9/27/2024 Uplink Community AMA

Summary of Discord AMA, September 27th, 2024.

Uplink participants:

• Claudia Olah, CMO

• Carlos Lei, CEO

• Mike Post, Community Manager

Thank you to all of the community members who attended! [Session begins]

Introduction Mike: Let's get started. Welcome to our third Uplink community AMA! It’s wonderful to have all of you here. Whether you've been around for a while or you're new to the community, like so many of you are, we're thrilled to have you, and it's been really wonderful to get to know some of you over the previous weeks. We’re thrilled to see how our community is growing, and we’re looking forward to sharing some cool news with you today. I'm Mike, Uplink’s community manager. I have the pleasure of interacting with all of you on a regular basis. Joining me today are CMO Claudia Olah and Carlos Lei, Founder and CEO of Uplink. So Claudia, why don't you start us off by giving us an introduction for those here who don't know you yet. Claudia: Hi! I joined Uplink earlier this year. We've been pushing a lot on our initiatives, especially our community programs and the referral program, and I've been a core contributor to the development of this. So very excited to show you guys what we have for you today. Carlos: Hi, everyone. So for those who don't know me yet, my name is Carlos Lei. I'm one of the founders of Uplink. I've been working in the connectivity field for more than 10 years now. It's been an interesting journey. For those who don't know the story of the company, we actually started when I was a university student 10 years ago. Things have evolved. This was originally a Web2 business. We saw this massive opportunity. We saw the tech that we had was great to solve this issue. So that's how Uplink came to be. This is my short version. There's so much to tell that I'm like, wow. Tune in for some upcoming podcasts if you’d like to hear the story. Points and Referrals Platform Claudia: I'm really excited to have this points and referral program, because this is a way to gamify everything that we're building and show all of you the on- chain experience that you're going to have once our network goes live, but in a points system environment. So yeah, without further ado, we’d like to start showing you guys our points program. Please note that it’s a beta version right now. Those of you who tuned in today are getting first access to the system. So as soon as you log in, you'll see your points. We really would love your feedback while we push out to phase two. We wanted to get this out to you guys as soon as possible. Carlos: Our team has been working nonstop. Nonstop. The thing is what we're doing is quite big. We're not just building a product, we're building an entire ecosystem, which means there are multiple different parts we're launching, and since day one we’ve been very traction-first. So we have been paying a lot of attention to real deployments that we already have with real companies. That's one of the sides of things that are happening. But where we've been missing sometimes is in terms of how we can let our community engage. Because Uplink is a very community-focused project. We need the community for it to grow. And this point system is basically our beta version of our first product that is specifically for the community. And the exciting thing is that everyone here, you guys are literally the first people that are going to be looking at this. We haven't fully announced this. You are the first ones to hear. With that being said, we're launching this for you guys first. There are going to be some bugs. Please let us know if you run into any. I think that's one of the good things of having this relationship is you guys are the first ones to see it, the first ones to use it, but you're also the first ones to find a bug. So please let us know if anything goes wrong. And with this being said, Claudia, I'm super excited. Please show everyone what we have. And again, this is the beta version. It's going to improve every single week. It evolves. But yeah, this one is live for you guys starting today. Claudia: Yeah, and we have a lot to show you in phase one, but we wanted to make sure that we could push it out to you guys as soon as possible so you could start seeing your points, et cetera. So obviously we have a referral program. There's a section here for pending referrals. All referrals will be pending initially until we have the app that allows you to validate your router. So once your referrals go ahead and validate their routers, they turn into actual referrals. And then you get those referral points, and we'll explain what referral points mean in a little bit as well. Your referral code is your unique code that tracks referrals for you. Most of you guys know what a referral program is, so I'm not going to go too far into it. One glitch that we have already seen, and our team is working on fixing it, is that you won’t see your pre-registered routers or your points reflected here just yet. You will eventually be able to see all of your earnings and all of your statistics here. And then we get into the fun part, which is how you make even more rewards. So first, obviously, is pre-registering your router. Second is referring new members. Essentially, anyone that you refer and they validate their router into the system, you get on that first tier of referral, 20% of all the points that they earn on the network, and then if they refer someone, you get 10% of the points from those referrals as well. And we even took it a step further: if that third person also refers someone, you get 5% of whatever those people earn on the platform as well. It's extremely beneficial for you to refer people and continue to have them refer people as well because you'll rise in the ranks of earning points and getting people into the network, et cetera. Another point we have is connecting your Discord account, because we're going to have this API integration where you can actually earn for doing unique things in our Discord server. Our phase two is going to including Twitter linking. So we'll be able to do specific tasks like, Hey, if you use this hashtag and you create a meme or a specific type of post, we can actually follow that and reward you extra points. Right now we have very simple follow us on Twitter, follow our partners at Bonusblock who helped build this with us, and so on. And you can earn a thousand points by following us on our socials and joining our discord, which you guys already have. So you can go in and automatically get a bunch of points just by doing these three things and then an extra 100 for liking posts. And that will be a regular thing. You can go and retweet or create content and you can earn points that way as well on a regular basis. We wanted to make it such that not only were you rewarded for contributing your router and bringing in more routers, but wanted to make it fair so that if you're actually creating content and helping grow the community, you’re rewarded for that contribution as well. We’re trying to make this very fair for the entire community. Carlos: Claudia, I have a question for you. When is this becoming available to everyone? When can everyone here start using it? Claudia: They can start using it right now! You can go onto your portal right now and see exactly what I was using. That was a live website. Remember that we literally just pushed this live, so it might be a little glitchy! Our team is working on making it as perfect as humanly possible, but as Carlos said, please bear with us. You guys are helping us improve this beta version of the platform. Carlos: This is super cool. This is actually the beta version of a product of our entire ecosystem. By you guys pre-registering the routers, we're starting to build coverage. Even though the network is not yet live, we're already starting to build coverage. We want to create this symbiosis, this marketplace type of symbiosis, with those who pre-registered who are telling us, Hey, I want to provide connectivity in the future and get rewarded for this. So on the other side, our business development teams are also onboarding customers for the moment we go live. So, basically, everyone can start gaining some traction.

Questions Carlos: I've seen some questions in the chat. One of them is about our backers. We’re very proud of our backers and investors. I really want to answer this one. Two of our investors are Framework Ventures and Blockchange, both very well known in Web3. On the more corporate side, we are funded by Deutsche Telekom – T-Mobile Europe as some people call it – and by E.on, which is the biggest utility company in Europe, and also by EDP, another huge utility company. So we actually have industry leaders who not only cooperate with us, but they actually invested in us. And for me personally, that was beautiful to see. It's really good to get this validation from the market. And then, of course, we have a bunch of other partners in the space: OEMs, and WBA, the Wireless Broadband Alliance. For those who don't know, WBA is basically spearheading the evolution of WiFi. We're very proud partners and allies with them. Another question I see: what will happen to non-brand routers? When you guys are pre-registering the routers, this is not only creating coverage: it also really helps our engineering teams to know what firmwares and softwares we should build. When you guys are telling us about the brand of routers you’re using, it helps a lot with that. With that being said, there will of course be some unknown brands out there. Basically what I want to say is we feel we can already cover around 80% of the routers that are out there. That includes some of the unknown brands. Ultimately, it will depend on the firmware inside. I don't want my tech team to kill me, but I know we're also looking into this. The intel you guys give us really helps us in widening the number of routers that can join the network. Claudia: Adding to your backers answer: I've been in the Web3 space since 2018, and the number of reputable Web3 companies that have Web2 backers is small! I haven't really heard of that many. We're essentially Web2.5. We've been mainly Web2, but we've used Web3 in a way that really makes sense in the world. It's a real use case in the real world, and that was something that drew our entire team into what we're building and has made it really important. So yeah, the backers we have are very impressive and I’m very proud of that. In terms of adding unknown routers, the community is really helping us launch to as broad a range of routers as possible. Each product or each router that's out there has its own protocol and mechanism to build into the system. We're starting with as many as we can with the software that we're developing. We're a software solution company more than anything, which I feel is the path forward to create decentralized tech connectivity. It's not, Hey, go buy this router, we need connection in this or that area, and we could have an OEM partnership, or people might want to purchase a router and get returns on that based on the data that they provide. Instead, we're able to also use the existing infrastructure that's out there today. So it's kind of a full circle company. Carlos: And just to quickly answer Mr. Wifi’s question: yes, we were at the WBA conference in Dallas. We did speak on stage, and we're actually going to be at the upcoming WCG EMEA event in Paris. So if any of you are there, our team is going to be there. We're really good partners with WBA. So if any of you guys are in town, we'd love to speak with you. Claudia: We got IDP and AMP certified at that conference in Dallas. Carlos: Yeah, that was awesome.

Ambassador Program Claudia: Mike, let’s move on to your news. Mike: For sure! One of the most common subjects we’ve been asked about is the Uplinker Ambassador Program. We’ve been taking applications, and we’ve been blown away by the level of interest. We’re super grateful at how many of you are interested in being involved! We’ve been looking over applications for the last couple of weeks, and we appreciate your patience as we go through that process. We’re planning on announcing the first cohort next week. Please keep in mind that if you aren’t selected for the first cohort, that does not mean that you’ve been turned down from the program! We’re planning on starting small and scaling up the Ambassador program in a sustainable way. We’re going to bring on a small number of Ambassadors at first, and then we’ll add to the program from there. I should note that we’re particularly prioritizing potential ambassadors from Buenos Aires and Southeast Asia, as those are potential upcoming surge areas. That said, we recognize that the majority of Uplinker Ambassadors will serve in a virtual capacity. Being in one of those locations isn’t a necessity. Anyway, we’re looking forward to announcing our first group of Ambassadors next week! Claudia: To expand on what Mike said about surge areas, that’s part of phase two of our points system. We will be rewarding points multipliers for select areas in certain locales. This will happen once we have our app and our validated routers live. Community members will have opportunities to earn multiplied points in designated areas for a select amount of time. We're letting the community know ahead of time so that if you’re in one of those areas, you can reach out to us. And we want to give that to our community first before we reach out to the public. Conclusion Our final bit of news today is that we're launching our new website and litepaper later this evening! You’ll be able to find the litepaper at http://litepaper.uplink.xyz. And that’s it! We’re looking forward to holding another AMA soon. We’d be happy to focus on anything the community would like. We could go deeper into the story of Uplink, or discuss tokenomics – you can find some information about that in the litepaper – or maybe have some other team members on. Carlos: If you guys want to hear about something in particular, let us know! I'm always glued to my desk, so I'm always eager to talk about what we're doing. Claudia: We’d really love everyone’s feedback on what you would want to hear from us, and we really want to be as transparent and as open as possible with you guys. So just let us know and we're here for you as usual. And thank you Mike, for hosting this today and for keeping up with the community and keeping everyone engaged. He does a lot more than I think he gets credit for. Mike: That’s kind of you to say! I love my job. I get to interact with the community. It's always a pleasure to get to know new people and to try to make this ecosystem and this community the best it can be for everybody. If any of you ever have any questions, or need assistance with the platform, or have ideas or feedback about how we can improve the product, please be in touch! I’m always available. Claudia: Yeah! And if anyone missed this AMA and wants to know what was talked about, what can they do? Mike: We know that not everyone is a native English speaker, so we’ll be posting written transcripts of every AMA. We’ll have that available for this AMA early next week. Claudia: We’re looking forward to all of you seeing the website and litepaper! We've been working on these since before I came on board the company. So it's been a work in progress. We've really put a lot of work into this. Very excited! Thank you all for coming today. And please continue to put questions in the chat and we can try to answer them at the next AMA. Okay, that's it for now. Mike: Wonderful. Thank you, everyone. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Carlos. Thank you, Claudia. And thank you to everybody who attended. We'll see you next time.

[Session ends]