What Is Ultra (UOS)? A Guide to the Ultra Stack, Ultra Mainnet, and UOS
Ultra builds blockchain infrastructure that businesses can use as their own. The company was founded in 2017 by gaming industry veterans, and its own Ultra mainnet has been live since 2021. Gaming set a demanding bar for the technology requiring millions of small actions, instant response, and no cost to the player. Those requirements apply well beyond gaming. Today, Ultra offers the same infrastructure to any business that wants to come onchain, with no transaction fees and a seamless user experience.
What does Ultra offer?
Two problems keep most businesses away from blockchain: cost & UX. On most networks every action carries a fee, so high-frequency, low-value use cases never make financial sense and before a new user can do anything, they typically have to go through the nuances of blockchain like installing a wallet, writing down seedphrases, connecting to the right network, and funding the wallet.
Ultra has removed both barriers. Using Ultra’s technology is 100% free, and for a user the whole onboarding process becomes a single step sign in.
Businesses can work with Ultra in two ways:
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Build on Ultra Mainnet: Deploy applications directly on Ultra's own network, which has been running in production since 2021.
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Deploy their own Stack: Take the infrastructure and run it under their own name, for their own users. Ultra takes businesses from concept to live. After launch the business runs it themselves, or Ultra runs it for them.
What Is the Ultra Stack?
The Ultra Stack is the complete set of infrastructure Ultra has built. It's modular, so a business takes only the components it needs. The Stack is organised into five layers:
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Foundation: Ultra Mainnet, Ultra EVM, and POWER, the network resource system covered in Lesson 2.
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Onchain: smart contracts, UNIQ NFT standard, first-party price oracle, multi-signature.
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Accounts & Wallets: Ultra Accounts (recoverable, with no seed phrase required), no-install web wallet, browser extension, and the wallet SDK.
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APIs and data: the Chain API, the Ultra API for asset data, a block explorer, and the Ultra Toolkit.
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Integration: SDKs for the Unity and Unreal game engines, and an Agent Knowledge Base that lets AI coding agents understand how to build smart contracts and dapps on the Ultra Stack.
What Is Ultra Mainnet?
Ultra Mainnet is Ultra's own public network, and the place where the Stack has proven itself in production. It's a custom layer-1 built on Antelope technology, optimised for performance, user experience and reliability.
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Live since
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2021
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Blocks produced
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330,000,000+
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Uptime
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100%
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Security breaches
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0
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Block time
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500ms
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Throughput
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15,000+ transactions per second
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Finality
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Sub-second
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Fees
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$0
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Consensus
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Proof of Authority
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Contract languages
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C++ and Solidity
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Ultra Mainnet is secured by a closed set of validators distributed across Brazil, Ukraine, Sweden, the United States and Australia. This is a deliberate trade-off as Ultra chose reliability and performance over permissionless validation, and the network has never been paused, rolled back or exploited.
Products running on Ultra Mainnet today include the Ultra Wallet browser extension, the Ultra Toolkit for advanced transaction building, the Ultra ↔ Ethereum Bridge, the Block Explorer, and the Ultra Game Store.
Lesson 1 Summary
Ultra is a blockchain technology provider. Its product, the Ultra Stack, is a modular set of infrastructure that removes transaction fees and hides blockchain complexity from end users. Businesses can build on Ultra Mainnet, the network that has run the Stack in production since 2021, or deploy a Stack of their own in around eight weeks. Mainnet delivers sub-second deterministic finality, 15,000+ transactions per second and $0 fees, with a record of 100% uptime.
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