It was early 2018 in Silicon Valley, with Cryptokitties and Bitcoin price swings regularly making the news. Upland co-founders Mani, Idan, and Dirk were discussing digital collectibles while playing a late-night game of Monopoly when they had a vision for a virtual property trading metaverse, with a vibrant community and blockchain-based incentive structures. 

In the years since, Upland has built a huge online following, leveraging the powerful and efficient EOS blockchain to offer players true ownership of digital assets. They’ve partnered with brands like the NFL Players’ Association and UNICEF Brazil to build a dynamic metaverse based around the Upland super-app and its virtual property NFTs representing real-world places.

  • Upland is among the top 10 most popular blockchain games, with thousands of daily active users. 
  • EOS’s sophisticated permissions structure enables Upland’s custom wallet, which utilizes a unique user identity and account management system.
  • The UPX token and the virtual property NFTs live on the EOS mainnet, allowing for true interoperable asset ownership. This empowers developers to integrate the Upland metaverse within their applications.
  • Upland partners with EOS Authority and ClimateCare to offset the carbon footprint of the entire EOS blockchain.

Upland: Bridging the Gap Between Real-World Property and the Digital Realm

Upland brings the dream of owning real estate to life by allowing players to buy, sell, and trade virtual properties. These virtual properties match one-to-one with physical addresses in the real world. This generates significant interest among players, eager to own and trade virtual properties near their favourite locations. Upland’s innovative approach has quickly gained traction, boasting a rapidly growing user base and an ever-expanding virtual world.

The game features a unique gameplay design in which a player’s “Block Explorer” explores the city blocks of Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, and many more across the world. Players begin their journey as visitors, accumulating assets until they become fully fledged Uplanders who truly own and can build on their digital properties. This progression system has proven highly engaging, encouraging players to explore the virtual world and invest in properties, while avoiding some of the onboarding hurdles that plague other blockchain-based applications.

Check out the highlight below of Upland Co-Founder, Idan Zuckerman, explaining the upland ecosystem and what makes it so unique.

Another key factor to Upland’s growth is its strong community focus. The game fosters a sense of camaraderie among players, offering bonuses for collaborative projects. This incentivizes players to form alliances and meet common goals, leading to the development of vibrant virtual neighbourhoods. As players interact with each other, they can take part in in-game activities.

Upland also partners with major brands to provide integrated branded experiences. These range from exclusive Spirit Halloween NFTs, to an official FIFA world cup prediction contest. Upland also operates hackathons and supports third-party integrations with their metaverse, highlighting some of the key interoperability benefits of running an application on a public blockchain. In a Web2 environment, these integrations would require significant overhead. By using the EOS, Upland can offer native interoperability without sacrificing performance.

Unlocking the Power of EOS for Upland’s Virtual Real Estate Platform

Upland chose EOS for its scalability, efficiency, and user-friendly features. This choice has allowed the game to offer players true ownership of their digital assets while maintaining a clean user experience and a sustainable business model. The blockchain has played a pivotal role in Upland’s success by offering a fast, affordable, and secure environment for managing user accounts, NFTs, and token transactions. The game never has access to any player’s private keys. However, thanks to the flexible design of the EOS Network, Upland can still offer the benefits of abstracting blockchain transactions away from the user experience.

Upland’s proprietary wallet signs transactions on users’ behalf, allowing players to communicate directly with the EOS mainnet. This is achieved without requiring user-managed private keys, removing the negative user experience that comes with other blockchain games. Users own their EOS accounts, and the wallet encrypts players’ private keys on the client level. Only the player’s login credentials can decrypt their keys. If players lose access, Upland offers a password recovery process based on email or two-factor authentication. The method enables non-tech-savvy players to enjoy the game while maintaining the benefits of blockchain.

The game structures user accounts into two tiers: visitors and Uplanders. Visitors are accounts temporarily owned by Upland. As visitors accumulate assets and reach a net worth of 10,000 UPX, they graduate to become Uplanders, gaining true ownership of their digital assets. This transition involves the creation of a dedicated EOS account, which is associated with the player’s Upland account. All digital assets are then transferred from the visitor’s free-play EOS account to the new dedicated account, ensuring the player truly owns their assets.

The EOS mainnet is the home of Upland’s UPX in-game currency. It incorporates the EOS token smart contract, which provides a secure token contract, similar to other token standards. UPX transactions require multi-signing by both the owner and Upland to ensure that UPX remains strictly a utility token for use within the Upland ecosystem. 

EOS also hosts Upland’s virtual property NFTs. The game stores these NFTs as a bundle of one or more UP², which are unique 3×3 meter squares tied to real geo-locations. Because Upland stores these property NFTs on a public blockchain, other developers can incorporate the NFTs into their applications without necessarily requiring Upland’s approval. This openness helps cultivate a vibrant ecosystem of builders assembling new solutions within Upland.

Upland’s smart contract functionalities enable a range of actions within the game. These include minting new properties, listing or removing properties from sale, buying properties, making buy offers, accepting or rejecting buy offers, collecting UPX earnings for owned properties, and allowing an owner to burn (un-mint) their property (to allow the free play model).

EOS is a highly efficient blockchain. The entire mainnet consumes 281 metric tons of CO2 per year, which is 0.68% of the carbon footprint of US Bank, or the equivalent usage of approximately 44 average world citizens. This was a driving factor in Upland’s choice to build on EOS. As part of its commitment to environmental sustainability, Upland also partnered with EOS Authority and ClimateCare to offset a year of carbon emissions for the entire EOS mainnet. This carbon offset is much smaller than on a proof-of-work blockchain like Bitcoin, which uses 22 million metric tons of CO2 per year. Thanks to the EOS blockchain’s low energy consumption, environmentally conscious users are given peace of mind when engaging with the Upland metaverse.

Build a Better Metaverse With Upland!

Whether you want to become a virtual real estate tycoon, build an integrated app, or just finally have the opportunity to ironically say “I own my own home”, Upland offers anyone the opportunity to experience the future of property trading. Join Upland now and start building your virtual property empire!

Upland Website: https://www.upland.me/

Upland on Twitter: @UplandMe

Upland is Transforming the World of Virtual Property

Upland’s successful integration with the EOS blockchain has played a crucial role in the game’s growth and popularity. By leveraging the power of EOS, Upland offers players true ownership of digital assets, secure transactions, and an engaging, sustainable gaming experience. The confluence of Upland and EOS showcases the potential of EOS as a powerful, efficient, and user-friendly platform for innovative projects like Upland that are pushing the boundaries of the Web3 landscape.

As you can tell, we’re super excited to have Upland as a part of the EOS ecosystem. To recap:

  • Upland leverages the EOS blockchain to offer players true ownership of digital assets
  • The EOS mainnet hosts Upland’s accounts, virtual property NFTs, and UPX in-game currency
  • The audited smart contracts run on the EOS public chain, ensuring security and transparency.
  • Upland’s carbon offset partnership with EOS Authority showcases its commitment to sustainability

Thanks for sticking around and learning all about how Upland leverages EOS to revolutionize virtual real estate. Upland is just one of many innovative initiatives leveraging the Antelope protocol and EOS blockchain to push the boundaries of Web3. Learn more about this and everything else EOS at EOSNetwork.com.

About The 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 Antelope protocol’s flagship blockchain and financial center, serving as the driving force behind multi-chain collaboration and public goods funding for tools and infrastructure through the EOS Network Foundation (ENF).

About The EOS Network Foundation

The EOS Network Foundation (ENF) is a not-for-profit organization that coordinates financial and non-financial support to encourage the growth and development of the EOS Network. The ENF is the hub of the EOS Network, harnessing the power of decentralization as a force for positive global change to chart a coordinated future for EOS.

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