The Upland Economy Report
USD Secondary Market Tracker — October 2025 – March 2026
Data range: October 2025 – March 2026. Last processed: April 10, 2026.
About This Report
This page is the verified, source-cited analysis of the Upland economy data we presented in our show on April 14, 2026. The show is a conversation — this page is the record.
Every number on this page has been verified against source data three times. If anything in the show went beyond what this report supports — or if you heard a claim during the conversation that you can’t find documented here — defer to this page. The data on this page is what we stand behind.
This report does NOT make claims about:
- Upland’s costs, payroll, or burn rate (we have no data)
- Upland’s runway or financial health (we have no data)
- Specific Upland team members or their decision-making
- Whether Upland will succeed or fail in the future
This report DOES document:
- Estimated revenue from public data sources ($1.38M over 6 months)
- DAU trends (peak 11,496 in December, current 8,370)
- Revenue per active user ($24.81/month)
- The whale-tier Sparklet trajectory
- The seller/buyer imbalance in the secondary market
- The correlation between store revenue and secondary market volume
If you have data that contradicts our findings, contact us in Discord. We publish corrections in our public CHANGELOG.
How to Read This Data
What this is: Every USD property transaction on the Upland secondary marketplace from October 2025 through March 2026 — 43,113 sales totaling $807,739. This is primary-source data pulled directly from marketplace records. Every number traces to a real transaction between real players.
What this is not: This is not UPX transactions. This is not Upland's internal revenue. This is the peer-to-peer market — players buying properties from other players with real dollars. It does not include first-time property mints, service structure purchases, vehicle sales, or any transaction where Upland is the seller. This is your economy, not theirs.
How we sourced it: Transaction data was exported from the Upland marketplace in monthly batches, deduplicated by transaction ID, and processed into the aggregations you see below. No transactions were modified, filtered, or excluded. Usernames are displayed as they appear in the marketplace — this data is already publicly visible in-game. Full methodology below.
When Upland ships a feature that interests players, the marketplace responds. The Uppies Store Packs launch on January 13 drove the single biggest positive market movement in the entire 6-month window — a 77.5% spike in USD volume and 18.2% more unique buyers in the 7 days after versus the 7 days before. Credit where due. The question isn't whether Upland can drive engagement. It's whether the features they ship after the marketplace spike deliver on what was promised. For context on what was promised, see The Audit.
Top-10 buyer concentration: 18%. The 10 most active buyers account for 18% of total USD volume. The remaining 82% is distributed across 2,038 other buyers. This is a broadly distributed secondary market, not a whale-dominated economy. For comparison, concentration above 40% would indicate heavy reliance on a small number of players. At 18%, the Upland secondary market has healthy buyer diversity. This is a positive signal for ecosystem sustainability.
Over the 6-month window, 3,369 unique users appeared as sellers versus 2,048 unique buyers — 1,321 more sellers than buyers, a 64% imbalance. Sustained over time, this is excess supply pressure on the secondary market. Whether that resolves through new player acquisition, price discovery, or continued imbalance is an open question the data doesn't answer yet. What we can say: there are 64% more people looking to sell than looking to buy.
February 2026 saw the sharpest single-month decline: 10.4% fewer unique buyers and 25.5% less volume than January. But context matters. January was artificially elevated by the Uppies launch spike, and February was the densest month of direct USD sales from Upland — boats ($50–$150), service trucks ($190), school buses ($150), and the Seattle/Vancouver dual city launch with terminals at $1,536 each.
When Upland's own store competes with its secondary market for the same player dollars, the secondary market takes the hit.
February's $119,554 was still 9.5% above the October baseline ($109,204). The dip was mean reversion plus capital diversion, not market collapse.
When we cleaned the data by filtering out 5,000%+ markup transactions (likely value transfers, not market trades), the true prestige ranking emerged. Trenton leads at 198% median markup, followed by Manhattan at 195% and Fresno at 194%. Compare that to Sydney at 22%, Kansas City at 23%, and Hong Kong at 23%. The 9x gap between highest and lowest premium is real — driven by collections, FSA scarcity, and early-city dynamics. Cities with low UP2 base values and active collection sets command genuine premiums. International cities with newer, larger property pools trade near mint. For the full breakdown, see the Markup Analysis tab.
The average USD sale is $18.74. The median is $6.50. That means more than half of all secondary market transactions are under $6.50. This is overwhelmingly a micro-transaction economy — a long tail of small trades with a thin layer of larger deals pulling the average up. The typical secondary market transaction is under $6.50 — closer to a tip jar than a marketplace flip.
Monthly USD Volume
Unique Buyers per Month
Top 10 Cities by Volume
Top 100 Buyers by USD Spent
Ranked by total USD spent on the secondary market. Filter by month or city to see who's driving activity in specific markets.
| # | Username | Total Spent | Transactions | Avg Transaction | Top City |
|---|
Top 100 Sellers by USD Received
Ranked by total USD received from secondary market sales. All transactions are subject to Upland's 10% marketplace fee (5% buyer + 5% seller).
| # | Username | Total Received | Transactions | Avg Transaction | Top City |
|---|
Active Traders — who actually counts? Most definitions of flipping are lazy. A user who bought $8 worth of property and sold $4,300 isn't a flipper — they're a seller who happened to buy once. For this report, we defined Active Traders strictly: at least 10 buy transactions, at least 10 sell transactions, and buy/sell volume within 3x of each other. 904 users traded on both sides of the market. Only 100 met the Active Trader criteria. These are the real bilateral market participants — the people actually making the secondary market function as a market, not an exit ramp.
Top 100 Active Traders
Net position is total sold minus total bought. This is aggregate activity, not per-property profit — it doesn't track whether the same properties were bought and resold, and it excludes the 10% marketplace fee.
| # | Username | Total Bought | Buy Txns | Total Sold | Sell Txns | Net Position |
|---|
Interpreting markup data. Percentage markup calculations are sensitive to the underlying UP2 value of a property. Properties with very low UP2 values can produce extreme percentage markups on small dollar amounts — for example, a $6 sale on a property worth $0.03 produces a 19,900% markup. During this analysis we identified 106 transactions with markups above 5,000%, representing $39,091 in volume. These transactions have characteristics consistent with peer-to-peer value transfers rather than typical market pricing. We have excluded them from the prestige rankings to give you a more accurate picture of what players are actually paying for properties at market value. The flagged transactions remain in the raw totals for completeness but are separated in the analysis layer.
Markup Analysis
Markup measures how much above UP2 mint value a property sold for. A 100% markup means the buyer paid double the property's original UPX value in USD equivalent.
Markup Distribution (All Transactions)
Data Quality: Non-Market Transactions
Transactions with markup above 5,000% are flagged as suspected non-market activity — likely peer-to-peer value transfers using low-UP2 properties as a payment vehicle rather than property trades at market value. No individual transactions or usernames are disclosed.
Flagged Activity by City
Upland charges a 10% fee on every secondary market transaction, regardless of whether the transaction represents a property trade at market value or some other use of the marketplace rails. Over the 6-month period we examined, Upland collected approximately $80,774 in marketplace fees from the $807,739 in secondary volume. That's a reliable revenue stream for Upland — and it means the platform is structurally indifferent to the composition of that volume. Every dollar moved through the marketplace is a dollar Upland earns 10% on.
City Prestige Premium
Which cities command the highest premiums over UP2 mint value? Ranked by median markup (not average) to remove outlier distortion. Adjusted averages exclude the 5,000%+ transactions identified above. Minimum 20 normal transactions to qualify.
Top 10 Highest Premium Cities (Median Markup)
Top 10 Lowest Premium Cities (Median Markup)
Event Impact Analysis
How did the USD secondary market respond to Upland's major feature launches, season starts, and announcements? Each card compares the 7 days before an event to the 7 days after. Green indicates an increase; red indicates a decrease. For context on each event, see The Audit.
For context on what Upland was doing during this period, see The Audit — 158 articles, 19 contradictions, 16 positive findings.
Methodology
Data source: USD property transactions exported from the Upland secondary marketplace. Each record contains the transaction ID, timestamp, buyer username, seller username, sale price in USD, UPX equivalent, markup percentage, property address, neighborhood ID, and city ID. No UPX-only transactions are included.
Collection window: October 1, 2025 through March 31, 2026 (6 complete calendar months).
Processing: Raw data is deduplicated by transaction ID across all monthly files, then aggregated into pre-computed JSON files. The processing script rebuilds all aggregations from source on every run (idempotent). No transactions are modified or excluded from headline totals.
Non-market transaction filtering: Transactions with markup above 5,000% are flagged as suspected non-market activity. These represent 0.25% of all transactions (106 of 43,113) but 4.84% of total volume ($39,091 of $807,739). Properties with very low UP2 values can produce extreme percentage markups on small dollar amounts — characteristics consistent with peer-to-peer value transfers rather than property trades at market value. Flagged transactions are included in headline volume and transaction counts for completeness but excluded from the City Prestige Premium rankings. Individual flagged transactions and associated usernames are never published.
Limitations:
- Active Trader net position is aggregate, not per-property P&L. It does not track whether the same property was bought and resold.
- The 10% marketplace fee (5% buyer + 5% seller) is not deducted from any figures shown.
- City names are extracted from property addresses and may group neighborhoods differently than Upland's internal classification.
- Event impact analysis uses a 7-day window. Events closer than 7 days apart may have overlapping influence.
- The 5,000% non-market threshold is a conservative estimate. Some legitimate high-premium properties may be incorrectly flagged, and some transfer activity below the threshold may go undetected.
Update frequency: Monthly, when new transaction data becomes available.
Privacy: All transaction data shown is publicly visible on the Upland marketplace. Blockchain identifiers (EOS IDs) are excluded. To request removal of your username, contact us via Discord.
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