A Message from Andy Tian, CEO and co-founder of Uplive

Hi everyone,

First of all, I want to thank all of our wonderful community for supporting us. As a newbie in the crypto world, I have been humbled by the enormous goodwill and enthusiasm. This is the first of our weekly updates to the community, and we would love to get your feedback on how we can make this better to inform all of you.

As this is also the first update of 2018, I’d like to take a bit of time to reflect on 2017. We started this whole journey of blockchain actually in the beginning of 2017. I have to admit, we were too slow when we first started in researching blockchain. We were actually encouraged to research and implement blockchain technology by our equity investors, many of whom have already been involved in this sector for several years. At first when they mentioned that we should look into blockchain, we were skeptical, this is such a new technology that seemed to me still is so far from our sector, which is online mobile entertainment. But thankfully, we were curious and looked deeper. We realized soon that blockchain was made for virtual assets, which, in the shape of virtual gifts, are exactly the driving engine of our live streaming business. That was a very exciting revelation.

On the other hand, as our Uplive live streaming business rapidly grew, our streamers and users constant bombarded us with their questions and requests for more innovation and better service. One of the rising requests from many streamers is to get gifts OUTSIDE of Uplive. Yes, Uplive’s virtual gifts are awesome (you can see them again here: www.up.live), but streamers can only get them while streaming, at most an hour or two a day. Many of the hosts have fans on other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, and they cannot monetize these fans. We then developed a Web-based gifting system for them to use on these platforms, outside of Uplive.

It is the confluence of blockchain technology and requests from our own business that drove the birth of GIFTO, the first universal gifting protocol. Unlike most protocols that just focus on the underlying technology, we are also building the full stack of user facing product, as that’s our strength.

Which brings us to the first update on the year. The goal for GIFTO in Q1 is to to get a commercial Beta for blockchain based gifts to Uplive’s now close to 100,000 streamers, and 30 million users, and of course, external influencers.

Here are the key product milestones for Q1:

End of January: Web-based gifting solution Alpha test for influencers to use on Facebook/Instagram/Youtube

Web-based gifting solution Alpha test for influencers to use on Facebook/Instagram/Youtube gifts will be available to purchase with internal Diamonds from Uplive

End of February: Crypto GIFTO Wallet start to deploy in Uplive

Crypto GIFTO Wallet start to deploy in Uplive Will start with Android, approximately 100,000 users will have access to the GIFTO wallet on Uplive.

We start with Android since iOS does not allow native 3rd party payment such as wallet integration, and that Android’s iteration speed is much faster than iOS.

End of March: Beta release of gifting on blockchain and GIFTO wallet commercial deployment

Beta release of gifting on blockchain and GIFTO wallet commercial deployment First 1 million Android Uplive users will have GIFTO wallet installed and an initial small number of tokens airdropped. By March Uplive will have over 30 million users, approximately 20 million of which will be on Android.

Selected gifts in Uplive will be on blockchain and purchasable with GIFTO. Note Wallet and GIFTO transactions will be done on our private chain server in order to support fast transactions.

Web-based gifts outside Uplive will be purchasable with GIFTO for influencers on Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube.

By end of Mar., we should have real, sizable, everyday usage of the GIFTO tokens, which will make it one of the most used, and quickest used tokens. We should see the number of GTO token holders increase to over 1 million. At the same time, we are actively engaging real business partnerships with entertainment and content companies around Asia to use virtual gifts.

By the way, we just held our first meet up of the year in Seoul on Jan 4th, over 300 people attended, making it the biggest single project meetup in Seoul ever for a new token. We are humbled and excited by the enthusiasm in the Korean community.

We also became a strategic partner with Binance, the #1 exchange in the world. We are using Uplive’s user base and influence to help promote Binance in the consumer mobile world. As part of the partnership, we created a fun virtual gift for Binance’s token, BNB. We will continue to work with important partners such as Binance in a fun, creative way.

Since GIFTO is based on our fast growing live streaming platform, Uplive, we will give a bit of update on Uplive too. During Q4 2017, we have seen accelerated growth of Uplive users globally. More than 6 million people from all over the world became new registered users of Uplive, many of them coming from new regions such as USA, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Our newest office just got established in Los Angeles. These regions are also where we are seeing a booming increase of Uplive hosts, both professionals hired by our local teams in the region, and amateurs who use Uplive for socializing with their friends and making friends with our multinational user base.

Some fun links to check out on Uplive:

We became the first mobile app ever in Hong Kong to wrap an entire subway station Mongkok platform with Uplive streamers. Mongkok station has the largest foot traffic in HK, close to 300,000 people a day pass through the station.

We released the first single for Uplive Girls, the first all-girls singing group in Asia comprised of our top streamers. The full original album will debut in the summer of 2018.

Over the next few weeks, I will share with you guys in more detail each week an important aspect of our business, from strategy, product, technology, to our partnerships. This quick first update is meant to give you guys an overview of what we want to do in Q1.

Our overall goal in 2018 remains the same: to create the biggest consumer application for blockchain technology, measured not by hype, but by the actual number of users.

Until next week!

Andy and the GIFTO Team

Uplive and Gifto in the news

2.Taiwan’s most influential financial magazine, “BUSINESS WEEKLY”, interviews Uplive Taiwan CEO, Daniel Yeh. Look out for it in their February issue!

3.Our very own girl group, Uplive Girls, have released their debut EP, “UpUpUp”. You can check it out in the video below:

[embed] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51miISPXC_Y

They also made an appearance on Taiwanese variety show, ‘Witty Star’. Their segment is slated to be aired on 21st January 2018.

4. Asia Innovations Group signed a Strategic Partnership with the Korea Model Association to revolutionize the association’s content business. More updates will be announced shortly!

5.Uplive Taiwan CEO, Daniel Yeh, participated in the “GENESIS BLOCK EVENT YEAR END PARTY”

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