Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Nicholas: Welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain. My name is Nicholas. At the end of each week, I sit down for a casual Friday afternoon conversation with some of the brightest people building Web3. In today's episode, I'm joined by XR dev, Avir, and XR philosopher and community builder, Jin, for an exciting conversation all about their dream of an open and composable metaverse. This conversation is a behind-the-scenes look at the most exciting project at the intersection of NFTs and XR. Avir and Jin teach me all about Webiverse, an in-development, web-based, open-source, 3D social experience that stands as a counterpoint to the centralizing tech conglomerate's vision of the metaverse future. The guests teach me all about the many open technologies that enable Webiverse to be a responsive and highly accessible 3D social environment. In the show's final act, we're joined by DAO engineer MetaDreamer for an insightful interlude about Metafactory, Ceramic Protocol, and MetaDreamer's new Web3 credentialing project, MetaCred. I had a great time speaking with Avir, Jin, and the many guests on today's episode. I hope you enjoy the show. Yeah, so I first came across both of you in-- a friend of mine showed me Exokit, and then that led me to what became M3. And yeah, that's how I first encountered it. But how did you two meet originally?

Avaer: It was probably also around Exokit times. So I've been working on this open-source stuff for basically forever. I'm trying to publish my research results, and Jin is kind of like a kindred spirit that has always been kind of doing the same thing with XRDevLog, and yeah, we met through the Exokit project. I think it was initially a Slack that we just kind of like kicked it off there. But yeah, then it moved on to Discord, then it kind of evolved into M3 and a lot of other stuff. You probably know the rest of that story.

Jin: I do recall it was the craziest blog post I've ever read about Emukit, and then Exokit, and that circulated around WebXR circles and went up. But yeah, I definitely had to drop in and talk to the devs after seeing things like N64 Ocarina of Time being played in WebXR, and the technical explanations of such.

Nicholas: So awesome. So just to maybe give people who are coming into the room a little bit of context, so Avir and Jin are, to me, they are major proponents of web-based XR, which includes mixed reality, virtual reality, augmented reality, etc., whatever comes next, all under this term XR. And they're deep in the weeds of the technical subjects and really pushing for a web-based XR platform or platform, or I guess protocols even more than platforms, building off of the great lineage of the web and web browsers. Is that a good way to capture what you two get up to?

Avaer: I might actually take one step back from web and just say open, and the web is the best choice for keeping things open.

Nicholas: Got it, got it, yeah. Jin, you have thoughts?

Jin: Yeah, I'd agree. I mean, I, in general, like I build and I research across all sorts of different platforms, and I'm always interested in Freedom and, you know, Introp, and as Avir said, web is like the most open distribution platform, read and write. And that's what got me interested, like in terms of VR development, I didn't want to make things for an app store. I wanted to make things that I had control and ownership of.

Nicholas: Yeah, Avir, what were you going to say?

Avaer: Yeah, I kind of take a bit of the stance of Linus Torvalds on the openness. Like, it's really cool that, like, yes, we can fight for freedom, but for me, it's just about what you can do technically. Like, I don't want to look like those garbage avatars in meta. Like, I want to have VRMs. I want to be able to express myself. I want to be able to edit the things that I see in the metaverse, and open technologies are really the only way to do that. Because otherwise, you're basically handing over the technical decisions to people who don't have your interest in mind. Like, they're trying to collect your data, or they're trying to sell access, or they're trying to sell ads.

Nicholas: So today, if someone's getting into the VR, I guess VR would be probably the most likely piece of equipment, sort of HMD for VR, and then hop in maybe Oculus, maybe something SteamVR. Are those the most obvious choices? I guess those are also for people in the West. Maybe in China, there would be different options. But most often, people are playing with or participating in virtual XR communities through some kind of most often lockdown hardware, and then they also have access to more open technologies through the web. What is the experience today getting online in XR?

Avaer: So right now, it's mostly you're coming in through the headsets. There's the desktop stuff, which is mostly SteamVR-based. HTC is also making those headsets. And that's just kind of running through Steam and through the existing ways that people play games. And then what Meta is doing with their Oculus headsets is a lot more lockdown, but also a complete package, where you basically just put on the headset. There's some software that you can install on your phone to kind of control it. And yeah, you're basically on their app store. Luckily, the one saving grace there is that the Facebook team is actually huge proponents of WebXR and having at least one gateway for people to be able to load open content from the web. So yeah, at least that is pretty well supported.

Jin: Yeah, when you put on a headset, when it comes to discovery, you've got your installed apps, the store, and the browser. And in terms of while you're browsing the web, now there's, I think, a way you can send links to the headset as well when you're browsing on desktop, which I think is pretty good because it's really hard to point in. You're basically reduced to point-and-click typing whenever you're in a headset.

Avaer: They also have some really interesting integrations with their new Office stuff where you can connect between desktop people who just have a webcam and people who are in an Oculus headset. It was pretty seamless last time I tried it. Kind of a replacement for Zoom where some people are in VR.

Nicholas: So do you think, like, for people who aren't as steeped in this stuff as you guys are, is it most likely that the fully packaged options from Meta are the things that people are going to spend the majority of their time in? Or are there cool experiences already available through those lockdown hardware platforms but on the WebXR that they expose?

Avaer: I think right now a lot of people are still not even that red-pilled on the VR stuff. A lot of people aren't red-pilled on the NFT stuff either. I think a lot of people are going to be coming in from experiences and games and preconceived notions of what games are like on mobile or what the Metaverse is on desktop.

Jin: I think in terms of content that brings you back, when you go to an event and somewhere, like VRChat or whatnot, and you kind of also discover a community in there and learn to make your avatar and whatnot, that kind of brings you back whenever there's events or you see your friends online and whatnot. But in general, when it comes to the open Metaverse, WebXR content is kind of still lacking and we have everything that we need. The performance is good and all the tech is there. I just think that right now we're in a position to make really dank content and we have great avatars. We have great capabilities to make worlds and experiences that are fun that draw people back on every device, not just VR, but desktop mode on any kind of device that you own so that the experience is persistent across everything.

Avaer: One of the most magical things that I think users experience is when there's a continuity of experience between us meeting them in Discord and then seeing their stuff in VR. So that's why actually me and Jin, the way that we really started working together was around a Discord bot where you're just minting NFTs. But when you mint the NFT, you can get a link and see the thing that you minted in a virtual world, which works in WebXR. So it's that continuity of experience that I think finally lets people understand what the open Metaverse can be about.

Nicholas: - So I saw this a little bit a very, very long time ago. This is the Webiverse tech, is that right?

Avaer: - Yeah, a Discord bot.

Nicholas: - So in Discord, we can be chatting and then I'll make a joke. And by interacting with the bot, I can mint my joke as an NFT that can then appear in an XR space.

Avaer: - And it's on the blockchain. But it's not only just jokes. It could be an avatar.

Nicholas: - Would I do that by dragging a VRM or some kind of file into Discord? How would that work?

Avaer: - Absolutely. It's just VRMs, GLBs, just basically any standard format that can reasonably be interpreted in a virtual world. We want to enable that.

Nicholas: - So for people who aren't so familiar, VRM, GLB, GLTF, these are kind of the SVG equivalent of 3D models, including rigging for motion. Is that right?

Avaer: - That's an accurate assessment, I'd say.

Nicholas: - So basically what you're talking about is that you can mint standards-compliant file types that can then be used across a variety of metaverse experiences. Do you guys use the word metaverse anymore or is it sort of not cool anymore? - I don't know.

Avaer: Is it cool?

Jin: - I still use it. I still use it. I'm not going to roll over just because big metaverse is coming in and co-opting language. I'll still use it until maybe something else. I do think like other kinds of, you know, whatever X-verse you want to call it is, I changed my opinion. I think it's kind of cool. Like if you want to name something like, I don't know, like Taco-verse and it's all made out of tacos and stuff, that's kind of cool, you know?

Nicholas: - I was in New York for NFT NYC and I saw there's the Steve Madden-verse, so you can get into a shoe-based universe.

Jin: - Wow, that sounds interesting.

Nicholas: - Yeah, it's pretty terrible. But to me, the problem with metaverse is not so much Facebook's entry, but rather that metaverse has just been co-opted by platforms in general. So anything that is locked down like a platform can be called, people call Roblox a metaverse, which seems inaccurate.

Jin: - Yeah, I've been taking fancy to internet cinematic universe lately. It's a fancier way, you know, that kind of puts things in perspective next to the Marvel cinematic universe. And just in general, kind of also helps describe things like introp, because you can't have things like the Avengers without introp.

Avaer: - I think a lot of people attach their own meaning to metaverse, whether that's from the crypto side, from the VR side, or you just heard about it from Mark Zuckerberg, or you're like us and you really are obsessed with like the internet cinematic universe and maybe even building the right systems for building the right metaverse that we want. But nobody really, I think, fully has any anchoring point for what a metaverse is. So when we use that word, it's really hard to understand what we mean, which is why generally, like when people use the word, I try to get them to say like, what it is they really mean, like paint me a picture of the metaverse that you want to live in and how can we work towards that, rather than just like throwing around these terms like metaverse, which can mean 10 different things.

Jin: - I think, you know, you're kind of alluding to shelling points and something, you know, right now the most popular shelling points for it is like Ready Player One, right? Where they're like, you know, who's building the metaverse and then you'll typically see some kind of clip or screenshot from that movie. But eventually we'll have our own version of such with IP that's created and owned collectively by people on the internet versus that of, you know, that's exclusive to big studios that you typically see in the movies.

Avaer: - That's the dream.

Nicholas: - I mean, to me, the most compelling experience I've had in VR, which is admittedly very limited amount of experience, but even like two, how long ago it came out, I couldn't tell you, but two, three years ago, VRChat, just the way that people were remixing and abusing intellectual property that didn't really belong to them. Like, you know, going into a room and hanging out with like a 10 foot tall version of Marge Simpson and a hot dog and Derp Shrek, obviously the knuckles from Sonic, like that experience, even if on a sort of technical copyright level, they won't be able to get away with that forever, I presume, it did feel like, oh, this actually is sort of fulfilling that dream of having fully interoperable intellectual property in a physicalized space. But do you even think physical, like 3D sort of body representation is essential to what you think about when you think about XR?

Avaer: - I think people should feel embodied in the virtual worlds that they inhabit. If people don't feel immersed, then I think you failed to just make a good metaverse. For some people, that does mean, for example, XR and full VR, all those controls. But I think it also just means like having your own content in the universe rather than feeling like you're playing somebody else's thing. Just having a sense of ownership around the experience.

Jin: - I've been having convos lately on the spaces to find common ground between the XR camp of folks and the web theory folks. And we have different kind of interpretations of freedom where the XR people really value the freedom of self-expression that they can achieve with their avatars. And the web three folks really value freedom through having these digital property rights to own your digital identity and the things that you collect or create. And I think both are really important. Just because I can own something and CryptoVox was a decentralized doesn't really mean much if I'm only limited to these choices in terms of avatar aesthetics and whatnot. Most of the player base is still in platforms like VRChat where they have true custom avatars and whatnot. I think that's super critical. And there'll eventually be a convergence between these two to make just the right formula. I feel like it's the mac and cheese combo that's just ready to get put into the oven and come out really nice.

Nicholas: - So you think NFTs are potentially a pretty fundamental paradigm shift in terms of ownership that could power XR? Obviously you guys are into that given the webiverse stuff.

Jin: - So definitely a primitive, that's important. I don't think it should be overdone kind of like baking soda is. But yeah, it's definitely something that we've been working, for example, on open source software for so long and NFTs are so much more than the ownership. It's also the social signaling and coordination and just having shared skin in the game and community aspects that can actually make open source projects really work well together and really bring a bunch of people onto kind of feels like the same hackathon team in a way.

Nicholas: - What do you think about Mozilla Hubs? Like that's another experience that I have some prior experiences in, but the project may be due to funding or I'm not sure exactly what. It's open source software, but somehow it hasn't exactly taken off. What do you think the difference is? Is there something about community ownership as well? that's important?

Avaer: - Well, first off, I would say that Mozilla Hubs is actually one of the bright spots. They're actually people who are doing something. And the reason for that is they have money. They have at least some amount of money, maybe not compared to a game dev project or like somebody with studio backing or VC investment, but they have money to pay people to actually work on this stuff. And in open source land, that is extremely rare. I think the biggest problem here though is that most people in the open source camp are actually anti money or like anti anybody getting paid. And there's only so much that you can do with people who are volunteering for open basically at night. And yeah, during the day, they just kind of go work at Meta or something. And like, there's these weird dichotomies that kind of happen. To me, I think the shift towards NFTs and at least like the narrative becoming that artists can actually get paid is that open source projects and people who actually do have values and stand for them actually now have a way to get funded for doing the work that the community believes in. Totally. Just draw some NFTs.

Nicholas: I'm super, do you guys know what the revenue share deal is for Roblox creators? It's pretty bad.

Avaer: Yeah, it's bad. I do not.

Nicholas: It's something like 70% as compared to Apple's 30%. Maybe, Jin, you know the details.

Jin: Oh, man. Yeah, it's like, you know, basically the creators get like a quarter of every dollar that they generate. And, you know, a big chunk goes to the app stores, a big chunk goes to Roblox team, and there's another chunk somewhere else. But yeah, 25%.

Avaer: There's another aspect, I think, to the whole hubs thing, which is that if what you're doing is you're just putting out open source software and the way that you measure things is just like how open it is, which is a very fuzzy notion. You're not really making a product and there's no evolutionary forces making something that's great that can actually compete with something that's either paid for with money or with ads. So I'd like to see a lot more projects, possibly even including hubs, like taking things more seriously, not as an open project, but like have the open part just be a side effect of making something that's actually good in the first place.

Jin: This kind of reminds me of an activity we would do at M3, which is taking VR devs on field trips through other platforms during an event such as Virtual Market and VRChat. And I think that's kind of important because VR devs, sometimes they don't really take time to peek over and see what other platforms and devs are doing. They just kind of have their heads down working on their own thing and don't get much exposure to bright ideas happening elsewhere.

Nicholas: Yeah, so tell the people a little bit about M3. How did it start and what's the idea?

Jin: Do you want to take this? My dog's barking.

Avaer: Yeah, basically it was just an extension of some of the open source work that I was doing. We said, "Hey, let's gather some interest "around getting people to work in the open "on these open source projects. "Let's find a way to make it all sustainable "for ourselves. "Let's kind of get together every other week, "do some presentations of the stuff "that we're working on, what excites us, "what we need help with.". And a lot of people were really interested in that format. The problem with running a Discord server and an event stream is that it takes a lot of work, as I'm sure you know. And it's volunteer work that is mostly not... You basically just don't get any thanks at all. So the main reason that we didn't take M3 as seriously as we should have is that it just didn't feel like there was any way to loop the value back. And this is kind of where NFTs came to the rescue. We can just sell NFTs to promote the content and make ourselves feel valued.

Nicholas: Just to clarify for people, M3 is like MMM, which is Metaverse Makers Meetup, at least originally. I was pushing for Metaverse Mafia. I wanted something grittier.

Jin: We never decided on last M, so it's Metaverse Makers. And the third M is a mystery.

Nicholas: So that's like a vertical flip of WWW, also a bit of a reference there as well. And that was kind of like a social gathering off the back of Exokit. I know a little bit about what Exokit, or primarily Exokit from my recollection. Maybe you could tell people a little bit about what that was about, Avere, because I think that technology is super interesting and I don't think enough people know about what you did there.

Avaer: Sure. So a lot of it started with my frustrations with the Chrome team really not moving on Metaverse stuff fast enough. There were constant WebXR bugs and I was waiting for key features that I wanted in my rendering pipeline. Because at the time I was making basically a reimplementation of Minecraft in WebXR, which is still available. It might actually work with a few tweaks. But I was running into a lot of Chrome bugs and I decided I'm not even going to wait for the Chrome team. The WebGL API, the WebXR API isn't that complicated. I'll just reimplement it myself. And that was the birth of Exokit. It's essentially a full reimplementation of a WebXR browser with native capabilities and moving a lot faster than the Chrome team. I'm not maintaining it right now, but that was kind of the initial genesis behind it. And with that technology of actually having an open-source, lightweight, game-focused web browser, what are the interesting things that we can do? Well, we can start to compose experiences. We can visit two websites at once and have them blend. Or we could even hook this up to Steam and be able to blend WebXR content on top of other games. I could basically change my avatar while being in another game.

Nicholas: - So essentially Chrome comes with what's required for you to get a full XR experience and you sort of ripped out the 2D DOM parts of the web browser, is that right? And focused on the native performance.

Avaer: - Completely reimplemented it, actually.

Nicholas: - Oh, really?

Avaer: - Yeah, 'cause at the time, really, there was only WebXR implementations. Neither of them were complete. One being Firefox and the other one being Chrome. And this was kind of like a third.

Nicholas: - Crazy. And then because you did a full reimplementation, you were able to get native performance as if you were playing an Oculus game or Valve, whatever, Vive game, SteamVR game.

Avaer: - That's right, as well as unlocking extensions and other things that weren't actually even available in Chrome and they're still not available.

Nicholas: - Crazy. So Exokit, as it was created, would allow you to, I mean, essentially it was like a web OS with native performance for XR.

Avaer: - You can think of it that way. An interesting side effect was that when Magic Leap came out with their simulator kit, this was even before they came out with their device, when they came out with their simulator kit, I managed to hook up Exokit to their simulator, basically within a couple of days. So the Magic Leap actually supported WebXR. Basically, yeah, within days. This also ended up, I hope, inspiring them to announce that they would ultimately support WebXR on their device and they did. So that's great.

Nicholas: - That's awesome. Are they still around these days?

Avaer: - They are. I just noticed that they changed their logo to Walmart. I have no idea. Their branding used to be so amazing, but you look at their logo now and basically they went all corporate and now they're just trying to sell it enterprise. It's a really weird kind of 180 that they did.

Nicholas: - Yeah, I guess things have changed.

Jin: So Exokit-- - I want to add on to Exokit just real quick.

Nicholas: - Yeah, please, please.

Jin: - It kind of made me think, when I saw it, there was a couple points that stood out to me. It was the ability to spawn multiple WebXR apps together and the community that it started to harbor were WebXR devs that were making things with all sorts of platforms, but Exokit could be what binded everything together into this world. So someone can make avatars, someone can make gadgets, someone can make worlds and using different frameworks that can all be composable and we are using our favorite tools and languages and everything and it's all interoperable. and that kind of helped seed the M3 community. And it also made me think, this is what's turning the browser into the next game engine as well, where it's like an open source and forkable game engine that can load these apps and it can even be interoperable with SteamVR. So it's kind of like, in a way, like the fudge on ice cream in a way. If you think of ice cream as like a SteamVR experience, you could augment it with some WebXR and yeah, so it's not like a zero-sum game like WebXR versus like native, you could have both. And I thought that was just so beautiful where we all win.

Nicholas: - So for example, I could be playing Half-Life Alyx or Minecraft VR and then load in, using Exokit, an additional layer of augmentation like look at my wrist and have a watch that's from an application that maybe I wrote or downloaded somewhere else.

Avaer: - Not just one, but multiple. It could not only be the avatar, it could also be, yeah, some equipment that you're wearing or it could just be menus or additional features that you want to control your computer with.

Nicholas: - Is it possible to pipe the like experience that I'm playing locally, let's say Half-Life Alyx into other people who are in a multiplayer layer in order to give me advice on how I'm playing or watch what I'm playing?

Avaer: - Probably right now, the best way to be served with that is like some sort of Twitch integration. But yeah, we actually did implement that in Exokit where essentially we're grabbing the screen from what's happening in Half-Life Alyx. And then we had this little window at the corner where you can actually see the other player's view. The really cool thing about doing this in VR is that if you actually capture both the stereo images, the window that you see into another player's view can actually be 3D just using side-by-side rendering.

Jin: - You're mentioning Half-Life Alyx and there's such a super awesome demo video where it's on metachromium.com where Aviar's in Half-Life Alyx and he's opening up this WebXR app that's basically like MetaMask in 3D and he's pulling out these NFTs in an overlay in Half-Life Alyx, like 3D NFTs in that world. And yeah, definitely something to check out.

Nicholas: - All right, I'm going to tweet that and put it in the, tag it in the spaces so you can check it out. So that's crazy. So what happened to Exokit? How come we're not all talking in Exokit right now?

Avaer: - 'Cause I was the only developer on it.

Nicholas: - Oh no, we've got to set you up with a DAO or something.

Avaer: - That's what we're doing.

Nicholas: But

Avaer: honestly, the way that I'm thinking about it is like we can make open products all day, but unless we're creating value loops for people, just creating things that they really value and that can compete with something like whatever Meta's putting out, we're probably not going to get very far. So yeah, these days I'm more interested in kind of just like, how can we attract, for example, people who just like playing games into these more open technologies? How can we, for example, create interactive objects where they can have an effect between maybe the base game and the top level reality? And how can we collaborate with other developers, for example, who are making all these experiences to make things more interoperable so that players can kind of share assets? But yeah, all of this is happening. And I mean, it's crazy that basically in spite of what we were doing, now Mark Zuckerberg basically is announcing like a lot of this stuff. It's just really weird that the world kind of moved into our territory. I don't even know if like either Jin or I have gotten over that yet.

Jin: It's crazy. I haven't even finished the announcement video. It just hits home so hard that I just take frequent pauses and walk around and yeah, I couldn't get to the end.

Nicholas: Oh my God, it's so upsetting. But I'd love to try and help find a solution for what you're working on. I know you're already working on so many things, but one thing I've noticed from the NFT scene is that often like a much more modest proposition can just be easier for people to understand. And then from there, you can have the projects that look like, oh, it's not really going anywhere, but they achieve some kind of financial success early on can then parlay that into like, oh no, it actually can potentially have a network effect because it has the budget to pay developers and as a treasury to do grant funding or whatever.

Avaer: Yeah, that sometimes has good results. But there is a downside to doing something like that, which is, for example, if you go the Decentraland route where you just sell a whole bunch of land and then hope that in a few years there's going to be decent content, you kind of come up with what Decentraland is now, which is I feel like really far removed from what they initially wanted to accomplish. Like I'm a landowner and I believed in Decentraland really, really early on. But I think right now they're turning into more of like a mobile game or like a haven for, I don't know, people who aren't really interested in making an awesome experience, but are more about just like, let's create a home for our Discord server or whatever, which is cool, but that's really different from kind of the metaverse experience that Decentraland was pitching initially. So that's kind of like where I think NFTs can go wrong, where if you sell a bunch of NFTs, you have investors at that point, you're trying to please them. And you're mostly just trying to maximize their returns and your mission and the things that you thought you stood for can kind of fall to the wayside. So I think we really have to be careful with that as well.

Nicholas: - So with your current plans, is the goal to deliver like a, what is the complete first experience, the MVP that you have in mind?

Avaer: - It's gonna be just basically a little quest that we're making. We were hoping that we'd have it announced by the time this podcast, but that didn't come together. No, but it's gonna be basically a complete experience, something that I hope can actually wow people because it's competing not as an NFT project, but it's competing like, no, this is an actually good game and it's running in the browser and it's fast and it has connections to like all these awesome things. And we're probably gonna be doing an NFT drop relating to that. - There might also be some ERC20 tokenomics involved, but yeah, that's all coming together.

Nicholas: - I think what everyone in the, well, maybe I won't speak for everyone, but I think what a lot of people who are hip to NFTs and have been for at least, let's say a long time, three, four months, I think what a lot of us are waiting for is for NFTs to be used as computational primitives rather than like the final product itself. And I think what you're talking about is definitely in that direction. Like it's, the emphasis shouldn't be on the fact that it is an NFT, you know, five years from now, that'll just sort of be, you know, no one's so worried about tweets. It's the experience of being on Twitter and NFTs will probably have some kind of similar trajectory where they become primitives, just a data structure on Ethereum that's useful or L2s, et cetera. I'm curious, I guess you can't pre-announce anything, but if people want to check out like what you're working on right now, where should they go?

Avaer: - Come to the Discord. I don't know, Jin, if you have the link, but yeah, come to the Discord. We're kind of dropping sneak peeks there first. The app is actually up if you know where to look, but nothing that I would recommend yet. We really want to wow people.

Nicholas: - Awesome, so what would I need in order to experience what you're working on? A headset?

Avaer: - Just a web browser. Actually, our main focus hasn't been on the VR side. It's just been making the desktop experience great. We have the best avatar system, the best animations, so it's really just keyboard and mouse. I don't know if we're going to be able to do mobile for this release, but yeah, the whole idea behind the world is everything in the world is basically an NFT. It's loaded from the web, either from the blockchain or even from a GitHub repository, and it's all being collected and rendered in a virtual world using all these standard formats. If you have a VRM avatar, you can wear it, and it becomes just something that you can use in the world with a character controller, and if you put on a headset, if you click the WebXR button, then you're embodying that avatar. We just kind of want all of that to be completely seamless to people and kind of give people an initial taste of what a good NFT-based metaverse can be.

Nicholas: - So where would I get the first avatars or accessories? Are they things that I might already own as an NFT if they have 3D representation, or would I be creating them anew?

Avaer: - You might, but we also have a bunch of defaults. Some of them are actually taken from Vroid Hub, which is probably like the premier place. It's where the Japanese community kind of drops all their best VRMs, and a lot of them have open licensing, so we can just use them. There's also CryptoAvatars, which, by the way, we own the first CryptoAvatar. - Cool. - So that's cool. But yeah, they have an API, and we're just going to be able to pull all those in, and you just select whichever avatar you want. In addition to, of course, being able to connect your MetaMask wallet, and if you have a VRM-based avatar, then that should just work as well.

Nicholas: - Are there any popular NFT collections that have VRM avatars built in?

Avaer: - There's Mitani. There's CryptoAvatars as well, of course.

Jin: There's MiBits. Clonix also announced it as well. - Yeah, Clonix announced. It was a tweet by the CTO, but yeah. And I've been kind of just working on these pipelines and for more NFT 3D projects that are coming out to go the VRM route, so that we all kind of have, for the user experience to be as frictionless as possible to bring your avatar between places.

Nicholas: - So this would be the Webiverse Discord that people should head to?

Avaer: - If you want to check out Webiverse, probably.

Nicholas: - Okay, okay. But that's the name of the project that you were just describing. It is Webiverse still? - Yep. - Okay, cool. That's super interesting. So we'll be able to go in in a browser and either use models from NFTs that support VRM or use the default ones in order to have social experiences, I guess?

Avaer: - It's a game that we're dropping, essentially. There's a dungeon, there's a raid boss, there's raids, there's combat, and everything is an NFT, from the enemies to the equipment that you're using. There's going to be a lot of surprises, including with some partnerships that we're doing.

Nicholas: - Oh, very cool. I know from having experience talking to you guys a long time ago, but quests and having some kind of adventure orientation to an experience can be helpful for people to know what to do and how to participate. How do you think about quests and structuring these kinds of experiences?

Avaer: - I think quests are best used as a framing device for something else that you're trying to accomplish. What we're trying to accomplish is just to show people, give people an idea of what an actual fun Metaverse experience can be like. And the quest is just the set dressing. It's how we tell the story. But it's mostly just an excuse to get the player to go through the motions of, "Hey, you can actually drop in whatever file "and it becomes an object in the world." Or, "Hey, there's an AI interface. "and you can talk to the AI and get it to do stuff. "And here's how combat works. "Here's how NFT interoperability works.". And at the end, basically, in addition to the user learning all these cool lessons along the way, we'll probably be doing some sort of reward drop, whether that's a PO-OP or something else at the very end. If you actually beat the quest and you're signed in with Metamask, then you can claim the drop from doing so.

Jin: - Super cool. - Yeah, that's awesome. It makes me think that the future of onboarding people into crypto was in a way of starting a new file on "Legend of Zelda" versus having to make a wallet and have all this prerequisite knowledge before even playing the game.

Avaer: - And I mean, everybody understands a quest.

Nicholas: - Yeah, absolutely. So what do you... You take this conversation away. I don't even know what the right questions are to ask about VR. What do you two think about when you chat on Discord? What are the hot topics for you lately?

Jin: - Oh, man. We're just trying to... I think what I'm really interested in is how to make more NFTs operable in virtual worlds. And Webiverse is the premier reference client that implements all the technical parts. And I think just the best implementation of these ingredients. VRM just works so great out of the box there. And people in metaverse interoperability groups are wondering, "Okay, what about props interop or wearable interop?". And one cool thing Webiverse has implemented is this inspector mode where you get an AR overlay as if you had Wikipedia vision. But it was a way to inspect any kind of item in a virtual world, even if it comes from other platforms, like third-party NFTs.

Nicholas: - Whoa, that's really cool.

Jin: - Yeah, it's like a Pokedex in a way. But yeah, mostly finding ways to make more things operable in there so that we have a new shelling point for the open metaverse. that's not Ready Player One, but something that has our creations on there, like on the screen.

Nicholas: - So what is it about the Ready Player One vision that's deficient or needs an update?

Jin: - It contains no IP. that's created and owned by people on the internet where we work, live, and play. The internet cinematic universe represents our plane of existence, whereas a lot of other big metaverse, for example, does partnerships to do these crossovers where they have cameos from Marvel or Star Wars or whatever, like thinking of "Fortnite" or Hollywood movies. But yeah, I want to create something that on the screen, you can see the things that we're creating and owning and something that's like "Smash Bros" or "Fortnite," but is made out of NFTs that we're creating and owning. It will create a new shelling point for just larger scale, working towards these interoperable open formats so that more people can make their things compatible for the open metaverse.

Nicholas: - You mentioned earlier Vroid and the Japanese community around avatars and VR. What are the kinds of things that people are already building as objects that people are using in VR that might eventually become NFT-based?

Avaer: - I think virtual market is one of the bright spots there. Basically, virtual market being the thing where Hickey, the company, gets a whole bunch of creators who make stuff in VR and basically builds a set of worlds and a cohesive set of experiences that people can walk through and check out the booths. Some of the booths are interactive. You can wear the avatar or you can pick up the sword. But a lot of what inspired Webiverse was actually going through virtual market and picking up this really cool sword and not having an inventory where I can just put it. I have the money. I can pay the $20 or whatever it is. I want this freaking sword. Give it to me. VRChat and virtual market, for many reasons, mostly corporate, can't allow that. In fact, they ban NFT projects that would even attempt such a thing. I think CryptoAvatars got just delisted. I think what we really need is just the kind of experiences and the kind of communities that allow things like virtual market to happen, but actually work for the user and build something good rather than having these weird corporate reasons for doing things or why you can't do things.

Nicholas: - So virtual market, sometimes called VCAT. Is that right?

Jin: - That's right. - Yeah.

Nicholas: - So VCAT is this, they do multiple times a year, they do these kind of exhibition, it's almost like a conference hall full of little stores, but it's all in VR and it's obviously not like a conference hall because it has the affordances of VR. That was at least how I experienced it. It's mostly like a thing you go to and walk around with friends and you can sort of check out different stalls, right?

Avaer: - It's like going to the mall or the arcade, yeah.

Nicholas: - One thing I found kind of weird about it was that it felt kind of static. And then I guess you go inspect objects and then you can maybe open up a 2D browser in order to purchase things from a 2D marketplace?

Avaer: - Yeah, it's kind of jarring and you're in basically the most immersive medium and the least immersive thing are these objects. Like I said, I just want kind of an inventory where I can put things, like a pocket where I can pull out a sword, like, "Hey, check out this cool shirt that I have. Want a PVP?".

Jin: - Yeah, that's something in VRChat's missing. There's no inventory system and it's mostly the Web3 space that has this concept of notion pretty widespread 'cause our inventories are our wallets. So it's like the ultimate playground for interop in a way 'cause we can bring our stuff from one place to the next and we need more examples of that in 3D and virtual worlds, but I think that's coming around soon. And we're currently working on something like that with LUT and like a 3D LUT collection. And I think that also kind of shortcuts a lot of red pills about just understanding NFTs and interop in a way, like viewing it from the metadata NFT perspective versus just the art, 'cause interop doesn't have to mean like maybe like porting the aesthetic and geometry perfectly from one place to the next. Like it could also just mean like, just the traits are really what's essential to bring between places. and perhaps like re-contextualize, re-imagine other places.

Nicholas: - I just pulled up the Webiverse app. It's app.webiverse.com and it's extremely fast. It's very cool to see, you know, you just open up a browser tab and immediately you're in a 3D space that feels extremely responsive, at least on the computer. I've got sitting in front of me.

Avaer: - I'm really sorry that you're experiencing aversion. that must be at least like three months old. There's so many improvements that the team has made since then. But yeah, thanks for the shout out.

Nicholas: - Yeah, totally. I'm excited. I'm gonna, so I have a quest, which I actually still haven't set up. Once I do set that up and give Facebook my DNA or whatever, I'll be able to hop into this experience there too, right?

Avaer: - Should be working.

Nicholas: - Cool.

Jin: - I think that's so dope 'cause like people really want to have like an open and decentralized like VR chat and Webverse is like the closest thing to that. But it's more like you can like equip a sword and like destroy things in there. So it's more than just like a Second Life clone or VR chat clone. It's like, you know, build your own MMO kind of thing.

Avaer: - So also trying to base all of this on just the existing standards. So the code that people are already using for WebXR, it's mostly just a matter of copy paste to bring it into this multiplayer universe kind of thing.

Nicholas: - So if someone's already built some kind of WebXR compatible experience, they'll be able to port it to Webverse and have multiplayer for free.

Avaer: - Yep.

Nicholas: - That's super cool. Have people started using this yet? Is it under the radar still?

Avaer: - It's under the radar because we haven't really made any big announcements. It's probably gonna start with a bunch of blog posts that we have queued up, probably just written by me, kind of going through all the tech stack, what we've learned. And then yeah, ultimately culminating in community events and actually doing the release with this event, the quest.

Nicholas: - I feel like we should have another meeting in VR or mixed VR and desktop where people can come hang out in 3D space together.

Avaer: - Doing Webverse.

Nicholas: - Yeah, exactly. It's super cool because I think what you're working on, I've spent some time in crypto voxels and we talked about hubs a little bit earlier, but they all do feel, like you say there, the most immersive. It's in the most immersive medium and yet it feels sort of like everything is dead, like everything is a 3D object at best with animation and maybe even better rigging, but not truly interacting one object with another. So to think that you can have these things in a Webverse world where you can destroy the environment or create other kinds of behavior that allows you to interoperate between things that you've brought into the world with you seems really, really powerful.

Avaer: - Yeah, it's really about treating NFTs as the primitives and the NFTs can kind of describe themselves, give themselves properties. And then you connect that to a game engine and then you know that this sword can do whatever is so much damage and it has physics applied to this part and so on. And just with the help of a game engine that's thinking about NFTs as the core primitive for all this stuff, you can just compose it all together and create basically an awesome game out of it.

Nicholas: - So, Jin, you mentioned this 3D loot project. I don't know how much you can talk about it, but essentially the idea would be that there's like a derivative project that includes, composed of NFTs with VRM or another standards compliant form of 3D model and some kind of behavior in them as well. If I were to bring those into Webiverse, would I be able to like break them or use them to break other things?

Avaer: - We have procedurally generated stats, but go ahead, Jin.

Jin: - Yeah, it's GLB wearables and one of the things. like with Introp and all the NFT avatars that have come out, this loot project is a way to kind of work amongst all these different communities and a wearables collection can involve all sorts of different NFT projects rather than making a new kind of avatar. It's something that can be used with many and like all. the loot was 3D modeled by the Webiverse team

Avaer: and then

Jin: it's also voxelized and we're also looking into Decentraland wearables for each and experimenting with ways of distributing it, not just like pay or claim all of it, but what if you could like craft or quest for some of them as well. I just think it's a really awesome ingredient that we're iron shuffling together with other builders. So like under M3, it's like this virtual hacker space where we're playing with loot, but it's in a format that we can plug into game engines and avatars and wearables and cook things up together in interesting ways. A lot of hackathons coming up soon, so it's going to be an ingredient that we can also just as a side effect ingest. a lot of wisdom that comes out of loot and metadata projects, on-chain projects, that I want more XR devs and 3D devs that aren't really crypto native yet to be exposed to these deeper concepts first.

Nicholas: Yeah, how would on-chain metadata be relevant in Webiverse?

Avaer: We read the on-chain metadata to basically make it part of the experience. So if, for example, your item has a certain trait, then that trait will actually have an effect in the world. We just kind of read it as if it were a component in an entity component system in terms of game engine speak.

Nicholas: I'm trying to think of how the advantages of, when I think of on-chain NFT projects, part of what's cool about that to me is that it's composable within block time. On the blockchain, other contracts can make use of or in other ways interact. We've seen this with so many projects today, Mathcastles, I know Jim was checking that out, it looks awesome. So many other projects loot. I guess because the front end is off-chain, it's not as obvious to me what the advantage of on-chain metadata would be particularly in Webiverse.

Avaer: There wouldn't be an advantage specifically to Webiverse, but the goal of Webiverse is that it's just working with all these systems that other people have built. So to me, that's just really awesome that people do have on-chain metadata on their projects. We can just kind of read it. That's still actually secure as long as you trust, for example, that the page that you're loading Webiverse from is the actual client.

Jin: Right. I also think of any NFT that I buy feels like I'm buying to learn and build with. And if you're buying the same or getting the same NFTs as me, we're going to the same classes together. And part of this 3D Loot project, the provenance of it, going back to loot and what it's about, it's a way of just getting exposed to these ideas from that community and a fast path to learning just real deeper stuff than art, going beyond the arts and what kinds of things can happen on-chain.

Nicholas: So if I wanted to create something, actually, to zoom out a little bit, Webiverse, if I go to app.webiverse.com, I'm thrown into a world. Are there different servers or what's the architecture of Webiverse like?

Avaer: Completely self-hosted. Actually, right now, it's just running on a powerful AWS box, but anybody can host this. If you know how to run basically Node, then you can run this. It's just npm start. What we do is we just provide essentially a set of servers, including the multiplayer, kind of bouncing servers, just for people to use if they don't want to install the app themselves. But we're hoping that pretty much anybody who wants to host this can.

Nicholas: Crazy. So I could essentially fork the project and spin up my own, for people, something like a Minecraft server, right? If I ran my own Node process with my own Webiverse instance, it would essentially be like my own, and then I could make modifications to it that maybe break the rules in some interesting way.

Avaer: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we should be able to just kind of hop between each other's servers without even reloading the page, because it's all using the same protocol. Just portal from one place to another.

Nicholas: That's extremely cool.

Jin: What does that look like, by the way? I've seen you experiment with some different modes of traversal. Is there... I guess there's options, right?

Avaer: There are options. It could either just be where you press a button and you teleport, but we do have a full portal system working now, so it's totally possible to literally load the other world in addition to the main one, and then walk seamlessly through the portal. It's a full render. The only downside to doing that is kind of performance, because you're loading two worlds at once. But it does work, and it's really cool.

Nicholas: If people have experience from VRChat or something like that, it sounds like Webiverse could be kind of a drop-in replacement for a self-hosted equivalent of VRChat. It has a more or less fully overlapping feature set, plus so much more.

Avaer: Some users like to see it that way.

Nicholas: - Jin, I'm curious more about this, the difference between the XR community and the NFT community. I was really disappointed to see the... I think it was Vincent Van Doe had the confrontation with the furries who were very critical of NFTs. I was pretty disappointed in that because I had this tweet ages ago and actually met Dave White from Paradigm via this tweet about how I felt furries were kind of doing, or the furry community, the fur community was doing a similar kind of basic research that people like John Carmack were doing however many decades ago by being deeply involved in a subculture that was perceived of as uncool and easy to make fun of by the mainstream. But nevertheless, at that time it would have been, I don't know, whatever, chat rooms and games, simulations, 3D games. But today it would be like spending a whole bunch of money in order to develop, in this case, a physical avatar costume that you can wear at cultural events and social events. And I felt like that was very similar. It seemed to me very obvious that the furry community would have a natural kind of compatibility with VR, which I think it did to some extent and continues to. So it was disappointing to see that there was a real tension between the NFT community and the furry community over, I guess, whatever, these trumped up environmental charges or whatever. I'm curious if you had any thoughts about that.

Jin: They have their own kind of working economic system through art commissions. And artists there pay very well for commissions and whatnot. So they don't really understand the money aspect, I guess. But a lot of furries are experimenting with Web3 and Neos VR. And so that's been also kind of like the science lab that a lot of other VR platforms take a look at. And just in general, though, I think the main point of contention is around the artificial scarcity aspect. And I don't think people really understand that, you know, like, NFTs, you always have the availability. Sure, you can right-click them and whatnot, but it's not going to, like, we're not trying to limit access in a sense, like, hide, you know, you don't have to, like, restrict, like, you can't use this unless you own the NFT. Like, it's just kind of more like, for most tokens, it's like kind of the signature, the autograph is what's scarce, not really the art or the content. And CC0 NFTs, in my opinion, are like the Teflon kind of example that I don't think there's any, yeah, like, when it comes to the point of contention around artificial scarcity, CC0 NFTs, I think, really answer and find a lot of common ground between people who are unsure of things. We just don't really have many game-dev-ready examples of collections that are CC0. It's mostly 2D art, you know.

Nicholas: Yeah, I definitely agree. For people who aren't aware, CC0, Creative Commons Zero License, is like a very permissive kind of license that projects like Nouns and Blitmap and Loot, more or less, have all used in order to allow people to create derivatives of their projects permissionlessly, and so it's promising for any of these projects, or Cryptodes is another one, where the creators of the project are interested in having people create derivatives. I think it's very difficult for people to understand, as you say, that, I was saying it just the other day, like, there's not enough right-click saving of music NFTs. Like, music NFTs will only actually take off when people are listening to it everywhere, and musicians have a lot of trouble. I think everybody who's kind of become habituated to these paywall, like, taxation-style revenue models, like Spotify and Netflix, really are used to the idea of paywalled memes and perceived of NFTs as an extension of that, as opposed to its antithesis. So, I often point people to the cryptomedia.wtf essay that I think Jacob and others from Zora crafted, which, it has a little bit of a commitment to this idea of attaching the market to the NFT itself, which I think maybe hasn't played out yet. However, it is really good on this idea that, like, allowing one person to own the NFT, purchase the NFT, allows you to distribute the content very widely, and people really don't seem to get this yet. I'm gonna invite up Atlas, who'd like to ask a question. Atlas, what's up?

Atlas Talisman: - Hey, thanks for bringing me up. Well, first of all, you've definitely got yourself a super fan just listening to this whole process. I'm, like, super pumped and working out how I can just be involved in the hackathons or add in any way to the webiverse. It really speaks to this concept of what I think is the true metaverse, which is just, there is no separation between anything, any community, game engine, reality, XR, AR, VR. It's all the one thing. So I really feel the way you guys are leading the way in that. So that's my first just, yay, fanboy, awesome. But the question was, if we as a community want to contribute, obviously interoperability is the key thing. And I love this idea of NFTs being these modular blocks. And so is there any way, or would you give advice as to what is useful for you at the moment? Obviously you've made strides in many directions. What interoperability do I need to think of? I mean, I'm a game designer as well. If I'm making an asset or I also do real world events and try to bring IRL into digital spaces. Like, what are the touch points? What's the output or throughput that is useful for Webiverse to make sure that I include in whether it be a text file, whether it be an animation, like anything that I create, how can I plug it in? And what's most useful for your community to expand the capacity of Webiverse?

Nicholas: Great question.

Avaer: That is a great question. So the way that we're framing this initial event is just kind of that. it is an actual game. We thought through what the game mechanics are, what the content is, what the narrative is, what are we trying to say here? So there are partnerships that we're doing with kind of other content creators and other people in the NFT space where they're providing content or ideas, and we're feeding that into kind of the creative process using a bit of AI synthesis and kind of creating this game experience. So it sounds like you and I could have some really interesting conversations if you had ideas of what kind of gameplay mechanics, what kind of stories do you want to tell in the metaverse? And what kind of content do you want to see working? To more specifically answer your question, though, right now we're just basing everything on standard file formats. So our goal is that no matter what you're using or what your development workflow is, it should just work or at least be extremely easy to port. So we do have documentation on not only the standard file formats that we support, but kind of the workflows that we're using. If you had any contributions there or you want to see something else supported, that would be another huge help for us. Definitely join the Discord, though. We need to have more conversations.

Atlas Talisman: Absolutely. I'll definitely join. Look forward to future conversations. And a big shout-out to Khalil in the audience as well. He and I work on a project and he probably has other questions, but he's a big geek dev as well. Definitely for sustainability and community-driven projects. So yeah, awesome. I'll see you in the Discord. Thanks so much.

Avaer: Thank you.

Nicholas: Very cool, yeah.

Jin: I had just one question. Do you do any kind of 3D scanning for these physical real-world events?

Atlas Talisman: No, not for years and years. I did do one. This is back in 20... I don't know when it was. Years ago, probably seven, eight years ago. I did experiment with that once when we had people come into a warehouse for The Legs on the Wall. It's an Australian-based physical theater company. And we brought people in and did do some 3D scanning as that process. But it's not something I was focused on. But is that something that was useful?

Jin: Yeah, I always found it really useful in terms of getting people to understand something like VR or AR when I show them a demo project with an asset from places they are very familiar with in the real world. And suddenly, it just creates such a stronger message, impact, red pill when they... Like a message in a bottle that they can share with their friends like, "Yo, look, it's our gallery in VR.". And then instead of creating something totally fantasy where it may be harder to explain to a friend unless it's something that connects with them some way.

Atlas Talisman: Yeah, totally. It makes me think of two things. And I look at it being like, there's this magic mirror, which is this interface between the digital, which is the infinite, and the physical, which is the finite. And yeah, one time, for a festival I ran called New Kind, we had these RFID tags. So when you came to the festival, you actually got this lanyard. And then that had its sort of inventory based on that. And you'd go to a real world workshop and you'd scan it with the facilitator. And that could level up your metaverse character. And then by the end of the festival, if you'd done a bunch of things and learned, then you'd have these various unlocks. So that was kind of like a real world thing you'd wear and you'd walk around and scan. And then I guess the other way is more of kind of like a Skylander-esque aspect where you've got some QR code or something, which you can hold. And think of the different learner types, that physical, tactile learning. It makes so much sense. And I've started sort of basic premise of making a physical analogy of the internet with hyperlinks. But everything's like a GUI. So everything, as you're saying, everything's got a physical analogy. And it's a simple file system, a DOM tree, all these kinds of things. But you're actually walking through it and pulling and pushing links. But as some kind of analogous thing, which makes more sense on a human scale.

Jin: - That's super cool.

Nicholas: - So I'm working on a collection with my girlfriend. We're making this cute collection together. that was gonna be primarily photos. But I'm thinking now maybe we should do some 3D scans and turn our NFT collection, it's gonna be like 25 NFTs in the small collection. Maybe they should also be available in Webiverse. So I could 3D scan using whatever, a reality capture or some free alternative. And then, was it Zephyr or something like that? And then export as a compatible format for Webiverse. And then I could, if people held those NFTs in their wallets, they would automatically be available from some kind of inventory selection?

Avaer: - Yep. Just basically drag and drop. Or you could just link them directly to the URL, to your token, essentially. We kind of have this scheme where it's ETH, send you whatever, and then you get the contract address and the token ID. And if you put that as the tail of the Webiverse URL, you basically drop into the world with that NFT. - If it's a GLB, like it's a 3D scan or something, then we also do an auto physics meshing of everything. So you could literally just walk through it.

Nicholas: - So you could have a little Chrome extension or whatever that on any OpenSea page, you just click a link and it just modifies the URL, including the contract and token ID as parameters, and you're right away in 3D.

Avaer: - That is an awesome idea for an extension to make. Thank you.

Nicholas: - Let's do it. - This is very cool. Okay, I'm super stoked. I'm like, why don't I just make all of the NFTs that I make going forward into, at the very least, 3D objects? Maybe to continue on Atlas's question, what would be the level up of that? Like, let's say, could I rig it in some way as well? Behavior, is it possible to give things sounds or some kind of motion?

Jin: - I know that the Open Metaverse Interop Group is trying to make a GLTF extension for audio. Mainly, we want to have these things to be, GLTF, that's the main kind of transport file format, but yeah, rigging it would be cool too, and give it a little bit of motion.

Nicholas: - Rigging it would be giving it bones, which would allow it to be sort of puppeteered by either an animation that's predefined or possibly like a real-time input data, let's say controller movement. I wonder how difficult it is to do that with the standard kind of 3D model that people, I mean, I suppose if people are 3D modeling, then they're not that far away from being able to rig a model and then provide an animation as well.

Jin: - Yeah, I like where you're going with it. I think, you know, in general, it depends what you're scanning too. Like, if you're scanning like a vase, it's kind of odd to rig that, but if you're scanning like a toy that you want to bring alive, then that's totally something that, I think there's even AI to help auto-rig some of these things in a way that's more efficient than manual.

Nicholas: - The only one I've used is, I'm forgetting the name now, starts with an M from Adobe.

Jin: - Mixamo, yeah. It's great for a humanoid.

Nicholas: But yeah, if you're scanning humanoid stuff, - Unfortunately, no, but you are making me want to make like everything into a rigged object. I wonder, do you know if there's a particular open source project or a regardless service that people can use to auto-rig things?

Jin: - I mean, Mixamo's easy. There's another cool thing called Monster Mesh. It doesn't exactly rig things how you'd expect, but it's a sketching program that you can export like doodles with rigs. And I've rigged a couch before with a VRM rig, and it actually like waddles around really nicely in a virtual world. So you'd be surprised at the results. Like rig something that's like inanimate in the real world with a VRM rig. And it actually like, you know, you can control it in a virtual world, kind of cool. And I don't think we see enough of that.

Nicholas: - Awesome. Sounds like Muni. I don't know if you guys know this Twitter account.

Jin: - It is Muni's avatar.

Nicholas: - It's Muni's avatar? Oh my God. Can you share the link to the... Is it an NFT yet?

Jin: - I didn't officially mint it yet, but yeah, he's got his own VRM avatar. We've got like VRM avatars for a lot of the eGirlCat peeps.

Nicholas: - Amazing. So, okay, I have a quick question then. So if you have this file sitting on your computer, what's faster, to mint it as an NFT in order to have it available in WebAverse, or can you just drag and drop directly?

Avaer: - You can just drag and drop. But if you really want to use that avatar on a permanent basis, then you're probably better off just minting it and then connecting your Metamask so that whenever you switch computers or whatever, you just load up your Metamask and we know which avatar you're using and it's already there for you to use. We don't have to mess with dragging and dropping.

Nicholas: - Which chains are compatible?

Avaer: - Right now, Ethereum Mainnet and Polygon.

Nicholas: - Cool. So you could mint it really cheap on Polygon and essentially like Polygon becomes the hard drive, or I guess IPFS plus Polygon.

Avaer: - You can actually even mint it on our sidechain 'cause there is a third option. You can just use our sidechain. It's basically just regular Ethereum and the gas is free and it's hooked up to our Discord bot. So if you don't even want to pay any gas at all, you can just do it that way and you trust us to store your files, but like we're honest about that.

Nicholas: Let's say I minted something just to be quick about it that way. Is it possible to bridge it to Ethereum or like later on transition it to being coming like an L1 mint?

Avaer: Are you talking about the sidechain?

Nicholas: Yeah, the sidechain. Yeah.

Avaer: I don't know if we're going to have that feature for V1. We actually did experiment with that and it does work. But yeah, we want to make sure that we get the security right if people are actually relying on it. And then there's also like the tokenomics implications where if there is a free chain, which you can kind of move to like another chain where things aren't free. Like what does that mean for the community? Like we need to figure that out.

Nicholas: Yeah, that's super interesting. I am very curious about this idea of like, I think people want to be able to mint cheaply, but at least personally, I would prefer to have my assets be like originating on L1. I haven't seen anybody. I've been talking about it a little bit. I think Lord of a Few is in the audience. We talked about this previously. He's working on a, is it Starkware based? In any case, L2, but looking at both Arbitrum and Starkware for L2 games in the lootverse, like loot realms based around loot realms. And in the course of talking about that, we talked a little bit about it being cool. I have, I would love to see it so that I could mint on L2 or sidechain or whatever, just EVM chain and then bridge back. But that the bridging essentially be just like passing the data about it, not the NFT itself. And then the minting really happened on L1. It's unclear where that, what the provenance situation of that would be, but it would be nice if the main NFT contract was actually an L1 contract.

Avaer: Yeah, that makes sense. By the way, I agree. Like our main drops, we'll probably just do it on main net. Yeah. But, but, but I also think like the future is where all of this stuff is completely interoperable. I don't think we're quite there yet where everything's meshing. Like even with something like Polygon, which technically does like allow you to move NFTs across, there's waiting periods and a lot of other stuff that I think would exacerbate the communication problems we have with, for example, like the gaming community where they hate NFTs. And not only are you destroying the environment, but you have to wait seven days to kind of move your tokens.

Nicholas: Yeah.

Avaer: That's not acceptable.

Nicholas: Easy target for ridicule. It would be nice if we get to a world where the chain that it's on is just like a little bit of data in the corner, not the huge change in UX.

Avaer: It'll be solved though, I think.

Nicholas: Yeah, I'm confident in it. And it's very cool. Like the emergence of EVM as really the shared territory, maybe that won't last, but it seems like it's got a pretty decent shot. And it's very cool. to be able to write code once and then deploy it to all these different chains with different consensus mechanisms is extremely cool.

Avaer: The web learned this lesson 30, 40 years ago with the JavaScript VM.

Nicholas: Right. Although people still complain about it today, but yes.

Avaer: And I think people are going to complain about Ethereum and EVM until infinity as well. But yeah, I think it's right now probably the best bet.

Nicholas: Totally.

Avaer: At least for a one.

Nicholas: Oh yeah, Jin, go for it. I wanted to ask Aaron what's up when you're done.

Jin: I just dropped the couch avatar, but I'm not sure it showed up in spaces. I just posted in the thread. Not sure how to make it appear here.

Nicholas: Oh yeah, I think I'll have to do a thing. I'll take a look. Oh, I think we lost Aaron. Oh no, here we go. Aaron, how's it going?

aronshoemaker: It's going good. Sorry, my app keeps crashing.

Avaer: We're traveling around on the road right now. Hey, thanks for having me on.

aronshoemaker: I love what you guys are doing. And I had a question.

Avaer: You started talking photogrammetry and 3D capture and you're talking my language.

aronshoemaker: That's a lot of what I do. 3D Zephyr is a great program. They have a free version that you can do up to 50 photos. I would recommend going for their light version. It's like $150. Allows you to do 500 photos. You can do a lot more detailed 3D capture. And then you will have to decimate that to make it possible to go into a game. And you can read about that. You just make it smaller that way. My question is kind of along the lines of Atlas, where is it going to be possible to bring in our own assets? Sounds like you might have the protocol written up in documentation as to how we need to make them and what they need to look like.

Avaer: Yeah, in terms of GLB, it's literally just the GLB standard. So whatever tool you're using, if you can export it as a GLB, that's all. Drag and drop should work as well as minting as an NFT.

aronshoemaker: Do you have any size limitations right now?

Avaer: Anything that the browser isn't going to crash on. And that actually varies from person to person. But usually we try to keep it VR enabled. So that means the absolute maximum is like 2 million triangles for anything.

aronshoemaker: Oh, that totally helps.

Avaer: I mean, what about environments as well?

aronshoemaker: Because that is something we're working on. I've got a guy that I work with and he's able to take 360 photos and make point cloud environments out of them so that they're literally a walkable VR environment from a 360 photograph. Are you going to have any parameters on things like that?

Avaer: Are we talking about walk meshes?

aronshoemaker: He developed a protocol which he takes a 360 photograph. It's not a mesh.

Nicholas: Oh no, phone troubles.

Avaer: I think we've lost you.

Nicholas: Might take a minute for him to come back. Meanwhile, Jin posted the Muni couch and Muni is responding and wants to know how they can use it right away. Because you just like dragged and dropped the VRM into the Webiverse browser tab, it's not something that you could link to directly. You'd have to mint it on Polygon or Ethereum to be able to link to it?

Avaer: The way that we're going to do this, but this might be a controversial thing, which is why we have it. But if you drag and drop the file, it's kind of this unattached thing where although it is uploaded to our IPFS servers, it's not really linked anywhere. So what we wanted to do is maybe have a right-click option and then you can mint it right there in the world, just because it hasn't been claimed and you're the one that's claiming it and minting it on the chain. But I can understand a lot of users have expressed reticence to that because that's basically the right-click steal art problem. It's making it really easy for people to mint things that they don't own without any sort of proof.

Nicholas: Right. I would say it's okay if you're maybe not minting on L1.

Avaer: Yeah, it might just be that we do that, but only on the sidechain. And then if you want to do it through L1, then you have to go through a different mechanism.

Nicholas: Even Polygon would be okay.

Avaer: But yeah, actually everything that you drag and drop is uploaded to our IPFS server. So the only matter of making it more permanent is where do you create the links, which chain, and who owns it.

Jin: That's actually pretty cool. If you wanted to meet up with a friend in a virtual world and share some memes, you just drag and drop and it automatically uploads to IPFS and they see the meme. It's temporary, but the minting is kind of making it then persistent.

Avaer: Yep.

Nicholas: That's pretty cool. That is kind of the purpose. It gives a good mental model to people about NFTs. The NFT is the permanent part.

Avaer: Yeah, I hope that kind of helps alleviate some people's concerns. Although everything is essentially just NFTs, you don't have to buy into that story. And if you like NFTs, but you don't like the whole weird capitalism part of it, then you can just mint on the sidechain and have fun there. The technology is basically all the same. And if you ever change your mind and actually think, you know what, NFTs are the future, I want to participate, you can easily bring your assets over.

Nicholas: That's extremely cool. Alright, Elixo, what's going on? And tell me how to pronounce your name.

elyx0: Hi, it's Elixo. Yeah, that's fine. Ava and Jane already know me, but I'll introduce myself anyway. I'm Elixo from the Charged Particle NFT Protocol, a job that I actually got from writing about WebAverse itself a year ago. And you guys were already like buzzing with this virtual decentralized world way before Facebook, way better than the central land already. And one is that the first Discord virtual asset minting bot, basically just dragging and dropping assets into Discord that automatically are part of your model or in the virtual world, which was pretty sick. And I remember there were talks about remunerating artists that provided the virtual world assets you were encountering in game. Let's say an apple with some rainbow texture and it would reward creators. And I remember Coil was an avenue. And how did that evolve?

Avaer: So I think there's two parts of this. One is the remixing of how do you kind of compose assets into something that's new content. And the other part is like, what's the economic model and how can artists actually be paid? I think the best way right now for all of us to be working is to just be making really awesome products. And for me, that means essentially making something that can compete as a sort of metaverse game, but it's using the assets from the artists who collaborated on the project. We're all kind of contributing towards just building a really cool experience. And what's associated with that is probably just NFT drops from the actual artists. By the way, at WebAverse, we don't actually take any cuts from artists. So when we do drops, it's basically 100% revenue to the artists that contributed. And what we're trying to do kind of at the top level is using all this technology, make sure that it can be delivered as a really cool experience that people can actually understand. It's really fun and it works. And we're just kind of making sure the technical parts of all that are figured out. In terms of the remixing, I think that's a longer kind of story because right now we're in the weeds where all these different communities are creating their own art and they're having some interesting conversations. And even MetaDrop announced, for example, Interleave and how they're using a bunch of NFTs to create basically a 3D animated movie and a whole new universe where board apes and other characters can interact. So I think we're starting to see kind of the beginnings of that using NFT tools. But I think the first step is just to kind of get people to understand that NFTs are actually a really awesome ingredient that we can use. And they're a tool that allows these communities to kind of interoperate in a way where everybody wins just by making really awesome products. I don't know if that kind of answers the question.

elyx0: Yeah, it does. I remember also you were having a familiar, like you had your NFT and it was literally following your avatar right after you bought it on OpenSea, which was hilarious. Did you need like some special like massaging? or you were able to like have your NFT follow you right away inside that virtual world?

Avaer: What do you mean by follow?

elyx0: I think you had that Wasi avatar. just follow you around.

Avaer: So actually, at Webiverse, one of the parts that we haven't even talked about is really nerdy and boring. But essentially, we have a translation engine. that's the middleware between the game engine itself and the blockchain. So the Wasi stuff, that's just using Loomdart's contract. And we're basically pulling that data. But there's a special case where we kind of said, hey, this is a Wasi, this is the contract address. And when you translate that to be an app that's loaded in Webiverse, we'll add this cool animation, we'll give it some AI behaviors, just all using standard APIs. And that's kind of the way that we did that. So the way that it works is, yeah, if you have it in your wallet, you can kind of drag and drop it into the world. And using the Totem translation engine, which is this like really nerdy open source part, it gets translated into a way that the engine can understand it and it becomes an interactive NFT in the world. It has physics, you can hit it, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff that I can't share yet.

elyx0: whether we want it or not, there's going to be a Webiverse. And it's going to be great. So yeah, let's chat at some point. Thank you for your time.

Nicholas: Thank you. Hey, Avir, can you just describe again, what's the process for going from having just an object to it being interactive with other objects in the world?

Avaer: So all of the code is essentially 3JS. We do have a system where you can kind of, there's an API where you can kind of call methods on the player, or find who's around you, like what are the objects that are around you? What are the NFTs? Where do they come from? Like, for example, which chain do they come from? All that's available, essentially through a scripting API, which is very similar to how React does hooks, where you just kind of inject hooks and you can interact with the rest of the world. And basically, it's the job of this totem system that we've built to take an NFT and translate it into an application based around this API, so that it can be loaded into the world. So mostly what you're doing as an NFT author is you just have to make sure that one, your assets are following standard formats. And two, whatever metadata that you're using to describe it is something that we recognize in Totem, and we try to constantly expand that. And then Totem's job is to read that blockchain data, translate it using basically a backend compilation process into an application that can just be directly imported as a JavaScript app into the main engine, which provides the API hooks that basically allow it to interact with the world in the way that it was described in the blockchain. So for example, the AI behavior, whether the NFT is aggro or not, can just be a property on the blockchain. And then through this process, it ultimately ends up in the world. And this works in a way that's basically completely permissionless and centralized, because none of the parties actually have to talk to each other for this to work. So if we want to support a new NFT, but the NFT project, whatever, for some reason, it's not going to work, we can still give the users of that NFT, the token holders, basically the experience of having it work in the world. And the beauty of just doing this openly is nobody actually even needs to agree. It'll just work anyway.

Nicholas: Very cool. I see Muni actually hopped in as a listener. I don't know if Muni talks, but I just wanted to communicate one thing to you Muni before you run. Webiverse is the world you saw in that screen recording that Jin put up of the avatar that Jin created. And we're talking about that today. And right now, the model that you saw animating across the screen was just something that Jin dragged and dropped into the essentially into the browser. But if it were minted as an NFT with that model as a piece of metadata off that NFT, then you could access it via app.webiverse.com/contractaddress/tokenid. I think that's so cool. And I really want Jin to mint it right now so that we can share that link. I want to see it.

Jin: Oh, I can. Provenance should belong to the owner in a way. True.

Nicholas: OK, so we've got to do this. Twitter Spaces is cancelled. This is now an onboarding from Muni into Webiverse NFT minting.

Jin: How's that minting flow work now? Is it from Discord? the best way still?

Avaer: That's if you want to use the sidechain, but we're still working on the front end UI. The main reason that we haven't shared this more publicly is. I really believe in making good things first before you ask for support, rather than just asking for support for something which may or may not exist in any form. So yeah, what we're going to do is essentially just in the front end, we'll have a nice UI where you just connect Metamask and then drag and drop your file and then mint it probably.

Nicholas: So that'll be the easiest thing once that's built out. But if I wanted to do something today, could I mint on OpenSea on Polygon and include the VRM as metadata and it would work?

Avaer: That should work. I don't know if it's been tested recently, but if you encounter any bugs, we'll make it work. Just essentially, you have to upload the VRM file and that's almost the only requirement. When you connect your Metamask, you should be able to see the token right there and then you can drag and drop it.

Nicholas: Got it. So Muni is asking on Twitter, what's the TLDR on Webiverse versus VRChat? Do you guys want me to take a stab at that or would one of you like to answer?

Avaer: I'd be curious if you could take a stab.

Nicholas: VRChat is a very cool platform that doesn't seem to care about copyright, but in the long term, won't be able to sustain that most likely. Whereas Webiverse is, oh gosh, on a technical level, it's a self-hosted 3D space that can be accessed from all kinds of devices, including XR devices. It's very NFT-centric and maybe the simplest way to capture that is if you go to app.webiverse.com/contractaddress/tokenid, if the token has 3D relevant metadata, interoperable standard files like VRM, GLTF, GLB, essentially the SVG equivalents of 3D that can include both geometry, textures, and rigging and animation. So that they could be either puppeteered or self-animating, as well as behavior, I guess. We haven't even really discussed how you would program behavior in. But in any case, NFTs, if they have these relevant things, then they just work in Webiverse. And if you go to that address, you'll pop into a world with that NFT standing right in front of you. And the team has also built all kinds of other stuff, including they're coming out with a quest to kind of introduce people to the world in the next couple weeks, I guess it sounds like. And yeah, pretty crazy. There'll be NFT minting within the client to L1 or to Polygon or to a sidechain that they operate. Is that a good summary?

Jin: Can I take a stab?

Avaer: Go ahead, Jim.

Jin: So Webiverse has an inventory while VRChat doesn't. Webiverse uses open file formats such as GLTF and VRM, while VRChat uses proprietary stuff like Autodesk's SVX mostly, as well as the proprietary Unity engine. While Webiverse uses open source, a web rendering engine like Three.js. And VRChat is kind of like a second life clone in which it's like a social hangout place. There's no kind of thing to do while Webiverse. You have that, but you also can have weapons, you can have vehicles, you can have pets. And there's quests. So VRChat's kind of like the game lobby before the game starts, while Webiverse, there's more to do than just hang out and socialize. And yeah, browser-based versus client-based that you have to download from an app store as well.

Avaer: For me, it's about openness and freedom, like the experience of going through VKit. I really want to own that sword, or at least to be able to remember it for later so I can pull it out with my friends. So one option is we could wait for VRChat and Unity to kind of eventually deliver on these features, or we could build them ourselves. And we opted for the latter, and it turned out to work.

Jin: Crazy. Yeah, open source.

Nicholas: Open source, and you can go on Vroid right now and buy 3D models, but I guess they're delivered through some kind of platform interface and you can download the file, which you can load into Unity or whatever you want to use it for?

Avaer: Yeah, you get the VRM. But we actually wanted to do a more deeper integration where you can kind of just select from the list of avatars that they already have, like the open ones. But actually, this is another problem between VRChat and Webiverse, or at least one difference, where on their end, they basically said no to our integration purely because we're open. So we actually can't have all the VRM avatars in Webiverse because we're delivering things for the community. And I think that's a real blocker to innovation where you can't use content across these different platforms, and it's all just coming down to basically the politics of software distribution. And if you make everything open source, you can kind of tear down all those walls all at once.

Nicholas: So they're concerned because they think maybe there'll be copycat products, or they just want to control it?

Avaer: I think a lot of it, I think partly it's control, partly it's like stakeholders, because they are a company. But it's also trying to kind of serve the needs or the requirements of the artists themselves, because artists don't want their work copied, like OC don't steal. Which is why actually inside the VRM format, there is a metadata field that says what you're allowed to do with this avatar. And we respect that. So there are some signs of hope there. But I think right now, it's this conflation of a lot of these different issues, as well as the association with openness and NFTs that companies are kind of scared of, or maybe they don't understand.

Nicholas: That metadata that's built into VRMs for sort of use, it's almost like a structured data license. So you could say like, you're not allowed to make it over this size, or you're not allowed to use it in a sex game or something, or what kind of limitations?

Avaer: Yeah, absolutely. So it's things like violence, it's like, can it be used by corporations, who the copyright owner is, what the license is, and all that stuff can be basically shown to the user and enforced.

Nicholas: Is it something that you can programmatically enforce?

Avaer: In some cases, I think. But obviously not like until we have an AI that detects is this a sex scene, and you're like, man, I hope like we don't get to that point. That sounds like a dystopia. But right now, I think it's mostly just at least being able to display that information and a lot of education of users of like, hey, this is the person that made it like, please don't do blah, blah, blah with it. Like respect the artists.

Nicholas: Crazy. I want to create something that I can, I want to mint something on Polygon tonight that I can pull into Webverse. It's just just to try it. It sounds so cool. Are there any NFTs that are you mentioned? So like, if we do this right now, if I pull up on OpenSea, you said MiBits is compatible. So if we pull up MiBits and grab a contract address and token ID, we should be able to just pull it up right here.

Jin: MiBits is coming out with an API. But in my opinion, because like the actual files like VRM and GLB and whatnot, are like behind a, you know, you have to unlock the downloads on the page there. But you could if you download your MiBit VRM, you just drag that into the browser. And then you hold down E in front of it, and then you'll embody that avatar.

Nicholas: Okay, so MiBits won't work. You said CryptoAvatars or something before?

Avaer: Yep.

Nicholas: I think you were like, well, there's obviously CryptoAvatars. I've never heard of CryptoAvatars. Is it a cool project?

Avaer: It's pretty cool. A bunch of artists basically releasing avatar drops. They're all VRMs. Some of them I think have permissive licenses.

Jin: A lot of them do. I think the founder of CryptoAvatars, Toxamp, he started out with like 200, he made 200 basically public avatars, one each day. It was the 100 avatar challenge and he did two rounds of that. And all of them are CC0 VRM NFTs now.

Nicholas: So how would I find that? Obviously, of course, today OpenSea is broken.

Jin: CryptoAvatars.io.

Nicholas: Cool. Okay, I'm going to check this out right now.

Jin: Actually, maybe easier is 100avatars.com. There you can just download all of them.

Nicholas: That's 100, like the number 100?

Jin: Number 100 avatars.com. Yep. And he's got like 200 avatars there for download with links to CryptoAvatars.

Nicholas: Very cool. They're organized into rounds?

Jin: Yeah, he challenged himself to do one a day. Wow.

Nicholas: Okay, I'm going to try and do this. Yinch, what's up?

aronshoemaker: Morning, everybody. I just had a question about the enforcement of bad practice or rather the enforcement of good practice. If somebody actually does steal the content of an NFT and attempts to remint it, what is the recourse? I mean, is there a way for people to say, "I need it"? What is the equivalent of a takedown notice if people do not honor the request of the artist?

Avaer: I think that's probably just going to come down to software and you have to have some sort of trust system. Like, who are you trusting, for example, to manage the block list? Right now, if you see any NFT on any of our products that you think is actually one of our copyright violations, you can DM us and we'll probably just add that as a special case that this isn't allowed and it's just going to basically render as an X that this was block listed in the software. But in the long term, I think where this needs to head is this is done by a DAO or some sort of decentralized organization whose only function would be to make sure that copyright and people's rights are respected. I think there does need to be some sort of human element in the mix because these rules are complicated and I wouldn't trust a computer to judge them, especially in AI. I don't know if that answers the question.

Nicholas: Yeah, I think that's basically it. There'll be interfaces and the interfaces will decide who controls what's allowed and what's not allowed. Same as OpenSea. OpenSea doesn't really censor NFTs. They just censor what you can see on OpenSea. So they take down things. As long as OpenSea is in a position where people are looking at it, then it's relevant what they choose to include and not include.

Avaer: In the future, I also think it's going to evolve a similar way to how email has their own spam block list where if you don't have some sort of spam filtering on email, you can't use it. I hope it never gets to that point. But there are basically ready-made technical solutions for being able to distribute lists of "This is what we agree was not allowed." And just make sure that all the clients respect it.

Nicholas: Does that answer your question?

Jin: But you can always list that on your client, right? If you self-host, then you could just kind of ignore that, right?

Avaer: You can, and that's the part of freedom that I think really draws me to this stuff. Where it's like, "Okay, so maybe I can use this content. I can enjoy it in the privacy of my own home." But it's just not going to work on the metaverse because the other people's clients won't actually recognize it. And it's just going to become a big red X. I think that's possibly the best middle ground that we can achieve there. We have both freedom as well as rights and people feeling like they're valued and listened to.

Jin: Yeah, it's kind of like these different layers. The global layer, where it's kind of like the free node of the metaverse, where it's the most popular server. And then you've got people who can spin up their own hubs and networks. Just peer-to-peer and have their own kind of sandbox that they can do whatever in. Kind of like off streets from the main street. You've got the main street and you can swerve right through the alley. That's kind of a smaller network, kind of like how Discord servers are spun up between people. It's more of like, you've got the global and then you've got the group chat. And then you've got the local, where it's the highest expectation of privacy and freedom.

aronshoemaker: Is there an issue with the main street having to be monitored? Aren't we back to some of the need for including humans in the loop? Does it make it trustless in the ethos of being decentralized? or am I being too mean?

Jin: That was in the book Snow Crash. They had ACM in there and you had to go through... It described how you would essentially get something on the street there in the book through licenses and bribing and whatever else to respect the code on the street and the machinery that powers it.

Avaer: I think anybody should be free to modify their software to let it do whatever it wants. But you should not be able to enforce that right on other people. I think everybody should have that right. So if I want a version of the metaverse where I go in and everybody's a dick, I should be able to code it that way. That doesn't mean that other people will see the exact same thing. They might have their own interpretation of what the metaverse is. But as long as we're using common protocols and as long as we come to some sort of agreement of what the baseline is, I think that's where we can strike the awesome middle ground between. There's underground garages where anything goes, it's all private, you can do whatever. But if you ever want to basically take this to the broader metaverse, the broader world, you can mint it on mainnet or make sure that you're going through one of these channels. For example, a game release where the default environment is this game and it has all these whitelisted assets and there's no red X marks. But maybe there's also these private rooms where anything goes and there's no checks. Or maybe there's kind of a middle ground where there's a kind of a hangout like a hubs room or a fountain or a public gathering place where there is crypto verification for every single avatar. But if you have some sort of open source thing that you're just dumping there, then it's kind of like a red X mark or it's replaced by a different asset. All of these things, I think, will be figured out in the next 10 years. And I don't know what all the answers are, but I think it's going to happen and I think it's going to be awesome. And I think everybody will ultimately feel like they're getting what they need out of the metaverse.

aronshoemaker: Thanks. That's really useful to hear. A couple of things that you described there in terms of being able to have your own corner of the metaverse. It feels like, is there any reason why Web 2.0 as it exists doesn't allow that to happen? You can spin up your own web server, you're allowed to go on TCP/IP, people can find you with a URL. You can give out DNS. Nobody really monitors the web that hard, right? So can we already achieve the metaverse without a blockchain foundation? Just asking.

Avaer: I think there's a need for... I think blockchains and NFTs are a driver of interoperability. Because we've actually had most of these ideas for a really long time. You have Second Life, you have a million games on Steam that claim to be the metaverse. And there's a whole bunch of different products that have their own idea of what all this is. But the problem is they're all gated communities. They don't really talk to each other. And oftentimes they don't even know of each other's existence. And I think NFTs and blockchains are the way that we can all agree on the protocols and the standards that are necessary for assets to be able to move across these virtual worlds while still maintaining agency for anybody who wants to have their own idea of what the metaverse should be.

Nicholas: I'm trying to pull up the crypto avatars in Webiverse. And of course, every single website relies on OpenSea's API. So there's no way to find it.

Avaer: Actually, we did have a version that was just based on our own, but their caching turned out to be faster than ours.

Nicholas: Yeah, this is the big problem. We talked about this in an episode of another show. I do still edit a Galaxy Brain with Ian from Zora. You have no choice but to do pretty clever caching if you want anything like a usable experience. Just given that some of the servers people are using to serve metadata are really, really slow. I think he mentioned one or two seconds before they come back at all, which can just ruin an experience. So hopefully someone will come out with a good paid indexing service. It would be amazing if it was a DAO, but even a company would be fine.

Avaer: Yeah, absolutely. I would totally pay for that.

Nicholas: If Pinata is listening, let that be your next project.

Avaer: And what NFTs and just crypto in general allows is allows each piece to be built by some sort of entity that is tasked with that one job and just doing it extremely well.

Nicholas: Yeah, totally. This kind of answers a little bit of the question, which is what does blockchains enable that Web2 doesn't? I think the real point is that until blockchain, there was no viable alternative to platform dominance. And sure, occasionally there'll be a world war or something, and there'll be enough funding for military technology or whatever to invent what becomes a public good like TCP/IP or even HTTP. But I'm interested in this swing between centralization and decentralization. Obviously, I think people who believe that we're entering an era of complete decentralization haven't thought very far about how people organize. Just this conversation about interfaces that will block certain kinds of content, it's obviously going to happen, and not everything will be on the blockchain. But nevertheless, it does open up the door to the creation of new incentive mechanisms and game theoretical toys that can maybe make it so that you don't need to pass through Roblox or the App Store in order to get people to see your creation, be it software or just regular. I mean, it's ridiculous. Like Instagram, whatever. You're so limited in what you can do. It's terrible. And you can't get anything in front of anybody unless you're on one of these social platforms and participating in the engagement Olympics, which has basically ruined discourse. So yeah, maybe blockchain offers something. Someone was asking me about this last night on Twitter. How would blockchain fix Facebook? What would a Facebook alternative on blockchain be? And it's like, it's not going to look like that. It's not going to be of an exact parallel to a Web2 megastructure that's then ported to Web3. It's going to be maybe lots of little things that eat away at different pieces or offer new experiences. you couldn't get on a Web2 infrastructure. And most likely, we will have combined Web2 and Web3 infrastructure because of things like cost and scale. And you don't run a node server on Polygon, even if Polygon is cheap.

Jin: Yeah. And I think this next period that we're entering with VR and AR, a good pair of glasses are going to come out this decade. And a lot of the old rules of UI and UX, it's a fresh slate to design from the ground up, which allows for a lot of new incumbents to reimagine a lot of these aspects like social media and whatnot. I don't think profile pages are going to be these flat scrolls. They're going to be avatars and home spaces.

Nicholas: Yeah. It's difficult to watch things like the Stalker and Ubisoft stuff play out. Everybody from the old world who announces they want to mess around with NFTs gets this wave of backlash, be they influencers or brands. Although, seemingly, the brands that one would hope would sustain the majority of that, like Adidas and Nike, et cetera, don't actually. And it's more the communities with kind of difficult relationships with their audience. I don't know. The vitriol from the Stalker community about what I thought was, I only read it briefly, but essentially they were going to sell NFTs and then you would be able to customize in-game world assets based on purchasing those things in order to fund the development. I think that was the model.

Jin: I don't know why they don't just open source old maps and models rather than try and implement NFTs into new product offerings.

Avaer: Because they want to do re-releases. I think a lot of it comes down to the business models that these companies have used for essentially the last decade or two where it's very user hostile. Just kind of pack it with DRM. On day one, there's a massive patch and still sometimes things just don't work. We've got to hit our Christmas deadlines, though. And the user is just an experience. And I think the outrage over NFTs gets a lot of that bundled in where it's like. these companies don't have my interests in mind. And now they're just trying to steal more of my money and get me addicted to crypto gambling or whatever. And I think a lot of that is actually pretty justified. But it's not a problem with NFTs. It's a lot of things being confused where it's just bad business models and bad companies and just like bad social structures that are actually being fixed by Web3. But a lot of people don't get to see that now because Web3 is hot. It's being kind of co-opted by people to basically continue the old way of doing things where you just grab more money from users rather than actually being open and actually trying to see how can we build things together? How can we deliver awesome user experiences and actually give users some sort of say in all of this? Which these companies aren't doing. They're just dropping NFTs. I'm kind of with them. I don't think these big studios should be doing NFTs unless they have something interesting to say. But if they had something interesting to say about it, they would have been working on this four years ago just like we were.

Nicholas: Absolutely. I do think there's an incredible opportunity right now. It's painful to watch if you fuck with NFTs to see this persistent backlash anytime anybody announces that they want to get involved. But more importantly, it's just creating an opportunity for NFTs. The immune response of mainstream society to NFTs that is incorrect. They've basically isolated. the wrong thing to focus on is actually a huge opportunity for people who do get NFTs and Web3 culture already. Because it's like early blogging or whatever. We're going to be stuck with the people who started podcasts and created video games or whatever you might want to call an NFT-based experience. These people are going to be around in 10 years, 20 years if they continue producing content and there will have been such a lag period where others didn't bother to learn about what was even going on, let alone lead the charge. So I think what you're doing at Webverse could easily be an enormous thing in the future even if people now almost can't even be bothered to learn what it is.

Avaer: I hope everybody copies what we're doing more than they already are.

Nicholas: They're already doing it pretty much.

Avaer: We're building the future that we want to live in.

Nicholas: Ultimately, Facebook cannot copy the business model. This is my argument with the whole meta thing. It doesn't really matter what they call themselves. The point is, the one thing that they can't invent, seemingly, is a new business model, a new incentive mechanism for internally driving their organization forward because they're so locked into this pattern. So it'll be difficult for them to transition to anything meaningfully different. They may just capture some portion of the attention for things that are, let's say, immersive. But fundamentally, they're not going to do anything with NFTs. that's dangerous to the Facebook property. It's this innovators dilemma thing. I see Aaron is back. What was the end of your question?

aronshoemaker: Well, I actually had something else because you guys were talking about a database for metadata and writing things to the blockchain. One of the DAOs I work with, they do a lot with BCH, AVEX, and eCash in particular. And one of the big problems that always arises is writing metadata to the blockchain becomes cumbersome for miners and indexers. And so there's this big war between the miners and indexers and the people that want to actually write data to the blockchain like that. And so one of the solutions that... There's a guy named Chris Troutner. I would definitely recommend following him. He's a brilliant programmer when it comes to that sort of thing. If you go to fullstack.cache, there's a pay-to-write database already up. And it writes to IPFS. And they're also about to release a JSON RPC call over IPFS. All this stuff is about being permissionless and uncensorable. And the pay-to-write database, it's not a lot right now, but it does allow you to write in such a way that it's going to be on IPFS and accessible from anywhere, behind any firewall or anything like that. So these are just solutions that are out there that are being built in order to be blockchain-adjacent and where you can write to the blockchain the location of the data and then use indexers to find that sort of data. So I didn't know if you guys were aware that those projects were going on.

Avaer: Are you aware of Ceramic?

aronshoemaker: Yes.

Avaer: How would you compare all that to what Ceramic is doing?

aronshoemaker: I don't know enough about Ceramic, but I know we have talked about it in several of our chats about some of what they're doing. This uses an SLP token and SLP is the tokens based on BCH. And right now they're actually going through re-indexing to make them run smoother and operate on eCash as well. And what's nice about those tokens protocols is they are extremely cheap. We're talking like a tenth of a penny to produce tokens. And they also have NFT protocols as well where you can produce an NFT parent and then NFT children. And so that's a very exciting protocol I'm interested in. And I think Ceramic, from what I've seen, has some good things going on at the same time.

Avaer: Yeah, my understanding was Ceramic is trying to do a lot of the same thing but on Ethereum. I think they're also on Polygon, but I might be wrong about that.

Nicholas: What was the name of the project? I wasn't able to find it.

aronshoemaker: Fullstack.cache will take you to and then there's the DAO is the Permissionless Software Foundation is psfoundation.cache and Chris Troutner is the guy that really kind of heads up and spearheads a lot of the programming.

Nicholas: How do you spell cache?

aronshoemaker: C-A-S-H?

Nicholas: Oh, okay.

Avaer: I wouldn't have gotten that.

Nicholas: It shows where my head is at.

aronshoemaker: Yeah. They work with several different blockchains. They're developing token decks on AVEX right now so that you can do trustless and atomic swaps on AVEX and they're doing the same thing for eCache which was a split from BCH and mainly over philosophical ideas. So eCache will take part of the mining rewards and put it in a pool so they can pay developers on it whereas BCH works more as a charity funding model type of way.

Nicholas: Interesting. Let's check it out.

aronshoemaker: So they split because of that. but if you owned any BCH or if you owned any Bitcoin from way back in the day they split now.

Nicholas: That's cool. Something to do with it. I don't know if I have any Bitcoin cache.

aronshoemaker: They're a sleeper. A lot of stuff is being built. Smart BCH was launched this summer which is an EVM compatible allows you to run EVM compatible contracts on BCH now. So it's just providing cheaper ways to do things. Ethereum is where it's at so I've been kind of getting into that but I came at it from the BCH side of things.

Jin: I think anything that is essentially asking users to download new software like a wallet per se is going to face a lot of friction. When it comes to gamers and their backlash to these other brands. it's cool that it's giving indies more of a head start but I think also it's because they've essentially been exposed to crypto through Twitch streamers promoting bad projects and through the sponsored gamblers on stake which is this gambling site. So their prenotions on crypto in general and this relates a lot to adoption. I think it's just kind of like they think of it as a gambling coin and get rich and they don't really get much exposure to deeper, cooler concepts and projects.

aronshoemaker: I would agree with that. I've seen a lot of that same mentality. I didn't say this but a lot of blockchain developers actually will say they prefer when the market dips down because there's less noise in the market and the real development can actually happen. And you do see that. You see like when the market surges a bunch of people jump in and resources can go to projects that really don't come through and then it can turn a bunch of people off like you're talking about. They get a bad taste in their mouth and they don't realize what the protocols can actually do for people.

Jin: I think we need more content and live streams especially on Twitch for people that are really doing interesting things VTubers especially because I think that also helps propel like push the whole synonymous culture and identity that a lot of NFTs the community is now kind of adopting. but it's like a big thing already and like XR and especially in Japan where avatar culture is way more mainstream.

aronshoemaker: I can see that. I can definitely see that. And I don't think NFTs are in their final form either. I think what you guys are talking about is them being roots. I see them as keys in a way. You know, I came from the music world and I look at an NFT as giving musicians the ability to negotiate better with services like Spotify and iTunes because they can literally sell an NFT that houses their music to Spotify and then they can see how many times it's streamed and they're not depending on Spotify coming in. You know, it may not be Spotify but this is just an example. They're not dependent on this company coming and saying well you had 10,000 streams we're going to pay you X amount. And they can come back and go. actually we had 25,000 streams and we need to negotiate better.

Avaer: It's interesting that you mention music because for the last two years or so my mental model of the right way that we should be using NFTs is kind of like record labels and releasing music. For all the flack that record labels get I think they do a fundamental job of making sure that artists are paid and all the infrastructure around the distribution of music and enjoying it and just branding and all that just works. And they provide really useful lubricants as well between the services that I want to charge for streaming music and creator relationships in our...

Nicholas: Synth, you just came up. What's on your mind?

Avaer: I actually requested earlier when you were talking about the whole gaming communities not liking NFTs because it really does fascinate me the whole guys. you can get unshackled by these restrictive marketplaces and actually start selling your in-game assets for money. I want to shout this to a whole bunch of people but I just don't think... Is it like they're not ready for it? Is it that NFTs have been too tainted by some sort of societal stigma at this point? It really baffles me how bad it's gotten. Look no further than some of these tweet threads and these people who are like, "You made the right decision, Ubisoft.

Nicholas: There would have been a mob at your door if you included NFTs.

Avaer: Good job. For once I can support you.". It just goes on and on.

METADREAMER: I can talk about this for hours but I just don't get it.

Avaer: How bad it's gotten. Do you think... I guess I'd ask some of the speakers. What do you think is the best way to crypto-pill people or just maybe switch people from aggressive to neutral at minimum? Get people to at least have an open mind when it comes to NFTs and gaming in particular. I want to show people awesome products and basically just prove things to people because it's hard to argue that creative creators are having fun. They're releasing awesome stuff which is widely supported by the community and it's powered by NFTs. So what's the argument against NFTs then? I think unless we have those kinds of showing points or unless we show the way, we're going to keep on running into people who really don't understand what we're doing.

aronshoemaker: Another thing to keep in mind is that when you look at the history of technology, going back to music for instance, the first recording started in the late 1880s. They were horrible. And they didn't even have master recordings until about 1897. So literally to make another record, you had to play the song again. And so musicians would play the song all day long, every day. And the music industry itself, the recording industry, didn't really start taking off until really the '20s when shellac disc came in. The point is that you see a lot of the same critiques on NFTs and crypto that you saw with a lot of these new technologies that came in. When movies first started in 1912 was the first full-length feature film. And the newspapers literally ran headlines that this is going to fail. It's going to crash and burn. Nobody wants to sit and watch a movie for two hours. And it ended up succeeding and actually overtaking the entertainment industry at the time and becoming a big part of our entertainment landscape. So that's also something to keep in mind that when new technology comes, you will always get this kind of backlash back and forth. But eventually it finds its way into being accepted in the culture and the economy.

Jin: I kind of want to add to that that we hear the promise of NFTs being ownership and interoperability. And I really want that to be obviously fulfilled and executed. Like someone bringing items from one place to another, being able to download it and remix it however they want. Real clear examples of fulfilling that promise, not just talking about it.

Nicholas: I think we've got PeaceNode and some other folks in the audience from Lexicon Devils, which is a voxel architecture firm that is just building the Juicebox juice bar, which I can share a link to if anyone's curious. That's in crypto voxels.

Jin: It's really well done.

Nicholas: Yeah, thanks. The Lexicon Devils and Wagme are two DAOs on Juicebox Protocol that together wrote a grant proposal and built out this metaverse outpost for the Juicebox Protocol, also known as a DAO treasury protocol. And I'm super excited to see it because I think if a metaverse like crypto voxels is legitimate, then there will most likely, especially given that it's so NFT oriented, there'll most likely be a need for a crypto voxels native interface to things like Juicebox for collective NFT ownership or minting, whatever. PeaceNode, how's it going?

Avaer: Hello, hello. How's it going, man?

Nicholas: Good, good, good. Thank you for coming. I know you guys were in a meeting just now. That's right.

Avaer: Yeah, we are scheming and dreaming, actually, as we speak.

Nicholas: Sick. Are there others from the crew in the chat?

Avaer: Let's see. I think I just saw Germs pop in. And X-Teen and Dar Boyd were around, too. I just sent them the link.

Nicholas: Awesome. Lots of cool people hanging out. We got Sasquatch, Shark. Tell us about what you guys are working on.

Avaer: We've been calling ourselves Lexicon Devils. And we are like a metaverse party troop. So what we do basically is buy parcels, stage them, curate them with our friends, our music.

Nicholas: that we're doing.

Avaer: And we design experiences around them for products and protocols and whatever creative project people are doing.

Nicholas: That's awesome. I'm going to share a link to the CryptoVoxels parcel in the Twitter spaces right now.

Avaer: Awesome.

Nicholas: Yeah. So tell us a little bit about what that's like. Do you know Webiverse? Have you messed around with that yet?

Avaer: I have not. No, I'm unfamiliar.

Nicholas: All right. We've got the lead dev here. And Jin, another builder from the Webiverse project. It's pretty cool.

Avaer: By the way, if you own a CryptoVoxels parcel, the drag and drop also works.

Nicholas: OK, so what would that experience be like? Maybe lay it down for a piece note.

Avaer: If you want to basically experience either the entire CryptoVoxels world, we're kind of re-implementing a client that allows you to get VRM avatars and a whole bunch of cool stuff on top of CryptoVoxels. But also if you own the NFT and you just kind of you're in Webiverse or in VR or whatever and you want to share like the parcel that you've built, you can literally pull it out of your inventory if you have the NFT. And it's just going to show up in the world. We just render the voxels straight from their API.

Jin: I think that's pretty significant. You know, lowering the switching cost to basically zero. That's quite an achievement.

Avaer: I think it's also about starting conversations of interoperability between these projects. The first step is to make sure that everything just actually works and we can show what we mean. Absolutely. So I think that maybe the audio on my end got cut off a little bit. But are you saying that on your virtual client that you can bring over your avatar that you've built in CryptoVoxels or you can actually navigate the CryptoVoxels world in your client? The latter right now, since I don't know if the actual avatars in CryptoVoxels are NFTs. But everything essentially in Webiverse is just an NFT that we're pulling from somewhere. Amazing.

Nicholas: Yeah, pop up in app.webiverse.com while you're at it. You can check it out.

Avaer: I really have to say that the current version that's up, since we weren't really planning on launching anything yet, the current version is at least three months out of date. We've made massive strides since then. So I'm sorry if it's broken.

Nicholas: I think it works pretty cool. But yeah, just to catch a piece note, I have one cool feature. in-app. So, oh, this is great. So I don't have to download anything.

Avaer: I can just start cruising. Yep. 100% open source, too, if you wanted to host it yourself. Hey, this is a really fun thing to do.

Nicholas: live with you guys.

Avaer: Thanks for inviting me.

Nicholas: Sure thing. Holy shit. Yeah, this is amazing. So we've been through this a couple of times, but basically if the NFT has a metadata field for VRM or other standards, GLTF, whatever, then it'll immediately be available if you connect your wallet or if you modify the URL parameters to include the contract address and the token ID.

Avaer: We're also making sure that the multiplayer is all great. And there's a lot of other cool features that we're going to be showing off soon, like AR mode, where all you need is a webcam and you can basically have full face hand tracking, even iris tracking. So you can literally kind of have a metaverse experience between two people. That's super immersive and you can kind of see each other's avatars acting things out all from the web browser. So cool. So, OK, I'm sorry. You guys maybe have gone over all of this, but right. I'm a beginner now, so I'm just wondering, like, are. Is this like an open open world anyone can build in here? Is this a total sandbox? Do you have to buy parcels or you just have to own NFTs? There's no parcels right now, but what we will be dropping within a few weeks is like an actual game where the entry point is kind of a tutorial level, as well as a little quest with a great boss at the end, which may or may not be multiplayer. Hopefully it is multiplayer. So anybody can kind of drop in and kind of be initiated. And at the end of it, you'll either get a po app or some sort of other onboarding token, which might actually grant you, for example, some space in Webverse. But we'll also be doing traditional NFP drops. We have some partnerships lined up where maybe if there is like some sort of special feature or some special NFT that we want to drop, we'll just do that on main net just to kind of project.

Nicholas: Very, very cool. So if somebody is like a creator like Lexicon Devils or Joy or Shark, Sharkdao, what would be the... Given that there's no like singular location, if people just drop into Webverse.com right now, are they all co-located?

Avaer: Right now, the default experience is not even multiplayer. It's just kind of a single player room. But what it will be probably is there's going to be a hub world. And we're kind of trying to treat this as a serious game dev project and maybe even an MMO game dev project where there will be a top level thing where we're kind of building it out. And this is kind of the shining lighthouse of like, hey, this is how awesome the metaverse can be. But there's also in the top right of the screen, this kind of drag and drop where you can check out other rooms, check out other things that people have built. And that's kind of just free reign. As well as we might do, for example, like some sort of land parcels or private rooms where there is an actual NFT associated with that. So if you go into your wallet, you can basically pull out your NFT, which creates a portal to the place that you own. Like all of this stuff are like things that we have in flight. But if anybody is like interested in integrating with any of this stuff, like we're all ears. We'd love to do NFT drops with you because the technology is getting ready. And yeah, it's going to be fun.

Nicholas: Yeah. Peace note, just to give you a little context, this is like very open centric. The idea of being fully interoperable, open, NFT based on L1 Polygon and Webiverse side chain and designed to be empowering to creators. So I'm really curious if you have any questions coming from your experience for the devs here.

Avaer: Yeah, it's our job basically just to build the features that the creators need. So we got whatever experience they want.

aronshoemaker: Very exciting.

Jin: I see MetaDreamer here. I wonder if you could, if you want to talk about the Avatar and DropSpec. Because I don't think we talked about Ceramic, but we maybe people don't really know what Ceramic is, understand it well. But I do think, you know, in the, you know, because like Twitter is about to have NFT integration, that it'd be a really good time to chat about it and how like, you know, the experience of the Metaverse persists across all these different platforms and mediums.

METADREAMER: Yo, what up guys? I think I didn't hear the start of what you said, but I heard something, everything after Ceramic. Do you want me to talk about Ceramic?

Jin: Yeah, I think we were talking about Ceramic before and standards and, you know, I'd love if you want to share information about the collab and Interoperable Avatars.

METADREAMER: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I think like a big part of making like this Metaverse workout is like just discoverability of, you know, data and information and, you know, sort of having a unified user account system, which we kind of have with Ethereum. But, you know, we have these wallets. So now how can we attach like more rich metadata to these wallets so that, you know, as we travel from like one world to another, as soon as we like log in with our wallet, that world can know everything it needs to know about us, our avatars, how to render it. And, you know, we can kind of make it more portable in that way. So, you know, ENS really, you know, shows like a good example of how that can be applied. And then when you use like ENS and Ceramic together, you can have something really powerful where on your ENS record, for example, you could have like. here is my avatar and the avatar could have its like NFT metadata stored on Ceramic. And the benefit of Ceramic is you get the guarantees of like, you know, this file is going to be available forever and it's verifiable and, you know, version controlled and everything. But, you know, usually with NFT metadata if it's dynamic, it's just on someone's like, you know, web server and if they take their server down, then you actually lose access to that NFT. The other option is to put it in IPFS, but when you put it in IPFS the downside is you can't really update that data unless you like, you know, make another on-chain transaction to like change the hash of the file. And even if you do that, if you allow changing the hash of the file, you know, you can't really enforce to be able to like, you know, take away the assets or change it to something, you know, that's like not what it's supposed to be and whatnot. So with Ceramic it's built on top of IPFS and Rweave and these other decentralized storage protocols and it basically adds on like version controlled. so you can like look back at the full history of the file changed, like you can see all the previous versions of that file. You get the verifiability. so who authored this file, who actually like created it, you can like cryptographically verify that, you know, this artist with this wallet address did in fact, you know, create this file and then did in fact, you know, make these changes to it and whatnot. And you can really do really interesting things with it where what fields can change and how they can change and everything can be like you can configure that. so an artist could have like you know, for MetaFactory to give a practical example, our wearables are going to have their metadata on Ceramic. so in the future if there's any like new avatar formats or something or new wearable formats then we can you know, retroactively update them to add new support without users needing to do anything. And then, you know, we can have a single file or a single NFT that's linked to multiple different files so you can use that wearable in multiple different virtual worlds and it allows it to be forward compatible too. because like it's a tricky thing right now with like us being so early in this space so many things are changing all the time so it's hard to figure out like on a blockchain when everything's going to be permanent you know, you have to kind of commit to something and then if there's a better standard or like, you know, there's a better way of doing things in the future you kind of have to redo your NFTs and then like that's not great for the long term like provenance of the NFT or the long term value of the NFT if it's like, you know, going to be outdated in a year or two. So, you know, with Ceramic, it lets us, you know, have that future proofness which, you know, does a lot for the value of the NFT because you know that it's going to have utility, you know, far into the future. And, you know, beyond avatars and wearables, even things like home worlds, right, like let's say you like meet some random other person in a metaverse and then you load up their profile, they could have like you know, like a link to like this is my home world and that link is like a ceramic document and you like load into that and it can, you know, reference like here's, you know, like USD files for example. it's like Pixar's universal scene description, you know, in that single file you can actually have like all the different, you know, here's all the things in this space, here's like how it's all set up, all the moving characters like the animations, like a whole description of a metaverse scene or space you know, in a single file and yeah, linking between them and just having that like permanent storage guarantee where people can update their avatars and add wearables, remove them without having to like incur gas costs. and then you know, wherever they go even if they've never used the app before they load in with the avatar they have, the characters they have and you know, have that unified inventory. So it's like ceramic is essentially like another like, a parallel data layer, you know, to correspond with the on-chain data, where on-chain representation is the assets themselves which is like, you know, if you look at an NFT, it's a contract, you know that's holding this like record but the data itself is you know, rarely ever stored on-chain. so when it's off-chain, Ceramic allows it to be verifiable, permanently available in the future, you have those guarantees, and then dynamic and interactive and whatnot.

Avaer: I think what Ceramic allows for is a sort of decentralized social network to emerge, where you get all the features of a social network, but it's not owned by a single company. And you get things like, if you have the NFTs, you have your login solution through your wallet, and if you have the NFTs, you automatically have a profile page where maybe we know which avatar you're wearing. We can already do this, by the way, with just the ENS and profile pictures. But in the future, we could, for example, maybe set our profile picture to a VRM avatar, or maybe some sort of description of the things that your avatar is wearing, and then we can render a profile picture of that, where it's a cool video with your avatar wearing your loot, or with your pet, or

METADREAMER: what have you,

Avaer: even inside of your CryptoVoxels parcel. And all this can work together to create the kind of experiences that people are drawn to, where it feels like a social network, but the underpinnings are different. It's decentralized, it's all run through open protocols, and basically everybody can participate in a much more fair way.

METADREAMER: Yeah, I think the critical part with Ceramic is that it's truly user-owned data. So your profile, your avatars, your friends list, all these data points, it's truly owned by you, in that your account controls it, and you can give and revoke access for different apps to read and write to that data. Whereas in Web2 social media platforms, the data is owned by the platform itself, and because each platform has its own user account system, its own friends list, its own followers list, you have to set your bio and your profile picture separately in every single platform. This allows for the user themselves to become the platform and own that data, and have a singular source of truth that's interoperable with any other service or app that wants to build on top of it.

Jin: I just wanted to add a context. MetaDreamer is iron-sheffing it up with us at M3. We're all collaborating on Metaloot concepts as well.

Nicholas: Cool, the loot tie-in. Where's Tim Schell? So MetaDreamer, Ceramic is essentially like a dynamic, like IPFS is insufficient because it doesn't allow for mutable metadata, and so we have solutions like IPNS, which is good but requires like a server running in order to update the connection between the IPNS CID and the actual content. If I understand it correctly, I've never actually used it myself, but Ceramic is an alternative to that. that's more fully decentralized but doesn't require your participation. Is that right? And who does pay for the hosting?

METADREAMER: Yeah, so IPNS is something that's closer to Ceramic, but Ceramic does a lot more than that too. Another really powerful feature of Ceramic is shared data models, because in order to make sense of this, we need to sort of, or for interoperability to work, we need to sort of agree on like this is a data model of how you represent an avatar, or how you represent a friends list, or various things. And with Ceramic, you can create schemas and then create documents that conform to that schema, so you can enforce like these are the fields needed, and then you can discover like what are all the documents created from this schema. So that I think is like a key piece of interoperability and actually generating that data graph of interconnected data, not just this data is for this one thing and it can be changed or whatnot, but it can be connected to identities and other pieces of data. And in terms of how Ceramic runs, at the base of it, it's still IPFS, you can also store things on our weave. So it's a layer on top of that. It's compatible with multiple different blockchains. So that's another thing too, is like your wallet address, usually, you know, it's on a single blockchain, you know, maybe you have L2s and stuff with the same address, but with Ceramic, you're essentially using DIDs or like decentralized IDs, which is like the W3C standard for like decentralized identities, where you can have a singular ID. that's like linked to multiple different wallets across multiple different chains. And then the Ceramic like has its own node network. So it's, if you're familiar with graph protocol, it's kind of akin to graph protocol where people can, you know, like run graph protocol nodes, and then, you know, it does like all this stuff on top of IPFS. But even if Ceramic, like nodes stop running, you can still like fetch the data from from IPFS. So yeah, they have all these like, kind of like mechanisms on top. It's a bunch of like really powerful, useful, like tooling on top of like existing, you know, blockchains and storage protocols.

Nicholas: Is it something that you have to pay for?

METADREAMER: No.

Nicholas: Okay, so it's like a protocol, open protocol.

METADREAMER: Yeah. So I mean, you don't have to pay for it right now. But like you, in terms of like in production, you know, there might be some. so it's kind of like in, like, for example, you would pay for someone might create like a paid Ceramic node that you can, you know, that has a lot of compute power and a lot of bandwidth that can handle things and you might pay for that service. And so there's no like protocol fees per se, the payment or like the cost of it is just like running that infrastructure. So you can run your own node as well, if you want. And just pay for that with like whatever cloud provider, you just pay them directly or on your own hardware even. But yeah, there isn't like, in terms of actually using it, like, the user does not have any like cost to them. It doesn't cost anything like update data, or, you know, make changes or anything like that.

Nicholas: Okay, so similar to the graph, maybe like a dApp that was built on top of Ceramic would maybe pay some kind of like staking, stake some tokens or something in order to attract attention to serve the data?

METADREAMER: Yeah, something like that.

Nicholas: Cool. I have heard of Ceramic and it does seem to be like a project of integrity that people are ready to rely on. And it seems even maybe, I'm not sure exactly how it compares to Arweave. I guess Arweave, in that it is its own blockchain, can do some dynamic or a lot of dynamic things. I know for a while they were pushing like even doing NFTs directly on Arweave. But you said Ceramic depends on Arweave for some things?

METADREAMER: So you can. So by default, it stores all the like data in IPFS. But you can also, you know, anchor data to Arweave as well if you want. So it can leverage Arweave if you like. And then you can also anchor data on-chain as well if you want to like anchor it onto mainnet Ethereum, things like that. But yeah, Arweave is like, that's like kind of solving a different problem. I think like it's almost its own ecosystem of like these data applications being built on Arweave. I think Ceramic, it's like really trying to kind of unify the data that's sitting in like silos across like multiple different organizations. For example, like in terms of like it's becoming, I know a lot of people building DAO tooling or leveraging Ceramic for a lot of things. So if you guys are familiar with Coordinate, for example, in Coordinate, you're setting up like your user profiles for each contributor and your organization and like who are the members in each organization. And like that mapping of like who everyone is and who belongs to what organization and their permissions. That's like only within Coordinate. But now that they're moving to Ceramic, then people will be able to create additional sort of applications that can leverage that same data set and read and write to it. So normally in the Web2 world, you would like talk to Coordinate's API and then like, you know, maybe Coordinate would make an API to like what you read and write to that data. But all these would just be kind of like platform to platform, like one-off connections. Whereas in Ceramic, the underlying data itself, you know, the Ceramic is like the common API that everyone can read and write to. And that data gets owned by the user.

Nicholas: Very cool. I know that you can use it almost like what Dropbox was starting to become or like what iCloud Sync does, sort of like a portable data that belongs to you, but that you can sort of per bundle of data, allow different services to access and possibly modify.

METADREAMER: Yeah, exactly. And it's cool too. So another thing you can do with it is like these data streams. So let's say you have a certain document and on Ceramic, you can create like, you can sort of like consume that data and then create another document from it. So that like, when the original document updates, that sort of cascades out. So like, let's say there's, you know, a list of, you know, a bunch of different avatar builders on Ceramic. And then, you know, someone could create then another list that like filters through that or, you know, sort of augments that with additional data, you know, in some other way. And then these are all like data streams. So like, as soon as, you know, someone updates their profile or some part of that data graph is updated, all those updates kind of like cascade through that graph into like, you know, all the derivative states. So you essentially get these like real time decentralized data streams. And, you know, you can customize the logic as well of like, you know, how these updates are processed and applied. So, you know, that I think that we'll see like the use cases for that, like probably later on, once like people start using it for these like base initial use cases, but that's when it gets really powerful is when you can compose this data in, you know, many nested ways you can have like, you know, it's a fractal series of data streams from like multiple different applications. And, you know, you can imagine people can create like curation games or prediction markets, you know, on like, kind of synthesizing this data or kind of creating analytics or, you know, doing all sorts of interesting things.

Avaer: Yeah, for the metaverse, I think this just creates a field of ingredients that we can use.

Nicholas: Extremely cool. I'm curious. So, like, you know, there's a lot of excitement about on-chain metadata. So I'm wondering like... Oh, hold on, peace. I'm curious, like, what makes sense to put on ceramic and what makes sense to put on chain?

METADREAMER: Yeah, so the way I like to think about it is like anything that represents like an asset or a transfer of value that, you know, like a transfer of an asset or something valuable, things like that, that should be on chain. So in the metaverse, for example, if you're trading items, you know, sort of engaging in a battle that's going to like reward you with something like that stuff is probably going to be on chain. But things that, you know, it's not a real asset, you're not transferring data, it's just information. And you want the verifiability of the information, but, you know, you don't need global consensus of it. Like, for example, a tweet, right? Like if I'm making tweets, you know, you can put that on chain, but there isn't any real benefit in doing so because like a tweet is not an asset, it doesn't have real value. And in terms of like verifying that I made that tweet, you don't necessarily need global consensus. that, you know, this person made that tweet. You just, the only people that need to verify that I wrote that tweet are the people that care about that tweet, you know? So with that, you just have a signature. that, you know, my address signed that message and then that tweet went up. So anyone reading that tweet can verify that. it was indeed me that made it without needing like, you know, the traditional blockchain where you need that consensus. So that's where this like, you know, that's what we'll get. this like next level scalability for these data applications is, you know, usually you need network wide consensus. With this, you don't need that. The only people that care about the data are the only ones that need to verify it.

Avaer: Another excellent example, I think that's metaverse specific is profile pics. So when you're saying a profile pic, you want some sort of association between the picture and your actual identity. And the way that most people do it right now, I guess, is just like through Twitter. And then we're just trusting that Twitter has everything in order. But with ceramic, you can do this completely decentralized where the avatar that I'm wearing or the profile pic that I have, or even the things I'm wearing on top of my avatar, all of that can be data that's in ceramic. And it's cryptographically verified through the blockchain that either I own these assets, or I am the person who I claim to be, and this is my avatar. And then we don't need to rely on, for example, whatever the current rules that Twitter are enforcing are.

METADREAMER: Yeah, another so the other like really powerful part about ceramic is like its method for like authorization or authentication for like. who can update what data. So you know, the default is just like with a wallet, right? If you have a wallet, you can use that to like, authorize any changes or updates to your the data that that wallet owns. But there's this, there's other ways to do it too. So for example, you can have like an NFT DID method where a document on ceramic, the ability to like update or change it could be permissioned by, you know, do you hold this NFT or not? So you can imagine, this is actually a really cool project that's built on ceramic. that's essentially like tokenizing the physical world, or like, you know, minting NFTs for any like piece of land in the physical world. And using like Harberger taxes, essentially, so anyone can claim that NFT as their own. And then if they're willing to like pay that tax, essentially, and then if they own the NFT, it allows them to define what content is shown in that space. So when you think about like Snapchat's AR filters, or these sort of like persistent, you know, like placing a digital object in the physical world, and who can control like what digital objects are shown where that's how you can sort of make that happen is like store it all on ceramic. And then, you know, or even purely in the metaverse too, like you could imagine that like, there's a building, you know, like, let's say the metafactory, like, home base, and then the all the metadata for that building, like, you know, the actual like 3d file for it, any sort of characters that might be in it, all that metadata can be on ceramic, and then the ownership of that building can be defined by an NFT. And then anyone who holds the NFT has the ability to like manipulate that building or, you know, what's shown there, what's not shown there. And then you can like transfer the NFT, you know, you could put it in a multi-sig and make a DAO own it. And, you know, the NFT itself just becomes like, you know, this like common shelling point or API into like programming the ownership or the rules on who can update this metadata and how. So that's like another interesting way you can use ceramic.

Nicholas: Super cool. I know Dev and Ali have both been waiting to ask questions for a while. So Devon, shoot.

METADREAMER: Oh, yeah, I got my mic off.

aaronshoemaker: You know, I'm still in the crypto vein of this conversation. And the one that I would have asked would have been more of a leg question. No, no, I actually like really and I know Ali actually. I didn't see Ali got in here. So Ali, if you want to go for it, feel free.

Aly: Hey, how's it going? No, I just wanted to see if there was going to be some discussion of DAOs so I could chime in, but I haven't been in long enough and I don't think the conversation has taken that turn.

Nicholas: Not yet, although you never know.

Avaer: DAOs are cool. They're really hard to get right, though. Actually, just me and Jin with M3, like a lot of our vision for it was to ultimately become a DAO. But for me, it's about like, what does the DAO stand for and our incentives aligned? My worst nightmare is actually to start a DAO that's, quote unquote, super successful, which has like a huge market cap. And what it ends up doing is like making the very things that like I was fighting against, whether that's in terms of Metaverse or taking the wrong direction. So that's what keeps me up at night. But I think ultimately, like all of this has to be run through some sort of structure, which will probably look a lot like a DAO or many DAOs, hopefully, where there's checks and balances.

Nicholas: Yeah, I think there's a lot of experimentation left to be done with DAOs that don't promise 100% governance to token holders, but instead, from the outset, from before anybody purchases a token or acquires it, however they do, make clear what types of decisions governance will have an impact upon and other areas that maybe a core team of founders, you know, either forever or at least initially will have complete control over. So this is definitely something that I think there's a lot of room to experiment with.

Aly: I think there's also some consideration, right? Like what type of DAOs we're seeing in social DAOs, utility DAOs, security DAOs. And I think one needs to be really considerate of what it is you're achieving with the DAO and what it is that you're providing the token holders. So if you're giving them some sort of kickback or rupture or royalty, it's not enough to just say that the members are voting on trivial things. You really have to make it truly decentralized in which all the members are voting on the material aspects of the organization in order for you to avoid being kind of a securities and be able to stand and say, you know, all the members deserve this portion, this royalty or this rev that we're providing because they're equally contributing to all the decisions.

Nicholas: Yeah, I think it's for sure. There's going to be a range of things. I don't think that the only solution is that everything be decided by token holders. I think there are many, most are like that or at least strive to be like that right now. But I do think there's also like mixtures between either traditional corporate structures or a group of people who are deputized in order to make decisions on certain subjects. Because I think what you find in practice is that leaving absolutely everything up to community vote becomes quite difficult, possibly untenable. And it also ends up depending a lot, the quality of the decisions that are made ends up depending a lot on who owns the tokens. So it's not impossible. But I think some of the more successful large DAOs that we see right now do not throw every question. Like the community is not asked for input on many of the decisions that allow for the thing to run day to day. We'll see if that can be fixed.

Jin: It slows things down too.

Nicholas: But it's also like if you gave the sushi community the power to decide compensation for devs and the result is it's in complete disarray. And maybe it'll turn out great. But by comparison, something like Uniswap does not operate in the same way. There are a select group of people who are making most of the decisions about what's being built and how it's being done. And then some decisions are thrown open too. And hopefully those become more decentralized over time. But it's not one or the other.

Aly: What are your thoughts on having? a lot of these DAOs have guilds in place where they will kind of narrow down the options to two or three options and then present that for the rest of members where the entire DAO is still voting or contributing to it. But the decision making has really been boiled down into one or two decisions or options, I should say.

METADREAMER: Yeah, I think with the concept of DAOs too, especially now, there's a lot of people starting DAOs that aren't really DAOs. And a lot of projects sort of exiting to community and this whole token and voting thing. And you see a lot of DAOs just kind of devolve into governance games where it starts becoming less about what's the real purpose of what we're trying to do and how about how do we govern ourselves and how should we vote and who should vote and how should do. It almost becomes a distraction. And I think there's a difference too between DAOs which operate more as a guild of where all the members and token holders are people actively contributing and coordinating with each other versus DAOs where there's people working and doing things. And then on the other side, there's this huge community of people just holding tokens and commenting and things like that. So for me, I think the governance and decision making in DAOs, it should be very much focused on who has the expertise in this decision and give the decision making ability to them and then delegate responsibility. And you want to minimize governance as much as possible. But you still need mechanisms to sort of see who did what work, what was valuable, what wasn't valuable. And this kind of gets into retroactive public goods funding as well where you can use things like Coordinate and SourceCred where everyone's just doing work and then people have periods of reviewing what value was created in the past few months and distribute tokens and give ownership or voting rights to those people. And then that way, it becomes more of a duocracy. The people that get shit done and move the organization closer to its goal will be the ones rewarded. And it's not easy. It's harder in practice, of course, because you need to first define what is that goal that you want to get to and you need mechanisms in terms of actually assessing and in a decentralized way, kind of attributing value to these things. I'm working on a lot of tooling around this, just from what we run into at MetaFactory.

Nicholas: Can you tell us a little bit about what is? maybe MetaFactory is the most successful example? or from all of your DAO experience, what do you find works best for a contributor compensation?

METADREAMER: Yeah, so it's a few things. So what we've kind of settled on now is one is a baseline, almost UBI type thing, where it's like, here's the minimum amount you need, just pay your bills every month. And this would be given to people who have sort of proven with some contributions and are working at least part time or something. But the main compensation comes from a combination of SourceCred and Coordinate. So SourceCred is kind of like the objective kind of measurements of value creation, where you're measuring activity, whether it's on GitHub or Discord or whatever it may be. And then Coordinate is more so like the subjective side where it's peer evaluation. And then you can actually put those two together and even use them as feedback loops where based on the objective metrics, you can assign people voting weights and coordinate for how much they can allocate for the subjective valuation. And then once you kind of combine these different methods, that's what we found works best. But it's still not ideal and we're working on improving it even more. In my pin profile, I talk about MetaCred, which is what I'm working on to more directly make this work. And I think so much of it too is like unlearning how we think about organizations, because I think DAOs, we should think less of them as like monolithic, singular organizations with some subset or groups of members inside, but more so like constellations of overlapping groups of people, all coordinating. Because the stuff that I do in crypto and Web3 is like, it generates value for many different DAOs. And there's a lot of overlap between them. And in a traditional organization, you have like, each company has its own marketing department, has its own design department and whatnot. In DAOs, you can actually have structures where two different organizations are sharing the same design department. In MetaFactory now, for example, because we're growing more, we almost are fractalizing where I think a DAO, once it grows to a certain size, it should essentially split up into multiple sub DAOs. And now one of the sub DAOs we're creating is like this whole Metaverse team that Jin's a part of. And we have Boombox working on virtual productions, wearables, like a lot of cool stuff there. But this Metaverse team, there's nothing stopping this Metaverse team for also doing virtual production for other DAOs. And the value that they create for other DAOs can actually flow back to the main MetaFactory DAO, because we can have this cryptographic record of this causal chain that this DAO is from MetaFactory. And we have this incentive alignment between this sub DAO and MetaFactory DAO. And then when any value this DAO creates anywhere else, that can all like flow back, you know, almost as like royalties, you can imagine, like contribution royalties.

Nicholas: I've got two questions for you. First of all, why sub DAO? Can it not just be a DAO?

METADREAMER: Yeah, I mean, so I would say it's a sub DAO, as in like, all these, so we have the Metaverse working group, we have like a fashion production working group too, that's in like the real world doing like physical production, content working group. So all these DAOs are still using the same robot token. So they're internally, they're sort of structured differently, they can make their own decisions internally. But they're all sort of bound together with this like one token, which is like, you know, our token robot. And, you know, when we first started MetaFactory, we didn't want to do a token. And we were like, trying to figure out ways to make it work. And then, like, we had we had to create one out of necessity, essentially, because we realized there's a lot of like, you know, we had like different groups forming and like different brands doing different drops. And, you know, all of them were kind of like, not incentive aligned with each other. And it was like, you know, almost like, oh, we want more for our drop. or like, you know, almost this like tug of war starting to happen. And so the token was necessary to actually align this incentives between all these players and, you know, this ecosystem we're creating. And I think that's another like mistake a lot of DAOs make is that they just like, you know, they're not really intentional about their token or why they have a token or what the token's purpose is. And I think, you know, you should only add a token when you know that, like, you have a strong need for it and it can, you know, serve this purpose. So.

Nicholas: So basically, the thing that ties them together is a shared token. Yeah. And then but they all have their own treasuries.

METADREAMER: Yeah, but like, like these treasuries, like they can have their own multi-sig and, you know, have their own funding, but the funding, the initial funding from that treasury can would still come from like that parent DAO. And eventually, you know, there's nothing stopping that this DAO or like group of people from like, you know, becoming fully independent as well, or, you know, launching their own token when it makes sense, if it makes sense. So, you know, it's it's very much I see it as like, you know, much like nature, these sort of like, it's like a garden, you know, where there's like things growing and things, you know, kind of like dying off as they're not needed anymore and didn't work out. And then like. if things grow big enough to like, you know, work out well and scale better and they need to like, you know, they could operate more efficiently as their own DAO separate from us, then, you know, that can still happen. And, you know, it's much more like fluid and dynamic in that way. And, you know, you're able to like restructure your organizations in real time to respond to like the changing conditions of, you know, the business or economic environment.

Nicholas: Is there a mandated treasury tech or governance tech that they're using? or it's a multi-sig and beyond that they can choose what they want?

METADREAMER: Yeah, so like one, the other, another thing actually that binds a lot of this together is like we want to be using the same tooling for doing our compensation and for doing our, you know, rewards and all that sort of stuff. So we want all these teams to be using SourceCred and Coordinate because if we're all on that same tooling, then we can all work on improving it together. And, you know, you can start, you know, creating bridges between other organizations as well who are using that same tooling. So that, you know, building out that interoperability is really critical, I think. So it's not mandated per se because like, you know, I think everything in this space is just like based on consent, right? Like if people don't really want to do something, you can't force them to do it. But it's advantageous to sort of have a unified set tooling because you can work on improving it together. And, you know, the value of improving it compounds more if like, you know, more people are using it rather than if just one person's using it.

Avaer: By the way, I think Ali has something to say.

Nicholas: Oh yeah, Ali, go for it.

Aly: Thanks. Yeah, just wondering, just because I help projects set this up, I'm curious, right? What legal structure do you have in place? And I only ask this because there's a gazillion DAOs. in practice, very few are actually formed. Some don't think they're necessary. And I guess until regulation starts cracking down on them, I guess you could evade it. But there are certain benefits to having one structured, such as like your IP, right? So even when you start breaking down into sub-DAOs or doing mergers, which we're starting to see DAOs combine and create a merger, you know, how is the transfer of intellectual property protected or being able to enter into certain contractual agreements on behalf of the DAO? Because if you don't have it pegged to a legal entity, that becomes almost impossible to do. So I'm curious how you guys are doing that. And also how you're accounting for, you said that you kind of have like a UBI system in which you're paying some of your members. How is that being done? Are they getting a 1099 or are the tax considerations implications being addressed?

METADREAMER: Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, with MetaFactory, since we were operating in the physical world and producing real things and selling them and, you know, having revenue from day one, a lot of the initial work we did was just like the legal engineering of figuring out how to structure this whole thing. So what we did is essentially there's an LLC, a MetaFactory LLC, and then there's like the on-chain DAO, and they're two separate entities. And then there's essentially like a social contract that the LLC is going to act in, you know, the best interest of the DAO. And with the LLC, all the sort of engagements with like, you know, the legacy, like service providers and paying taxes and all that is like handled by the LLC. And then the actual like all the information, like the profits, the losses, all the paperwork, all the like, you know, structure and everything about the LLC is made available to the top token holders of the DAO so that they have that transparency of knowing like, you know, how things are operating and whatnot. And, you know, everyone in is compensated, you know, by the DAO with this governance token separately. And, you know, no one takes a salary from the LLC as well, the LLC at all.

Aly: So, you know, this is being compensated through the token or actual like? So they're just given more of your native token?

METADREAMER: Yep. Yeah. So and then in terms like that UBI setup where we're still working on figuring it out, we haven't deployed it yet. We have plans to deploy it. Initially, it'll likely just be, you know, USDC paid on chain. But it's we have to like understand, you know, all the like different areas people are in and like how to handle that, like whether we take that policy of like, you know, you're responsible for your own taxes and, you know, treat it as like freelancers versus more employment. I think, you know, it's going to still lean towards like, you know, treating people as like freelancers or just service providers. And then, you know, people invoicing us and then us paying it out where we're trying out this cool new DAP called Utopia that Inuit knows is safe to like automate payments and stuff.

Nicholas: So can you tell us a little bit about the token? What are the tokenomics like? Was it cap token supply? The DAO kept a bunch? How did it work?

METADREAMER: So the yeah, there's a cap token supply of 420,000 robot. The initial distribution went to all the people that bought the first drop, the Genesis drop, which is like the Genesis bomber jacket. And then from there, they were sort of, you know, in control of the, you know, how this token works and, you know, the treasury of the full 420k amount. So, you know, early on, we proposed this sort of, you know, token distribution schedule, like how these tokens should be allocated, whatnot. And then all those people voted that in to like sort of ratify it. And so the general way it works right now is we and I think for all DAOs, if you are trying to design tokenomics, it's like super simple. The only thing you have to do is like, think about what it is that you want people to do and then give them tokens for doing that thing. So in the case of MetaFactory, we wanted people to buy merch, wanted people to design merch, and we wanted people to sort of like, you know, build out the platform, you know, do community support, do all these things. So those are the things that we distributed tokens for. We didn't have any token sale. We didn't have any sort of like, you know, like mining program or anything. It was focused on just, you know, giving like governance tokens to people who contributed in some way to the growth of the platform. So right now, anyone who buys stuff off MetaFactory will get like robot tokens, you know, proportional to like how much they spent as like, you know, kickback for, you know, like buying merch, essentially like loyalty points, even. You can think about it. Same with designers. Anyone who designed merch for MetaFactory earns this token. And it's really cool because, you know, normally if you were to just like do a merch drop, let's say we sell like a hundred shirts for a hundred bucks each, you know, 10,000, you know, 30% of that's just from the production cost, you know, maybe 7,000 left. And we could like split that between, you know, MetaFactory and the designer and be like, you know, a few thousand dollars, not that significant. But instead, and then with that too, we'd also have to worry about taxes and, you know, all these like implications of like how to do that revenue sharing. So in the case of MetaFactory, it's super clean because all the revenue just goes to the LLC. And then, you know, people just get this governance token, and then the token itself can, you know, the people that did the design work early on, the amount of token, like the value of the tokens they got is like, you know, tens of thousands of dollars now, whereas they would have just had like, you know, maybe a couple grand if they just took that fiat payment. And also, you know, because all these, you know, designers who did stuff, they all hold the same token, they're all incentive aligned with each other. And it's not so much like, oh, I want the next design. And like, you know, like this one person doing something doesn't really benefit anyone else. But when everyone's holding in this ecosystem, everyone's holding the same token. You know, if someone does a dope drop, it benefits everyone else. And like everyone celebrates the fact that, you know, there's a very successful, awesome drop to happen instead of being like, oh, you know, like, I wish I made that money instead, or things like that. So yeah, in that way, like, and even with the producers as well, like, we're actually bringing all the production in house now. So for next year, we started, we opened our first micro factory last week, actually in Berlin. And we'll be in January, we'll have one in New York as well. So we're actually going to be distributing tokens like all the way up the chain as well to like people, you know, the guy who sold the shirt together, you know, he'll have a share of those tokens based on how well that product sells.

Nicholas: And how have you found? that is for like contributor retention over time, people are people are excited to receive the robot tokens, it sounds like?

METADREAMER: Yeah. You know, it's for a lot of communities, too. It's like a win win. Because like, you know, the two choices you have is like, you know, figure out how to do the merch yourself. You have to like, you know, first of all, find a provider and a supplier to do it, you have to pay for it, you have to like handle all the headaches of like production and shipping, logistics, all that. For Metafactory, you know, we don't charge you anything, we pay for all the costs up front. You know, you just come to us with a design, we even have our in house designers, we can like do the drop, we'll handle the logistics, all the shipping, everything. And then on top of that, you get, you know, paid. in this token, it's actually worth more than you would have made if you did everything on your own. So in that way, it becomes like a win win where, you know, it's much less painful, much easier, and much more lucrative for them to like, engage with Metafactory than it is to, you know, try to figure on their own. And just from that, like, we've built like a really strong, loyal community. And this kind of goes back to like what Avia was saying, you know, a lot of DAOs or projects, they like, blow up too fast. And that can almost be the death of those projects where too much growth too fast can just like, you know, bring in the wrong type of people. And, you know, make it unsustainable. And yeah, you can like pump your token and make a bunch of money that way. But it doesn't actually, you know, help you get towards your goal. And in fact, can hurt you in getting towards your goal. So, you know, Metafactory, we've been operating for like, you know, almost three years now, you know, one of like the very like, I saw the Twitter from 2019. Yeah, so late 2019, like, it's a long time since in the crypto world. And, you know, we're still relatively small, we've been like really intentional in terms of like, how we grow, how much like we, you know, like, we don't try to hype ourselves up too much, try to keep it like, you know, as tight knit as possible. And, you know, really just attract those people that really see what we're doing and the value in what we're trying to do. And, you know, can provide that value as well. And that I think, you know, will lead to like, like more sustainable, like growth longer term, and a more like healthy ecosystem. overall, you know, versus just like, and the whole method of like, you know, injecting a whole bunch of capital and attention into a project and hoping to get somewhere it can work. But usually, you know, those things kind of die out. You know, it's like, it's like a sugar rush.

Nicholas: Totally. Same thing in NFTs. Same thing happens. Jin, what's up?

Jin: I just want to mention how timely it all is. With after all the Nike and Adidas news that, you know, MetaFactory kind of can plug in, it's still like a DAO, still like completely community owned. It's not like there's Nike or Adidas tokens, you know. So I just find it all very timely and interesting with, you know, the metaversing stuff and MetaFactory and how it can plug into these things and be all truly like owned by the people. And I think the tokenomics can be abstracted to other types of DAOs. It's really worked out quite nicely.

Nicholas: Yeah. So if you buy a MetaFactory piece, do you get a web-averse compatible NFT?

METADREAMER: You will be getting them, yes. We're finalizing our like wearable standard with like the metadata on ceramic and stuff. We're going to like retroactively distribute NFTs for everything we've ever sold. And yeah, those will be web-averse compatible.

Avaer: I think one thing that's really understated is how MetaFactory, for example, exists because there's products being released. And the best DAOs really need, I feel, some sort of direction like that where we're shipping something. Naval actually has a really good post on this on how basically groups refuse to admit failure. And if all you're doing in your DAO is like we have a whole bunch of money and we're just kind of going to, I don't know, appreciate ourselves, that's really not going to be sustainable in the long term. It's the evolutionary force of trying to ship things and improve the world that really drives, I think, innovation. And that's where I see like the best DAOs headed, MetaFactory being one of them.

METADREAMER: Yeah, I think it's like, you know, there's very few DAOs that actually have like some sort of product or service or like, you know, are generating some sort of value. And with any economy, like the bedrock of any economy is like, you know, productive human labor, right? Money and like resources and assets are. they're all sort of like. they're there, but nothing happens unless people are doing things right. So in a lot of DAOs, it's like, especially in crypto bullrun, where like everyone's like so rich, no one wants to like do anything. You know, you get that issue of like, especially like social DAOs or something. It's cool. Yeah, you can like have a group chat. But I think the key thing is like, how can we actually, you know, figure out how to coordinate each other and like accomplish things and do things. And, you know, it's been crazy, especially for like the legacy fashion industry, where there's a lot of people who knew nothing about crypto. And the first like touchpoint in crypto was like earning like a bunch of robot tokens from MetaFactory and then like, you know, becoming a part of this DAO. And, you know, in the legacy world, like especially in fashion, right, like huge brands like Zara, they like, you know, suck up all the value from the ecosystem. And like the owners and shareholders of Zara, all this sort of value accrues to them. And, you know, even like the idea of brands themselves, like the consumerism, like, you know, you know, the consumers are sort of paying and flowing all the capital to these brands. But the value of the brand is actually, you know, comes from the people that decide to wear it or represent it or, you know, actually, you know, create that thing in the culture that makes this brand popular. But consumers don't have any sort of upside in that. And the same people with the people working for these companies or these, you know, the fashion designers, pattern makers, they're just paid like kind of minimal salaries. You know, if something blows up, they don't get any shared upside in that. So when they come to MetaFactory and, you know, we initially just hire them for like, you know, normal, like Upwork or Fiverr, like, you know, pay them a normal amount. And then later on, like you may pay them 500 bucks, then later on drop them $5,000 worth of a governance token. They're like, mind is blown. It's like, why did you pay me more than I asked for? Like, that doesn't make sense in their world. And then that gets them to go down this rabbit hole and realize what all this really is and that they have like, you know, ownership in this thing. And, you know, alongside all these other people that are creating value and, you know, all the value instead of occurring to like, you know, stakeholders or investors or owners, it accrues to the people actually like building and creating value. So, you know, both on the creating side and also on the consumer side where, you know, the line between like a consumer and a creator or the brand itself starts to become blurred. And there's like a path where, you know, you can just start off buying something, but then, you know, end up actually influencing that in the future and creating with it and owning it.

Avaer: That's how the best things are made.

Nicholas: It's interesting. Revenue first, Dows. It's a pretty cool idea. Jungle Color, how's it going?

METADREAMER: Yeah, I was just trying to follow up on Alex's question with regards to the legal side of things. Is there a legal group, you know, people within the manufacturer, people that should handle legal issues and questions? Not like an active legal group per se. If you guys know Lex Note or Gabe Shapiro, he helped like do a lot of the original legal work. But yeah, coming into the new year as we scale, we're probably going to like, you know, do a whole revamp on that. And, you know, we have a lot more work to do now that we're sort of growing and, you know, expanding what we're doing. Thank you. And the reason I ask is, you know, we already have, we're in the process of forming a Dow. We already have LLCs formed in the process. And if we wanted to plug into the manufacturer, I was just wondering how that would work out legally. That's my question. Thank you.

Nicholas: Yeah, I think it's, everyone is figuring out how to organize themselves legally, and there's lots of different options and not enough lawyers to go around.

METADREAMER: Yeah, I think the reality of it is, is that like the like policies and like tax laws and legal structures like really need to evolve to meet like what these new organizations and ways of working are. I think that's what's going to happen. long term is like, we have to like, you know, change the policy rather than like, you know, water down the tech to conform to like legacy policy. So that's one thing I hope to that like matter of fact, you can help figure out. is this like, being at the forefront and trying to go through these like legal things is like, how can we like innovate here, like, you know, improve on it. And you know, if you guys, you should check out LexDAO, they're doing some really cool legal engineering stuff as well. For example, like there's a, they have a dApp that you can actually create like an LLC just by minting an NFT, like an actual like legal LLC without like, you know, doing like any paperwork. besides, you know, going minting the NFT on that dApp. So there's a lot of cool stuff happening there. But yeah, I'm not a but I have a lot of cool people doing cool legal engineering stuff with crypto and Web3.

Avaer: I think in the short term, it makes a lot of sense, though, to have kind of the split world where there is some sort of LLC that can do a lot of the Web2 type stuff. And then you have the DAO that can kind of orchestrate what the LLC is doing.

METADREAMER: Yeah, that's, I think that's the best way right now. Because like, the Web3 DAO world is so different than like legacy world that trying to like, have one entity, like be across both is just like, you know, really limits the potential. Whereas, you know, you can have a DAO be a DAO, and then an LLC act as a normal LLC, and then just create like a bridge between them. So yeah, for MetaFactory, the LLC is essentially like an oracle into the real world. That's like kind of minimize as possible.

Avaer: Yeah, that's where we ended up with WebReverse as well, like kind of similar structure.

Nicholas: It's good, but there's still questions remaining about the issuance of the token. And I mean, I guess it depends. In the case of Robot, it sounds like you're not making revenues on the blockchain directly. So you're not capturing value on the blockchain. So I didn't quite catch where the revenues paid in. If I buy a piece of merch, I pay in ETH and or I pay in USDC.

METADREAMER: So you can you can pay with your credit card, you can pay with USDC, you can pay with, you know, whatever you want.

Nicholas: It's like a Coinbase Commerce or something?

METADREAMER: DAO. So yeah, this is like, this is the thing. I think the thing that people kind of like get tripped up on, too, is like, for MetaFactory, none of the revenue goes to the token holders. And you know, you normally think like, oh, like, why is the token worth anything if none of the goes to token holders? But people don't realize that, like, and, you know, for us, it was like legal reasons, but also like the value in what we're doing is like so much more than just like the revenue we're making off the merch. And, you know, it's hard to sort of unlearn that mindset that, you know, there is many forms of value outside of just monetary value. But once you realize that, like, you know, people engaging in MetaFactory, there's the value in the community, the, you know, collaboration with other people, access to, you know, both like brands and communities and, you know, like a user market as well. The, you know, doing cool stuff in the Metaverse, it's like virtual production stuff we're doing, setting these new standards, it's like all these like other forms of value that are created that goes beyond just selling merch. And, you know, the like that can all be like captured in a non-monetary way with like people's, you know, how much people would value holding this token and getting access to these channels. So, yeah, when you hold Robot, you get access to like, you know, the certain Discord channels, depending on how much you hold, you get more or less access, like various different perks and whatnot. So, you know, I think too many DAOs try to like figure out, oh, how do we like, you know, that's where they get into like legal issues. It's like, how do we tie like the revenue that's being generated with like the token in a way that's legally compliant? And that's really hard to do. But if you just like, you know, there's absolutely no revenue sharing with the token whatsoever. And, you know, there's other sort of avenues for value to accrue and, you know, value to flow around, then that can be like much better. And, you know, for us too, it's great because it helps filter for our community as well, where if you're, you know, if you want to like come into MetaFactory just for gains, like that's not really what we're here for. The value we create is all like downstream and kind of like multi-dimensional. And if you're excited about what we're doing, then you want to be a part of MetaFactory, right? Like your credibility is like virtual wearables and metaverse standards and DAO coordination and tooling and whatnot. That's what, so we attract those people. And that works out well for us because it keeps a lot of the moon boys.

Nicholas: Are there actors within the ecosystem that only accept robot token or it's more than it's just what is paid? Yeah.

METADREAMER: So robot token is not a payment token at all. So it's mostly just a governance token. When we were originally like figuring out how to make this work, that's like, you know, a common thing people think of is like, oh yeah, I'm going to use this token as like a currency within this ecosystem. But, you know, using as a currency is really hard because you have to have some sort of basis, right? Whereas we have a lot of really good currencies already, like Ether and USDC and, you know, all these other assets that we can use that are more suitable for that use case. And, you know, it gets into like all these using as a payment token. that kind of makes all the incentives weird too, where like, if the value of the token like fluctuates a lot, then, you know, it really like trips up how you would price certain things. And if we're being, you know, if MetaFactory is being paid in its own native token to like produce these things, then we have to then sell that token to like pay down costs, which, you know, it's kind of weird for the DAO, the operations of the DAO to result in like sell pressure on the token. So in that ways, like, you know, it didn't make sense to use as a payment token.

Nicholas: So people are excited to receive the token because they can vote in governance proposals for MetaFactory and potentially also the sub DAOs.

METADREAMER: Yeah. So yeah, governance power there, access to the community, those are the main things. We're working on this thing called the curation game as well, where you'll be able to stake your robot tokens on future drops that are coming out to sort of signal if you think it's be a hot drop or not. And then the ones that have the most signal will go into production. And then based on how well they sell, you'll get rewarded for curating it. So it's kind of similar to sub graph curation on a graph protocol, but, you know, curating drops. So we have necessity for that now because like there's so much like we have probably like 10 requests for people to do drops with us every single week. And that's like way more than we can handle. So, you know, it's hard to like filter through that. Like what should we do? Shouldn't we do? But we can like let the community, you know, help govern that and, you know, use this staking mechanism. So to like come to these decisions. And I think that's another way. like people aren't like, I think, creative enough on how to structure their DAO governance. Like not everything just has to be like yes or no votes on like individual decisions. You can have things like, you know, people staking on like multiple different parallel proposals to signal which ones they think are valuable. And then, you know, not everyone needs to be involved in every decision. And, you know, you get sort of you get to sum together the collective intelligence in a much more nuanced way. And, you know, governance is like continuous in that sense. It's not like yes, no, and this goes through or doesn't go through. And it's like, you know, slowing things down. But instead it's like enabling things to move faster and sort of, you know, it's much more integrated into like the purpose and the operating mode of the DAO.

Nicholas: PeaceNode's microphone isn't working, but he had a question for the Webiverse guys. What type of tools do you plan on integrating into Webiverse that enable creatives like streamers, bloggers and fans on the internet? Tools outside of on-chain ID and inventory or produce or produced content on a drive. So I guess the question is, like, how does this connect with web to social kind of social media content?

Avaer: Sure. So there's a lot of technologies like. this is a really multifaceted question. One of the things that we're doing, for example, is if you have some sort of token on ceramic where it's linked as your profile picture avatar, then we have a rendering engine where you can just hit a URL once again with just your ENS name. And then you can get out a rendered video of your character wearing whatever wearables you attach to the VRM on ceramic. So it's things like that where you can have basically social media previews of something that's inside of a virtual world. But there's a lot of other pieces like integrating with various web APIs that these services are providing, like whether that's for Twitch streaming or making sure that the progressive web app implementation works well on the Oculus Quest. These are all things that are basically inflate and doable. It's just we need the manpower to do it. But the hope is we can just use all the existing APIs and plug in directly through all these different services that people are already using. Another excellent example is actually the Discord integration, where basically we have a bot that's running. You can mint directly in there. You can see your inventory and you can, with a link, just hop directly into a virtual world. And every inventory item that you preview, you can just type .preview and the ID of the token, and then you get a fully rendered version of that displayed in Discord. I think the technology is all there. It's all available on the web. We just need to glue it all together with the appropriate standards. That's what we're doing.

aaronshoemaker: So now that the conversation shifted back to over to this. So, you know, I'm pretty behind, man. I was in the Exokit Discord years back. How did you, how has the product grown? Is this even the same thing as Exokit? Did you use any existing legacy code for that? I just don't understand how you got from where you are right now, all the way back then and vice versa.

Avaer: The goal of Exokit was, I think the goals haven't changed at all. The goal of Exokit was essentially a frustration with the Chrome team not moving fast enough to build the kind of open metaverse experiences that we want. We are actually using all of the code from basically way back for the last 10 years that we've been doing this, even before Exokit with projects like Xeo, which is kind of a Minecraft fork on the web, or not a Minecraft fork, but a re-implementation of Minecraft on the web that uses Martian cubes, which had some really early crypto integration about seven years ago. That was back when we were loading rare pepes, if you remember what that is, on Counterparty, and we were just loading that up in the web world. But yeah, basically that evolved into Exokit, where we were just bumping up against the browser limitations. And all of the Exokit techs, including the stuff like the avatars that we're using, just carries directly over to WebRippers. That's the beauty of open source. And I think that's an excellent example of us showing the way of how these things should be built, where if it is open source and we're all collaborating, then we can actually build a mountain. Ultimately, that's way better than the offerings from these closed companies with some really weird business models like Meta.

aaronshoemaker: Yeah, 100%. So I guess just a more direct question would be, when did Exokit transform into WebRippers? Was there a specific date that the product name changed? I know that sounds like a ridiculous question, but I'm just curious.

Avaer: I think the most interesting question there would be, when did we change the name of the Discord? I don't know the actual date of that. But these projects are all basically using the same open source code base, and a lot of the community has carried over as well.

Jin: I can probably chime in as a third party, where I think it transitioned over because Exokit was building this infrastructure for composable like WebXR and Interop. And the thing is, it was lacking content and it was lacking incentives for open source developers to collaborate together. So we've been discussing crypto concepts and NFTs for years during M3. But yeah, so during M3, it really figured out that the browser direction that Exokit was headed to needed really dank content to power it and monetization models to sustain it. And that's how seedlings of Webiverse came about, especially during the hackathon, where it was like, "How do we onboard these XR peeps into Web3?". And you could just talk to this Discord bot to play around with crypto without ever having to install a wallet. And then from Discord, you can progressively enhance your experience into web-based virtual worlds.

Avaer: I think another part of it was just the realization, like maybe two years ago, that NFTs are probably the best hope that we have to build an open metaverse. And that's where this whole idea of the internet cinematic universe came into being, where we can have these assets and we can use them to produce things in a way that the value loops back to creators. I think that was the main thing that was missing from Exokit, where we were constantly buffing up against the same things that we're still buffing up against, kind of trying to inspire people to be more interoperable. One way to do that is to just build the interoperability solutions ourselves. And we got pretty far with that. Once again, for example, being able to wear a VRM avatar inside of Half-Life Alyx. But really, to move these things forward beyond just prototypes, we need to be able to have conversations with, for example, people at Valve, and develop the standards and the interoperability protocols that allow all this content to just seamlessly blend together. And that's where Exokit took a turn towards, like, "Okay, how do we figure out the right systems to make sure that people can work on these things and be paid to do so, and everybody's cool with it?" As opposed to just a few freedom-fighting volunteers working for nothing.

Nicholas: Someone from the audience isn't able to speak. Altrine has a question, and that is, "What is the best technology you've seen for integrating wallets into VR experiences?".

Avaer: I think most of the projects that support VR do not support crypto, and vice versa. So, I don't know if there's any real bright spots that I can point to there.

Nicholas: So, for wallet access inside of Webverse, that's something you wrote yourself?

Avaer: Yes. But there are also other people who are developing a fork of a browser, which can, for example, support Metamask inside of Oculus. I forget the name of it. If anybody remembers, you can post it.

Jin: I do recall you made a couple crypto wallets that worked in XR, though. Wasn't that just Metamask.js?

Avaer: Yeah, that was. That was basically just the Exokit integration, though. The main problem with these wallet solutions is, ideally, you're going through the systems that the user already has in place. They have their own Metamask wallet, they have it in their Chrome browser. As long as you're using WebXR, that's great. But on a headset like Oculus, you don't really have access to Metamask, and I don't think they're currently allowing it or ever going to allow Metamask to be an extension that you can install. So, the way that some other developers have done it is just fork the browser itself and make it available as an APK, which you can sideload onto the headset, which at least is possible. There's also Fusedman.

Jin: He just streams from Unity straight to WebXR, which I think is cool because it all happens on your desktop, which is your trusted computing environment instead of trying to do transactions and you're bringing your wallet into meta-owned hardware and software, which is, I don't know, psychologically not the coziest place to do transactions.

Avaer: Yeah, that's not bad if you can make it work, but it still does require you to essentially have two VR environments. You have to have the headset and then you also have to the desktop. It feels like the future is moving more towards mobile first.

METADREAMER: It also reminds me of, Jin, when you gave those demos of AR and VR, where you can be in a certain virtual world but then have a common AR overlay that's persistent across any virtual world you be in. I see the future of wallets being this overlay experience on top of the underlying platform rather than each platform integrating itself with the wallets, maybe long-term eventually, but the AR on top of VR strategy seems like a much quicker or efficient path to get there.

Avaer: Shoutouts to the WebXR team, at least at Oculus, because they actually implemented the feature that I proposed four years ago, which is just basically compositor layers where you can have different render layers that are blending together, which I hope is a stepping stone to being able to run, for example, a WebXR app on top of another one. But I don't know if they're going to allow that anytime soon, especially if it allows any sort of crypto to leak in, because I don't know if they want to touch that with a 10-foot pole right now.

aaronshoemaker: Which team is that? Is that Lachlan?

METADREAMER: Or is that...

aaronshoemaker: who's working under that right now?

Avaer: I'm talking about Rick. It was Rick that actually, I think, implemented this. Rick Kevin here.

METADREAMER: Okay, gotcha.

Nicholas: All right, well, we've been going for three and a half hours, so we should probably close up pretty soon. I'm curious if any of the Webiverse guys want to shill anything. Webiverse.com, Webiverse Discord, anything else that people should know about?

Avaer: We're launching a new site, but check out the Twitter. We're dropping something soon. Very cool. Also join the Discord. If you're at all interested in collaborating with us, we're all ears. Let's make something great.

METADREAMER: I'll just say it.

aaronshoemaker: I was always hesitant to even mention this, but yeah, I'm interested in collaborating. Basically, I saw this as the same problem, and I actually took the opposite direction. I used to build electric skateboards, so I decided to take hardware engineering and just go build a pair of smart glasses that vertically integrate everything we've discussed. I think that's the best solution. I know it's like a bunch of overhead, super cost prohibitive, but I was like, "All right, fuck it. I see the problem, and I'm not going to do nothing about it.". So yeah, I'm interested in talking further, and this would be how you mitigate or at least avoid the deep hands of meta into at least the next generation of hardware.

Avaer: I actually think we can win this fight if we all work together, and I know that sounds crazy, but I've been working on this stuff for 10 years, and I never thought it would happen, and now you have Mark Zuckerberg announcing that it's going to happen one way or the other. I just want to make sure that happens the right way.

aaronshoemaker: Oh, dude, it's terrifying. That's why a couple of years back, I was like, "All right, time to study photonics.". There's no other solution other than to learn firmware engineering and study the property of light. It's just no other solution. So yeah, let's talk further, man. I think that the device is coming out next year, and I guess this month was the first time I publicly disclosed anything at Decentral Miami, and I think it was the first day of this month. But yeah, there's a YouTube video recording being posted over the weekend. But yeah, let's talk further.

Avaer: Awesome. I'd love to try it.

Nicholas: Hey, everybody. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. I do this show every Friday afternoon after work, so every week it's a different subject. This week, Metaverse. Next week, I'm not sure what we've got lined up. Oh, I think maybe corruptions. The corruptions crew is going to come through. So please do join me for the next episode, and otherwise follow me on Twitter and everybody else. And it's been lovely talking to you all. Thanks for coming, and thanks for all that great information about MetaFactory and MetaDreamer.

METADREAMER: Yeah, no, happy to share something about MetaFactory. I think this DAO stuff in general and coordination and how we can... I think at the core of all this is just our ability to coordinate. That will determine if we're able to do this better or do it in the proper way versus letting Meta or Facebook realize its own version of it. Yeah, better tools for people to coordinate in a decentralized way and out-compete centralized corporations, I think. That's what gets me really excited.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's awesome to see people coming together between XR and NFTs and DAOs all in the same place. It's very promising.

METADREAMER: Yeah, the WebXR community right now, it feels like what the DAO community was like back in 2019 or 2018, like MetaCartel early days.

Nicholas: Super exciting. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. And yeah, Veer and Jin, we'll have to have you back when Webverse has a new website and that quest comes up.

Avaer: Follow Twitter.

Nicholas: Cool. All right. Thanks, everybody. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. To keep up with everything Web3, follow me on Twitter @Nicholas with four leading ins. You can find links to the topics discussed on today's episode in the show notes. Podcast feed links are available at Web3GalaxyBrain.com. Web3 Galaxy Brain airs live most Friday afternoons at 5 p.m. Eastern Time, 2200 UTC, on Twitter Spaces. I look forward to seeing you there.