Hi.  My name is Corey.  I had this idea that you could marry Minecraft and blockchain which evolved into an understanding that the REAL value was to map permanent land access and building rights to buyable, sellable, and tradeable NFTs.  Basically, I realized we had all the pieces needed to create a scrappy VERSION ONE of the Metaverse imagined in Ready Player One or Snow Crash.  The amazing team behind Uplift.Art, with it’s visionary, mBluCrypto at the helm, adopted me & the small community already in the Minecraft server I was playing with (originally turned on by THE UpliftGreg!). You can still find those OGs  *Original Gratitudians* running the amazing Chik’in Ka’ah world today! Combined with the genius, know-how, and resources mBlu martialed within Uplift.Art, we quickly proved out a Minimum Viable Product version of the Uplift World and started building a community.  I seriously can’t believe this was only about 5 months ago!?!?  

The team really ignited once we brought on Dr. Wayne, our head software engineer, who is currently VERY head-down focused on the Upliftium, (Active Rewards plugin that will reward players and land key owners in the Uplift World just for playing) and Chris Tuttle as our DevOps lead, a true blockchain gaming expert. That was a little under 4 months ago!!

You can track our progress in real time by visiting our “Office” in the Uplift at Genesis 2800,

2800.

I built this room under the sea right down at bedrock at the foot of theUpLifters Tower, where we have guests on our YouTube show add GRATITUDES almost daily to the giant living monument towering into the sky.  Down in the office, we put up  our team’s GRATITUDES at the start of every Tuddle Huddle, our daily team dev/planning meeting.  Every month we have been adding a floor up from the bedrock.   We are just closing out the 4th floor.   In a few months, this building will burst out of the ocean!! I get really excited thinking about this! Lol.   It should be noted the room that I built was super simple.  It looks so amazing because Gary, Jen and others having been

Over the last 4 months we’ve been growing by leaps and bounds, but never so fast as recently.   Our Telegram group basically doubled from 2200 to almost 5000 just in the last 3-4 weeks.  This means that more than HALF of all people in the Uplift Ecosystem are completely new here!!   There’s probably a lot you don’t know about us and our commitments, vision, and passion for DELIVERING.  This short (cough…. It won’t be short…. cough) article is meant to help get new people up to speed.

Principles

@ Uplift we are 110% committed to a few key Principles.  

Gratitude Practice   – The practice of Daily Gratitude has been scientifically proven to make people happier.

WIN WIN WIN – In every transaction, we strive to make it WIN WIN, but then see if we can add a third winner! For example, in all our Uplift Land sales, 10% of revenue has gone to our mission to build a school in Haiti.  We can’t tell you how humbling and beautiful it is to watch so many people and projects in the Uplift adopt this principle.  Whilst creating, building and earning we are contributing some REAL GOOD IN THE WORLD!! 

Play To Earn –  We are committed to our vision to create a metaverse where players and citizens earn real value just for everyday activities in the Uplift. 

Accomplishments

• We sold the first Uplift World monument / art piece at auction and raised an unexpected amou
• nt of money for charity (it all went to our charitable mission account for this year that you can track on wax: upliftdonate).
• We set a goal to build a school in Haiti through this calendar year working with HaitianRoots.com, an organization for which we raised 30k last year doing our I’m Not The Bubble music video / NFT collection release from Uplift.Art. We’re almost there! 
• We did our first sale on a promise that we could create areas inside a Minecraft server and map control of those areas to NFTs that you could buy, own,  and sell, or trade. 

          We made that happen.  

• We also promised that owning certain NFTs from our collection would automatically be able to grant you access to The Uplift.

            Nailed it.

• We invented a way to have players earn just by PLAYING in the game and by owning NFTs mapped to the PLACES people play in that game!   Coming thoon! It won’t be too much longer now.

• In our first sale, we set aside HUGE amounts of $ & raised 1 MILLION $WAX that will later be used as player rewards. (This was before we got the go-ahead from our team to create Upliftium).  Then we had a mysterious benefactor DOUBLE that to over 2 MILLION WAX!!   That WAX still exists in our rewards account, and one way or another, every single bit of it will go to the community.  Period.  Full transparency, no exceptions.  You can track the rewards account:   theuplift.xp
• Not for nothin’,  our collaboration with Rplanet.io has raised 2.85 BILLION $AETHER for the rewards pool that will find its way into the hands of Upliftians, over time as well.  It will ONLY ever go to Upliftians, as in, this is not company money.  It’s community money.    We take PLAY TO EARN hyper seriously!! It’s the core animating reason for everything we are building!  That said… we aren’t in a hurry. 😉  We’re going to take our time figuring out the best way to use $AETHER as a reward.  
• We started on one BIG map on one server and found out pretty quickly this WOULD NOT SCALE!! So we figured out how to carve up all the main parts of the map, complete with their builds intact, and put them each onto their own servers.  This was NOT a trivial task, but with our stellar team is was accomplished.
• We launched UPLIFTIUM!  Our own internal, mineable currency that will be the prime method players and landowners receive rewards in at Uplift World for decades to come.   I’ll include a section on current and future use-cases for UPLIFTIUM below.
• We announced that UPLIFTIUM will be withdrawable far sooner than the 6 months I’d originally communicated. It will be withdrawable as NFT’s into a new account we set up just for this process. We set the secondary market % on this account @ 1%, basically to cover the cost for RAM, so that there could be as little friction as possible when Upliftians buy and sell their UPLIFTIUM NFTs.
• We are still considering whether to create our own token for Upliftium, but starting with NFT’s, we have seen that there is a VERY high chance  the community themselves will create tools to turn UPLIFTIUM NFTs into fungible tokens via smart contracts, and we find that prospect fascinating.   
• To answer a question we get a lot: WEN ALCOR?: We (the Uplift company) will very likely never list Upliftium on an Alcor.Exchange, but there is nothing stopping anyone from adding a community generated token based on burned NFTs to alcor.exchange, for example.  This space will evolve quickly.   Our commitment has been to create a system whereby value can be extracted from the Uplift by players.   The CRYSTALIZED UPLIFTIUM NFTs that can be withdrawn and very soon deposited back into the Uplift solve this, but we expect many innovations around this in the coming months and years to make it easier and have this value take the form the community wants it too. 
• We started logging in-game events on chain!! You can see us play with this on the WAX acct: upliftevents
• We built theUpLifters Youtube channel from a couple hundred subscribers and just me and Jimmy to MANY contributors and shows, including the amazing Jen’s Awesome Show which went live LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE DAY for awhile!!   Jimmy and I have cut our regular lineup back to 5 days a week with more of a focus on keeping everyone up to speed about the Uplift, but also continue to have h guests  from across the WAX and broader blockchain and crypto ecosystems to learn about,  promote, and connect with other amazing projects in our immediate and extended communities. 
• Easter Egg Hunts  LINK
• PostCards 😉   Get ‘em on Nefty Blocks

• Finally gettin’ our Social Media on at scale!  *Not only is our new hire SuperSam15 crushing posting on Twitter, Instagram and FB, but we are developing an over-arching strategy enhancing our YouTube, and adding Twitch and more to create a vibrant presence all across the inter-toobz!! 
• The Blog is rockin out content. Jimmy has been cranking out articles and he started a new series on Uplift BLDRZ!!    
• Jen is putting up more and more pictures all the time, giving Upliftium its first use case.  She’s also doing photo shoots with cool shaders for builders as well.  Use case #2. And she’s doing really amazing interviews with the new Jen’s Awesome Show
• We just hired one of the best Discord guys in the game!!  The guy who built the WAX.io and Banano discords is on our team now! 
• We have HUGE names attached to the Thoon Creative world that will be going live later this year.   Like the band KORN and Tito Ortiz of MMA Fame.
• Oh and the maps are going 3D again!! Genesis is done and the rest will follow.  Find our live Uplift World maps @ worldmaps.theuplift.world

• these arent so much our teams accomplishments but I need you guys to see @ least one of the *many* videos the community is making of their builds in the Uplift! @GrowYourBase_    ison fire!! Keep an eye on JimmyD’s BLDRZ series here on the blog to see more of these.
  

  Excited to share our build in @theupliftworld

  This build took 2 months & was entirely community-driven! #NFTCommunity @coreycottrell @kansai_krypto #NFT

  In-game coordinates in the video are:

  450,4250 (50×50 rail plot)
  500,4200 (100×100 land plot)
  500,4100 (100×100 land plot) pic.twitter.com/oJVHq79f6K

  — GrowYourBase (@growyourbase_) August 4, 2021

We asked you what you thought our main achievements have been.  Your answers are my new reasons for waking up every morning.   These were originally going to be in this article but there’s too many and they are TOO GOOD!! I’m going to have them collected up into articles of their own.  Here’s just a taste: 

• “Dear Uplift! You made a huge job! 🙂 You connected minecraft with NFT and brought many players to it!! created a massive huge awesome community, where everyone helps and respects each other. Many chats, all over all socials.. Uplift for the win! Its really huge! Many servers, awesome technical support( had some problems was solved in 30 mins ).I like the transparency. I like the way you guys treat players, making some events, presents, quests like easters eggs, I LOVE IT! No lagging on servers, perfect rail system, ideal plot sizes! eehh i just love everything about Uplift. Honestly, the best project i joined so far!! 🙂 wanna go to the moon with you guys! keep it up!”

• “Technologically it’s really impressive how the Uplift and the Metaverse are seamlessly connected. Owning land on your wax account instantly gets you access to building on your land in the server, which is really cool.”

• “I think the biggest accomplishment is bringing together a community of this size that remains so positive and friendly. It is quite clear to me that it is not just heavy-handed mods; not at all… the uplift message really seems to be coming through.”

• “Uplift has helped to gamify the discovery and viewing of fine art by setting up survival worlds. Therefore for ArtVndngMchn exhibits, the art gallery scene has been taken to a whole new level. One minute a player is enjoying a painting, the next moment, they player is fighting off attackers!”

*there are 200 more responses to this question and the craziest thing for me is how DIFFERENT they were!  

WORLDS

The best place to learn about our 8+ worlds in the Uplift is check out this article:

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS INTO THE UPLIFT METAVERSE WORLDS

Here is what we are laser focused on delivering over the next 90 days. 

• • Punch Sign, Get Thing.   Imagine being able to put a sign up on your land in the Uplift, and any time someone punches it in the game we send a signal to the wax account: upliftevents.   You could read that, manually or with a script, and create all kinds of actions OUTSIDE THE GAME!  Eg.  Punch sign and the player gets an NFT sent to them.  Punch sign and the player gets added to your whitelist.  Punch sign and you give them an upgraded roll in Discord!?  Here’s what I know for sure… once we launch this feature games, projects and Uplifters will find ways to gamify and enrich this experience that we would never have dreamed of.  At a very high level I see this feature as connecting the Uplift to the outside world.   It’s going to be epic. 
  • Launch the Portal Hub complete with portals to multiple Old World attractions and all the worlds!   *And launch the first paid billboard in the Uplift?? 😉  *Ps this is basically done now since i started writing the article.
• 
  • Scale Servers – Getting more PEOPLE into the Uplift is always going to be one of our biggest priorities.  There’s probably a full article in explaining the challenges we face using the large maps as we do and scaling minecraft servers, which all run on a single thread!!  Basically for every world we need to punch ALL of the data through a tiny straw lol.  We will be optimizing our current one-world-one-server configuration, but we are quickly moving to the cloud, where we will be able to scale server capacity dynamically and in real time.  *and we have a skunkworks team working on something completely experimental that might blow all of this out of the water!! 
  • Launch Passports – Land owners being In-Worldz is VERY cool.   Launching passports means we will be able to invite PLAYERS into the Uplift!! Tourists! This combined with active rewards for player and landowner is going to be… um….. MASSIVE.
  • Events MVP!   WTF IS THIS?  Imagine signing up for an event with a 1000$ prize that sits at the top of a huge mountain in a world you just teleported to from the stargate hub in Old World.  The NFT ticket you just bought (or FOUND in the Uplift) is the only way anyone gets through this door.  Teams of people are here to win the prize.  Everyone will at some point try to kill you.  Everyone will rush in to the center of the world from the outer reaches.  At the center the mountain is 255 blocks of sheer wall!! You’ll need to build to reach the top! And all the while mercenaries will be trying to kill you!  The first person to punch the sign at the top of this mountain gets the whole price package of NFTs, Crypto, sent directly to their wallet.   Its Uplift meets Hunger Games meets E-Sports!!   And its going to be huge!!   We are creating a Minimum Viable Product version of this feature to roll out later this quarter.
  • Social Logins, Security.   Right now you log in with your wax account and your minecraft username.  This isn’t secure enough for us to launch any kind of automatic Upliftium transactions so we are moving to social logins.   You’ll be able to use your gmail etc to login much like you do for the wax cloud wallet.
  • Scarcity, we will only do small sales this quarter and the ammts of Land/Rail we release will depend on delivering @ least one Key Deliverable first. Ie *Full Uplifitum Withdrawal and Deposit or ACTIVE REWARDS! 

• Active Rewards Pools for Players and Land Owners to Earn WAX / Upliftium

            This is the biggest one for me.  It’s how we truly launch into the Earn To Play revolution. 

            Players will earn Upliftium just for exploring! And someday thoon just for building! 

            Or riding in a boat!  Or planting a carrot!  *we can get really crazy w this 😉  

It’s ultimately what will make us WAY cooler than Ready Player One.   Instead of everyone spending all their money we are creating an ecosystem that will earn people real value for their time playing in the Uplift.  And land OWNERS will earn Upliftium every time a player earns an award on their land.  

• Automated Crystalized Upliftium NFT Withdrawals and Deposits.  Getting 1MM Upliftium out as an NFT has been fun and taught us a lot! But the goal is to have it so that anyone can automatically withdraw their Upliftium as an NFT in all kinds of denominations, and people will be able to buy those NFTs off atomichub and deposit them back into our system so they can use the Upliftium.   

• More Easter Egg Hunts!

• Finish the Mythic Quests

• More Upliftium Use Cases! Along with the Picture Installs, Photo Shoots and Plot to Plot portals we will be releasing probably a half dozen more features you can use Upliftium for.The 2 that I’m most excited about that could launch before the end of the year?   Turn a ROOM on your plot into an NFT that you can sell. This won’t be cheap but the implications for earning and onboarding new people are profound   *Think rail plot sized appt building.* and being able to use Upliftium in game with the new economic model based on kiosks we are researching. Need some glass?  Buy it from your fellow Upliftians with Upliftium.

By the end of this year

• • Fully scaled into Amazon Cloud Service – AWS is like having an infinite number of servers you can turn on whenever you need them.  This is a dramatic oversimplification.  The main point is it’s a huge step forward in our efforts to scale the servers to handle thousands of people instead of hundreds/

• • 10x the number of players by adding passport access to increase Upliftium rewards traffic

• • Game Events with MASSIVE prizes happening monthly

• • GUILDS!!!!  Watch this for my discussion with Guilds originator Caue Motta

• • (NFT) Ticketed Events

• • Huge Brands launching in the Uplift

• • Maybe more naps.

*Just a little end note, looking through some pictures to find some good oldies I came across pictures of the Cathedral 2.0 under construction.   It took me back to when I was laying the blocks of glass and sea-lantern for the dome one at a time.  Hours a day.  And it makes me ponder how all of our actions, good and bad, are piling up in the worlds.  We get to choose to add the good every day.  We can chose to make a Gratitude Monument that grows and grows to become a forest of them.   We can chose to do a little good in the real world as we play.  We can chose to be patient with ourselves and the community.   While we have built something truly amazing over the past 5 months we have a LONG way to go, and I am deeply, profoundly grateful for all of you who are giving us the space and time to build the Uplift into something we can all be proud of.