

Through this investment, the ENV aims to support Upland on their mission to build the world’s largest digital open economy. At the same time, this investment will drive value back to the network by supporting Upland in building the Web3 industry’s leading metaverse platform, with nearly 300,000 virtual property owners.

“Upland’s ability to offer a captivating web2 experience that seamlessly abstracts away the intricacies of blockchain technology, while delivering the advantages of true asset ownership perfectly aligns with our vision for the future of the gaming industry,” explained Yves La Rose, Director of EOS Network Ventures. “We are thrilled to announce Upland as the inaugural investment for the ENV’s GameFi fund.”

Upcoming Spark Milestone & How to Get Involved

Along with the investment from ENV, community members can expect to see a lot more news and updates coming from Upland over the next few months. The most notable of these is the upcoming initiative to enable Upland’s new token “Spark” to be tradable on Ethereum via a Token Tradability Event for a new token called Sparklet which can be converted into Spark (on EOS) at a 1/1000 value.

Learn More About Spark/Sparklet Tokenomics

This will be the first time that Spark has been tradable outside the Upland platform. Deploying an ERC20 token on the Ethereum will allow the project to access broader liquidity from other ecosystems while also being transferrable to EOS for its utility function where the Upland application and gameplay logic are deployed. Spark is also expected to have liquidity across other blockchains beyond Ethereum, including EOS, after launch.

Increased usage and users on Upland’s smart contract will help foster even further demand for EOS blockspace, driving value back to the ecosystem. All users on Upland are also provided with a free EOS account when they sign up, which serves as an important on-boarding mechanism into EOS.

This addition of an ERC20 token comes during a time of growing popularity for EVM technology, both on EOS and the broader Web3 space. With the recent launch of EOS EVM, more projects on the network are expected to begin building out support for native and EVM functions in an effort to offer the most accessible user experience possible.

To stay in the loop on all of this, be sure to connect Upland in the following places:

Don’t forget to follow the EOS Network Foundation on X and stay in the loop on this and other news. Also, join the EOS Community Discord to connect with like minded builders and EOS enthusiasts. Lastly, check out the EOS Events page for details on upcoming digital and in-person events that you don’t want to miss!

Upland

Upland, the Metaverse Super App, is a web3 metaverse platform mapped to the real world on a mission to build the largest digital open economy. Its ecosystem is a diverse community of players, entrepreneurs, creators, developers, and brands, all benefiting from true ownership and guaranteed intellectual property rights powered by blockchain technology. Currently, Upland is one of the most widely-used web3 platforms with over 3 million registered accounts, nearly 300,000 landowners, and has sold more than 6 million NFTs. The platform offers various activities for players and creators, including virtual property trading, world-building, collecting, and fun competitions like car racing. Metaverse entrepreneurs can also operate their own shops, contributing to a thriving economy powered by UPX, the native currency which serves as a medium of exchange, and Spark, a utility token that fuels the value creation by a highly-engaged community. Upland is headquartered in Silicon Valley, with additional offices in Las Vegas, Ukraine, and Brazil. It was founded by serial entrepreneurs in July 2018 and launched in June 2019. Upland is accessible on the web, the App Store, and Google Play, allowing users from around the world to experience the metaverse.

Upland Website | X (Formerly Twitter) | Discord | Apple App Store | Google Play Store

EOS Network Ventures

EOS Network Ventures (ENV) is a venture capital fund with a mission is to attract capital investment and deploy that capital for the benefit of the EOS Network as a whole. A portion of this capital is funded by the EOS network on behalf of EOS token holders, with the remainder of funding coming through partnerships with external liquidity providers. EOS Network Ventures makes strategic equity and token-based investments into tech startups across the Web3 space that are deploying on the EOS Network. The intent of these investments is to support the adoption of the EOS Network into innovative new business models that leverage blockchain

technology.

EOS Network

The EOS Network is a 3rd generation blockchain platform powered by the EOS VM, a low-latency, highly performant, and extensible WebAssembly engine for deterministic execution of near feeless transactions; purpose-built for enabling optimal Web3 user and developer experiences. EOS is the flagship blockchain and financial center of the Antelope framework, serving as the driving force behind multi-chain collaboration and public goods funding for tools and infrastructure through the EOS Network Foundation (ENF).

The only source for EOS news you'll ever need

Meet Our Founder Yves La Rose

Yves La Rose is the Executive Director and Founder of the EOS Network Foundation (ENF). A consummate consensus builder within the EOS ecosystem, he lives and breathes EOS, working to ensure the success of the network.

At a young age, Yves was attracted to technology. Through the experience of building his first computer and writing his first program at the age of seven, a lifelong interest in the potential of technology was born.

After completing studies in psychology at the University of Ottawa, Yves moved to Japan where he began his professional career in business and education.

With an entrepreneurial and inquisitive nature, six years passed, living and working while steeped in Japanese language and culture. At the same time, his early intrigue with technology was being further amplified by the revelations of Bitcoin. In 2010, he began mining Bitcoin on his laptop, and exploring the potential of decentralized networks.

Returning to Ottawa in 2011, Yves resumed his university education in pure sciences, focusing on perceptual and computational neuropsychology, and additional studies in behavioral economics.

In 2017, with additional years of business planning and analysis experience, Yves began seriously considering an endeavor in the emerging blockchain industry. Along with a handful of interested associates, he formed a blockchain book club, and having made a thorough survey of second and third generation blockchains, they began focusing their attention on the promising open source blockchain platform, EOSIO.

In February of 2018 Yves co-founded EOS Nation and led it to become the top rated block producer on the largest and most valuable network using EOSIO, the EOS Mainnet.

For over three years as founder and CEO of EOS Nation, Yves helped navigate the company through a great deal of operational uncertainty. Running network infrastructure, providing community outreach, exploring governance models, and contemplating approaches to public goods funding. His undivided attention was on EOS.

EOSIO was at the bleeding edge of public blockchain development, but it was also a global, decentralized network that was increasingly hobbled by distant and ambiguous leadership, misallocation of capital, and misalignment of incentives. Various teams sought to create a foundation, or a worker proposal system that could fund the development of public goods for the network, but these efforts stalled, and EOS was adrift. In May of 2021 Yves resigned as CEO of EOS Nation and began to contemplate a new path forward.

Throughout his tenure as CEO of EOS Nation, Yves had formed many good relationships across the EOS Network, among BP’s in the East, West & in the global South. Yves recognized that he was uniquely positioned to coalesce the stakeholders of the EOS Network around a foundation that would work on behalf of all EOS token holders to realize the true potential of EOS. With the assurance of support from a coalition of stakeholders, Yves founded the EOS Network Foundation.

Since founding the ENF, Yves has dedicated himself with singular focus, in the spirit of a modern day samurai, to work for the benefit of the EOS public blockchain and the many stakeholders of which it is composed. Yves continues to cultivate a team at the ENF that can serve the needs of the EOS community by lifting up and empowering the community itself.

Grounded in the lived experience of Eastern thought and traditions from his time living and studying in Japan and traveling throughout Asia, Yves brings a holistic approach to unifying the global EOS community through mutual respect, and a willingness to meet others wherever they are at.

Upland Receives $1.5 Million Investment from EOS Network Ventures in $7 million Series A Extension

Lowering the Barriers to Metaverse & GameFi on EOS