Hello PUBLISH0X community! Today I am happy to bring you this article dedicated to the Upland contest. After looking at the functioning of the platform, the project, the team and the concept of this game, I decided that it was worth dedicating an article to it. But not just a simple article. I realized that much more is being transmitted behind this project than it seems. If we can open our mind a little more and look further, we could really see a lot of interesting things!
Reading a few articles on Upland, I saw that most of them are based on tutorials or video guides for the game and that's fine. I love to see this kind of articles because I find them very useful and interesting, in fact I also have to thank some Publish0x users who have made me understand many new things about the Upland platform and game.
Since this format is already quite present, I decided to avoid writing another article about it. I am not saying that tutorials are “the easy stuff” but I wanted to focus on something totally different, something unique. I'm not here to do the simple homework and for this reason I want to open your eyes to how Upland, in its simplicity, can bring a lot of innovation to us and to this world!
I am sure that after this article, you will start to fall in love with the Upland project and its lessons that we can draw. Your reaction could probably be the following:
I decided to divide this article into 3 main parts:
- Upland: The game
- The technology behind Upland
- The lessons we can learn from Upland
So, get on board this plane with me and let's start this journey in the lands of Upland!
1: Upland: The game
If you find yourself reading this article, you are probably already familiar with this innovative game. Upland is the earth's metaverse mapped to the real world and accessible via web. I immediately liked the concept of the game. It has its own in-game economy and can operate according to the law of supply and demand established by players like itself.
At this point in the article, you will have understood that Upland is not just a simple game but pushes towards new horizons that connect the gaming world with the blockchain and crypto sectors.
Hey STOP! Don’t be afraid!
You don't need any in-depth crypto knowledge to succeed in Upland. Indeed, Upland is supported by the EOS blockchain. Blockchain can help us guarantee true ownership because every transaction is recorded in an irreversible ledger. In this way, you know that your property belongs to you-forever! Indeed, Upland's commercial business uses our game currency UPX.
Upland wants to solve a great problem of traditional games. Traditional games usually provide a simulated economy controlled by the game creator. In most cases, these simulated economies do not provide a market for trading or liquidating their assets.
After Publish0x readers understood all the potential of this new gaming concept, I imagined a scene like this:
When I realized the problem Upland wants to solve, I immediately thought of a beautiful game that I loved several years ago. It was a restaurant simulator, where you were the owner of your restaurant, you had to take care of customers, expand the restaurant, offer more services to monetize and also take care of the menu. All very nice, I remember that I spent a lot of time on this game, but in the end there was no possibility of being able to monetize the results and progress of the game in any way.
This story of playing “just for fun” has never suited me 100%. I used to say: “All nice, I'm having fun, but what value is this game adding to my life?”. What did I get in the end? Anything. This critical sense of mine has grown even more when, over the years, I have learned to understand the true value of our time, since it is the most important thing we have.
So, to tackle the problem, Upland is developing a virtual collectible game representing real estate. Initially in San Francisco and later in other cities and regions around the world. You can buy, trade or sell properties. When sold or traded, the property changes ownership and the ownership will be recorded on the blockchain. Upland's property ownership has nothing to do with real-life property ownership.
In Upland there are 2 kind of players: Visitors or Uplanders.
When you join in Upland, you start as visitors. In this phase, your Upland account is associated with an EOS account that is owned by Upland. After you will accumulate a net worth of 10,000 UPX, you gradually become an Uplander. At this time, the Upland smart client will generate a new private key that cannot be read by the Upland backend and create a dedicated EOS account to associate with its Upland account. Then transfer all digital assets from the free EOS account to the newly created dedicated EOS account, and Uplander can enjoy the true ownership of the digital assets forever. At the same time, Upland lost any access to the digital assets it owned.
For more information about the game I invite you to Upland website: https://upland.me/
2: Technology behind Upland
We have seen the concept of Upland as a game but you have probably understood that there is much more to consider. I would start by talking to you about the opportunity that the blockchain offers.
As you well know, blockchain allows the creation of fungible tokens that serve as a bearer instrument that complements or, in an increasing number of cases, act as a replacement for fiat money. In addition to fungible tokens, blockchain provides the ability to create Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) which represent provable, unique collectibles.
In the game, Upland provides you two types of tokens:
- UPX: A fungible token on the EOS mainnet. UPX can be bought in the Upland store with fiat currency via 3rd party providers.
- Virtual Properties: A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) on the EOS mainnet which maps to real world addresses, including precise parcel boundaries.
Non-Fungible Token is an interesting topic!
NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) are particular Tokens that give to the Blockchain the possibility of not being associated only with cryptocurrencies. The fungibility of an Asset indicates the possibility of individual units to be interchangeable. Let's take an example: if I have a 100$ asset, each 10$ bill can be replaced with any other 10$ bill, so it means it's Fungible.
If we take an art gallery, the paintings present cannot be replaced with another painting: each painting is unique, so they are not fungible. By the same principle, NFTs are unique Tokens for stored data or information. The identification data of each NFT are stored in a Smart-Contract. Another important feature of NFTs is that they cannot be divided, while as we know a BTC can be divided into Satoshi.
These are some examples of NFT applications, there are many positive aspects to consider. There have already been some examples of applying Security tokens to the Real Estate market but I would not like to dwell on this topic in this article. However, know that we are not talking about science fiction.
Let's continue to analyze the last point on which I want to focus.
3: Upland teachings and how it can bring value to the crypto and blockchain world
At this point I want to try to open your mind as much as possible to see beyond the game. When I saw this game I immediately thought to Monopoly (or Cashflow 101 for the more nerdy).
I'm sure you've played it at least once in your life, with your parents, with friends or with your children. I find it a very effective example to compare to Upland. Unlike the Monopoly concept of "Play to have fun", Upland makes itself unique for the "Play to Own" concept. Utilizing blockchain technology to create real-world economies for games opens up a completely new way of how the ownership of assets can be treated and assigned.
Do you remember when you started falling in love with the crypto world?
Do you remember those emotions, why all of us Publish0x readers, authors and founders are passionate about this world and why we work on it?
I remember the first days very well. Everything was new, but simply brilliant.
Admit it, you too will have fallen in love with the concept of decentralization, of being the true owner of your assets, the idea of ??putting power back into the hands of the population.
Because in the end, the concept of crypto is a return to freedom, crypto are people’s money, a fundamental step for the evolution of all of us from many points of view. This means understanding our blockchain and cryptocurrency sector to ensure that more and more projects, like Upland, come out!
How can we increasingly integrate blockchain technology into everyday life?
These are the questions we need to ask ourselves.
After this reflection I am sure that when someone asks you to play something, this will be your reaction:
Thanks to Publish0x for introducing the Upland project to many people, and thanks to Upland for being another important example of progress in this area.
What does the cryptocurrency world mean to you?
Let me know in a comment, I'm very curious to put together many different ideas and visions.
I am sure that all of us, even with small things, can bring value to this world!
*All the pics in this article are made by the author*
