Navigating the open metaverse

Transcript

foreign okay thank you everyone hello all right thanks everyone for coming joining and coming to listen to our talk so we'll discuss about the lighthouse we have a bunch of the lighthouse crew here so if you have any questions feel free to come and talk to us afterward we're going to discuss about the metaverse more broadly as well uh touch on some Concepts that are key to us and some definitions that we have I see there's other builders in this in the room as well so that's great many faces are recognize from the midover summit as well so let's get started um first piece is defining the metaverse

how do we see the metaverse what it is and I think there's some confusion around the term no unified ways of describing it anyway but the way we kind of see it is an interconnected network of 3D virtual spaces so interconnected in that you can move between each of them you can search across each of them those are part of our bigger unit and then you need to have a shared economical layer on top of it which means you can exchange value you can store value um and right now we only have unified version of this siled version of this so a good example that comes to mind obviously is Roblox which is which is great but it's a closed ecosystem in that you can't easily move from A to B

um you can't easily use your Robux to buy minecoin which is the currency in the Minecraft ecosystem so those are fairly siled so in that definition to us the metaverse needs to be 3D needs to be persistent immersive it needs to be interconnected as well if we jump to the next slide which kind of doubles down on that idea of open and closed if we take a step back and just try to think about the internet as we Define it today to its core the internet is really a set of communications protocol it's HTTP TCP FTP SMTP those are all Communications protocols that allow data packets to move across different servers the metaverse in our perspective is pretty

much the same thing so interoperability the capacity of two systems to communicate with one another is actually not something that's important for the metaverse it's it's its only defining factor it's the idea that all of those ecosystem all of those worlds become more and more connected together and it's obviously non-binary so it's not European or you're closed all of this falls into a spectrum but if you're trying to assess you know if something is open or not you should think about it in terms of can I use my assets within this ecosystem is there a way for me to fetch data from that specific world so some of the things we look at at Lighthouse is you know many worlds kind of brand themselves as being part of the open metaverse some things we like to look at is is it is there you know open

source material shared with that well does the world has public apis for people to pull information if they need to does the world uses decentralized storage can I use my NST collection inside that world those are all clear items that we can look at when trying to Define if a world is actually open so that's you know just having a critical lens when you look at those worlds and how they bring themselves what you're actually able to do in those environments then the second piece which is very important is when we think about the metaverse and we look at the web stream whatever specifically we're still super early right we have tens of thousands of people in those Worlds at best hundreds of thousands Max perhaps during peak time when you turn around

and you look at what's happening inside closed environments like Roblox you have 50 million daily active users you have lots of people and so what makes us so confident that the web 3 initiative is actually going to succeed in driving traffic and changing the habits of so many people this is a hard thing to do lots of people love to game I'm one of them and what's going to make me transition to this new real man why is so much money invested in the space why is so much brain power going into the space well I think there's a few core reasons really first principle thinking that makes us very confident that this will actually happen and I name a few of them under here so the first one is credible neutrality

um the capacity to come inside an ecosystem and know that you'll be able to do something without censorship that the ecosystem is actually going to remain neutral that no single party can make a decision that goes against you is actually incredibly important if you were um you know building something inside the Horizon that ended up becoming competitive to one of Facebook's other products you know there's no guarantee for you that the ecosystem is actually going to remain neutral towards what you're building and as a builder that should be pretty top of Mind especially in the world in which we're at where you know so many apis have been closed with people building on Twitter so many models have been copied with people building you know stuff related to Amazon we've seen that the escort faradang we're going to talk about that

a little bit but that neutrality is actually very important forever persistence well if I'm a Creator a builder a brand and I have you know half a million I want to drop in one experience building an amazing HQ in the metaverse and bad luck you know there's a scandal with a specific firm it goes bankrupt and the world is just closed well I've just lost hundreds of thousands of investment I've lost the community I built around that space and so that sense of persistence knowing that that thing is going to last over time is actually something that blockchain provides that classical system can't guarantee which is very important to us if we really want to see that big institutional Capital influx in the metaverse you need that which I think can only be provided in web3 and

then the last piece is the native ownership and settlement layer which are both enabled by token and token and blockchain um you know I really share well where when you go in the metaverse you need to be able to transact move your capital in and out in an easy way and so far you know blockchain really seems to be the text that that's the better suited for that very quickly on that slide it echoes the ideas I've just shared but we call this the S Turf Paradigm which is at first an ecosystem is always going to be fun to you the user or the developers or you're going to have developer grants you're going to have tons of access you're going to be able to talk to someone in that team very quickly as a user you know the platform won't do anything harmful with your data at first

you're going to be empowered listen to but then over time when that company which has you know stakeholders that look for growth and don't have that many new users they can onboard The Only Way Forward is to extract more and more of the current base this is when you start to see behavior that you didn't sign up to in the first place but the game is kind of rigged there's no way for the company to continue growing please it shareholder without extracting more from other stakeholders in the patient so this Esther Paradigm if you've been you know planet Earth over the last 15 years you've laid it lived it with most of the social platform you you ever use so that's kind of important now going back to navigation in the open metaverse so connecting different worlds become

harder the more and more worlds you get on the web free space if we look if we go back just a few months ago perhaps seven to ten months ago there were 10 15 worlds of real importance and magnitude that we felt could attract significant traffic and and at Lighthouse I'm going to tell a bit more about what we do um but we we watch that very closely and back then there were 10 to 15 names perhaps you know November 2021 and we felt that fragmentation was going to increase and so on the social media side you basically had a concentration of platform which means that right now we all use the same four platforms and interact with them the key reason for

that is Network effect obviously first thing you want to do when you jump on a platform is meet your friends talk with them and all your friends are in the same spot right so you're going to go there second piece is actually lock in so there's no easy way for you to import all your pictures from Facebook and put them on Pinterest right but this is not a technical issue this is this is pure lock-in right and lock-in is one of the biggest modes you can have as a as a platform well how hopefully this will be served in the web 3 we hope with better portability with the fact that the user on its data and can give access to it there's projects like lens there's projects like disco where obviously in a rich ecosystem

there's other like cyber connect lots of things are being built to solve some of those issues but anyway I'm kind of drifting I'm just saying there were a few platforms on the web to side we think that there's going to be a lot more on the Webster side some of the reasons for that is well every time something new creates there's a financial incentive to be early that's why you see so many new projects being launched in web 3 all the time we think that's going to create more worlds and it already happened and the UI you know website a web app can be very similar when you think about Twitter Facebook but when you think about a game like Minecraft and you think about a game like FIFA well those are very different things there's no way one world can be everything at once for everyone so

there's going to be kind of a natural fragmentation for it we saw that level of fragmentation and thought that it was going to trees and we try to answer one single question with Lighthouse which is really what pushed us to build the thing with and this question is how can I find what is there to do in the metaverse if you were right now thinking to yourself sitting at your desk and thinking okay I'm gonna explore this thing you know everyone's talking about the metaverse let's see what's out there how would you actually go about it right I think the obvious answer is that you would Google it you'll try to Google what can I do in the metaverse and you know most likely the answers are not going to be great right it's going to be hard to find those best places and that's the premise

of Lighthouse that's what we're actually trying to build one last piece that's kind of a bit more macro and historical but we've seen that historical pattern happened with Innovation which is pretty much always the case and a bunch of people build apps on pretty shaky infrastructure um we've seen that from the player earn on the web shoot gaming side and then one app becomes widely successful I think that app you know it could be on the website axi affinity and when you look at everything that they had to build to make the game actually work you see how much infrastructure was a pain for them you know that hat could be something it could be crypto kitties and the Dapper kind of ecosystem there's

been a few you know shifts like that with big apps being created and and the infrastructure kind of broke another example could even be other other side right I know there's some challenging reason why they kind of broke ethereum and obviously a lot of things could have been avoided but still you've basically had an app that was widely successful that showed the limitation of the current infrastructure and so what happens is once this comes to the realization of everyone then I'm bunch of companies like us try to unify and start building some cool infrastructure to help the next generation of app being developed and what happens then is you build great infrastructure new app are built on that great infrastructure and that better you

at ux is usually what drives mainstream adoption and in our perspective or right at that point where you can focus on the infra trying to help people build great apps and hopefully those apps will be so great so good that we're gonna shift from being our closely tied web true ecosystem native people and and try to onboard new people into the space which is very important especially in the bear markets you don't have those financial incentives to drive new folks in so you need to have great product to keep them in so yeah there's going to be an increase in the what we call the cross-world infrastructure stack and Lighthouse Falls right into that at the navigation layer trying to answer that

single question which is what can I do in the metaverse and the plan that's far and the way it's built there's really kind of Three core component and you're gonna have a small 15 second demo after so you'll be able to see it the first part which is super key is the search engine so people come in they'll be able to type whatever they want to search could be super specific could be abstract so you could search for the the Adidas Fashion Store you'll be able to find the parcel specifically inside the sandbox or you can type where are their digital fashion stores across the open metaverse and then you'll see every Power sales or every Gallery across many different worlds where you have an experience that fit that description and then you'll be able to click on one and

be teleported in the world so search is very important another thing that we really want to focus on with search is actually making search social on the internet when you think about it browsing is a really solo experience when you sit at your desk and you search for stuff you do it on your own we think that the metaverse will not be in formation-centric it will be experience Centric and the first thing you want to do with experiences is leave them with people even if you actually appreciate the experience on your own you seek and search those experience as a group I think this presentation is a great example of that many of you came as friend although you're listening on your own searching and finding where you're going to come to the event was actually a social experiment so what we're trying to do is allow people to

search for their friends as well so if you follow someone and someone follows you you became friend and then obviously you could go in dark mode if you wanted to but if you want your friends to be able to find you the goal is for them to jump on Lighthouse that stepping stone to search across World click and and arrive in the same location as you you know based on where you're placed so that's pretty cool um it's kind of like the social rapper on Roblox now on Roblox you have all those ugc experiences on top of that you have a search and then you have a social features which allow people to kind of enjoy experiences together the second piece of what we're building which is actually pretty cool um is Creator profiles so once you start search for an experience and you really

liked it well it would be pretty cool to be able to follow the Creator that has actually built that experience and if that Creator builds a new thing you'll be able to see it and jump in them and as a Creator you'll be able to own and and have a direct relationship with your users which is something that we've lacked very significantly on the web to side of of social applications there's also another component to it which is no one knows an experience as well as the person who created it and so by allowing creators to create profiles will also Empower them to basically Define it with which tags would you put to that experience which enriches our search engine and actually makes it very

accurate marketer than what you could find either through API Integrations with worlds or on chain from everything that we could fetch having that Creator creating that description of the thing is actually quite powerful and so that's something that we're trying to do trying to make game designers and experience Builders the YouTubers of the future I'm convinced 100 that there's going to be some real stars creating experiences that people are going to be able to visit and see and experiment for themselves and they're going to grow the thing I'm sure game designers you know Mark my world are going to be the next YouTuber it's the profession that the kids have been doing for the last you know five to ten years now more and more people are paying attention to it I'm

very convinced that this is a category that's going to expose and so if we want to be a place where they can expose their work show what they do build a following and have a direct relationship with them and then the last piece which is super cool as well is we're going to be the first the first platform that has data on what people actually like to do and so we will never allow targeting this is not something we want to do we think it's a core shortcoming of the web to space but we have tons of data on what people actually like and if you're a Creator and 80 of the people that follow you actually own a specific type of nft or search for the same type of things well us we can make better recommendations but you as a Creator you

can better understand your audience and you can better interact with it and that's the first time you're gonna have metaverse Centric intent and search related data which you know for all the builders in the space is nothing else but a call a gold mine and with that level of information our experiences are going to be better and we're going to be able to drive people from a close you know ecosystem we've been used to towards more open ones so that's how it looks like um I just click so you log in on the platform connect you can see tons of experiences you can search specific or broad then you're going to click on the experience you want to join and then you're going to be transported within that specific parcel it could be a place could be near a friend and that's the

goal make it as easy as possible our goal is to be a platform where you come and you jump out as fast as possible we're not creating content there's millions of creators that are better than us at creating engaging content we're just a search and Discovery platform that's what we try to empower so push people in Worlds make people have fun in the mirrors is is where we're trying to to play and yeah that's that's just a quote from um Sebastian the founder of the sandbox who's also one of our investors he's been um a big supporter of Lighthouse from the beginning which is pretty cool because when you think about it as the number one metaverse so far the sandbox in terms of brand recognition corporate engagement they're willing to they're

they've been able to get it would have been really easy for them to actually play you know pretty tightly on being closed trying to protect that leadership position but actually it's been super open if you've been at any metaverse conference since you've talked to him you've seen him uh he's doing everything he can to promote the open metaverse interoperability openness which I think is great if we add a different type of leader in the space right now things can a lot a lot slower they had Timbers team berners-lee on the internet side of things that really helped I think Sebastian to a certain extent is trying to push people to play a similar role which is great it's aligned with the atosa web3 with what drives everyone took my friends like ATC and we're super

happy about it so this was a lighthouse this was some thought on the open metaverse thanks so much for your attention happy to answer any questions you have thank you [Applause]