Sin City has come to Upland!
Users can now buy, sell and trade virtual properties based on real-world addresses of Las Vegas. I personally attended a live, in-person event at the Sahara Hotel where fellow Uplanders could experience in real life the competition to purchase the virtual properties. The Upland team rented out a ballroom and had plenty of space for users to spread out and prepare for the launch.
Rio de Janeiro is officially the first international city to launch in Upland. In addition to adding a brand-new era of Uplanders, Rio de Janeiro is the beginning of international expansion. New partnerships in Brazil range from Porto soccer team, Samba Dance school and beyond!
Rio de Janeiro and Las Vegas join the 18 cities that have already opened. With over 230,000 plus virtual landowners from all around the world, that number is growing every day. Over three million NFTs have been purchased by players. Each day, Uplanders sell and trade virtual properties, build houses, complete property collections, and participate in treasure hunts and city tours. Places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, the Bronx, Chicago, New Orleans, and Manhattan have been sold out due to high demand for virtual land since the beginning of this year.
Upland's community played a pivotal role in this new sustainability action, coming together in June 2021 to raise over $6,000 USD to support future carbon offset efforts. "At Upland, we are serious about sustainability being based on three pillars: timeliness, effectiveness and impactfulness. This is why we have chosen swift action, ambitious targets and trackable carbon removal methods," says Hagan Dietz-Rosales, Special Alliances Lead.
New additions to the Upland metaverse were cars, user-owned shops and a multitude of events for and by its community. Upland continues to fulfill its Play-to-Earn model. Upland has now taken another step towards achieving its climate action goals by reaching historic zero for its AWS services. While carbon removal enables net zero, it is possible to go one step further, removing more than you emit. Reaching this status has enabled Upland to take care of the historic emissions of its cloud services usage, thereby reaching historic zero for this part of its operations. As one of the largest, fastest growing, and most dynamic blockchain-based economies in existence, they understand it is their responsibility to rebuild it in a sustainable way.
"Partnering with Carbonfuture is one step in the direction of sustainability here at Upland. But we are not done yet and will continue our efforts until we reach our ambitious goal of becoming a carbon negative business in the near future. While we see the future of the internet as the metaverse, we see the future of the planet in climate action," says Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Upland, Dirk Lueth.