The Future of the NFT Marketplace, Meta-Space and More, Featuring Boburjon Muydinov of Dvision Network

The Bit Podcast — Episode 26

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This week on The Bit, we’re joined by Boburjon Muydinov, the Head of Business Development at Dvision Network, a VR content ecosystem based on blockchain technology.

Boburjon and Chris touch upon everything from Dvision Network’s robust and diversified NFT marketplace to how they plan on being more than just a key figure in the metaverse space.

Here are the show notes:

[03:02] From No Funds to Head of Development
[11:24] Inside Meta-Space and Meta-City
[16:26] The Three Fundamental Pillars
[22:39] Emerging Use Cases for DeFi Tools and NFTs

Chris: Hi, welcome to The Bit, the Bittrex Global podcast, where we give you the inside scoop on all things crypto. My name is Chris Sinkey, and I’m the Chief Business Officer here at Bittrex Global.

In the age of exponential technology and innovation, it can be challenging to keep up to date with all the latest trends and inventions. Every day, it seems as though the technology industry offers something new to explore, and if you’re not actively getting involved, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and trampled by the tremendous amount of activity. One space that perfectly describes this and is gaining a lot of momentum is the metaverse.

The metaverse is an online environment that allows users to interact with each other, earn and spend digital currency, play, work, and perform real-life activities through the use of their avatars. However, as fascinating as this sounds, we are far from seeing widespread adoption. Behind the spectacular growth of the metaverse and VR markets is the shadow that pinpoints the lack of solid proof of ownership practices, the absence of an integrated platform for VR in the metaverse, and much more.

Paving the path towards widespread adoption of the metaverse is riddled with challenges, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. With their cutting-edge blockchain-based NFT platform, Dvision Network aims to allow designers, enterprises, and everyday users to dive into the most advanced Metaverse experience. So to join us for a stimulating discussion on how Dvision Network allows you to create trade and play in the blockchain-based player-owned NFT metaverse, I’m joined today by the head of business development at Dvision Network, Brian. Brian, welcome to The Bit. I’m excited to be chatting with you today.

Boburjon: Hi Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here with you and with the followers of The Bit podcast. Just to briefly introduce myself, my name is Boburjon Muydinov, but I usually go by Brian, and I’m the head of the Business Development Dvision Network. Here, I’m responsible for executing the actual plan and strategy that is built together with the Dvision team. My duties include the technical and business partnership establishments implementation of the business growth strategy, and of course, achieving core KPIs for our team’s vision.

I just wanted to mention; it’s truly fascinating to witness the growth of the metaverse industry. I guess we live in an era where big corporations such as Facebook try to lead this arena and try to keep up with a trend on a larger scale. Whereas projects like Roblox are ranked higher than the Web2 companies like Twitter or Spotify by their market capitalization. It’s an honor and pure joy to be part of this revolution, and I hope we see even a larger adoption and influx of the traditional companies into the metaverse industry in the future.

[03:02] From No Funds to Head of Development

Chris: Well, thank you for that background introduction on you, and we’re really looking forward to discussing how Dvision Network is growing the metaverse. Before we dig into that, we always like to ask guests on this podcast the following question: Who or what got you into crypto in the first place? How’d you hear about it? And how and when did you buy your first Bitcoin?

Boburjon: Well, it’s an interesting story. I have previously had a very negative first experience dealing with the cryptocurrency market. In early 2017, that’s when I first heard about the rise of cryptocurrencies, and I guess most of the people here also heard about it too. The discussions about Ripple, Ethereum, and Bitcoin were consistently surrounding me. I naturally got captured into the FOMO epidemic at that time, and of course, that was happening without any prior knowledge of the market.

Given the burst of the bubble in 2017, I have lost all my funds, and I had to realize the losses and sell the assets at a very depreciate price. But I guess after that painful lesson, I decided to immerse myself into the education of the blockchain fundamentals and start learning the basics of this industry, which brought me to the place where I am right now.

The most interesting part of the journey started once I joined the Dvision Network as the head of their business development department. Here, I got to meet the most brilliant people that are bringing the adoption and revolution to the blockchain industry and disruptions to traditional businesses. So far, it’s been a wonderful journey.

Chris: Well, I love hearing stories of how people got into crypto in the first place. So thank you for that. For those in our audience, who may not be familiar with Dvision Network, could you break down exactly what Dvision Network does? I know you’ve spoken to it a little bit. Still, in doing my research for this episode, I found that Dvision Network is a content ecosystem that bridges virtual reality and blockchain together to enable users to experience the metaverse. I don’t know if that’s accurate in your words, so I’d love to hear your description of it.

Boburjon: We definitely can say that Dvision Network is a content ecosystem built on blockchain as a whole. Still, it’s actually bigger than that, particularly if you look at the expansion of the NFT use cases and integration of the DAO mechanism. For those of you who didn’t know, we have just announced the release of the Dvision Metaverse, so it’s going to launch on November 1.

At the moment, the users can visit our official website and check out the newly released Gitbook that fully covers the essentials. To kind of give you a brief understanding though, Dvision Network is a blockchain-based Metaverse that powers the robust and diversified NFT marketplace within its augmented reality. Dvision is based on three primary platform features: NFT marketplace, Meta-Space, and Meta-City. In Dvision world, Meta-City is a public terrain where the Meta-Spaces like LANDs are accumulated.

It’s a place where users can enjoy the metaverse with other community members and engage in different events and activities. The Meta-Space itself is a tailored virtual estate — it’s a place where users can acquire and customize their personal LAND in order to establish and offer their own content within the virtual estate.

Here the LAND, as you may know from the previously launched metaverses, it’s a digital piece of virtual estate in Dvision metaverse. It’s registered as NFT; mostly in ERC-721 or BEP-721, depending on if you’re maintaining those LANDs.

Lastly, NFT Marketplace is a place where users can create, trade, and sell those unique items also protected by the NFT standards such as BEP-721 or BEP-1155.

Chris: And what about the Dvision Network team? Can you give us some background on when the project began, where the team is based, and some background on the team members themselves?

Boburjon: The main thing about the team is that we are quite globalized, but the main team operating the metaverse itself is located in South Korea. I’ll briefly talk about the background of the Dvision itself:

It’s been initiated in late 2019. It emerged as a result of the convergence of the founding teams’ appreciation towards blockchain technology and, of course, its previous experience in building metaverses. So basically, Dvision was doing the metaverse thing long before it became mainstream.

With Dvision, it was the commitment of the core founding team to the VR and metaverse. It was the willingness to address the professional issues in the gaming industry, presenting a robust and plausible in-game economy and the decentralized approach to the game assets like management.

Of course, it was providing the end-user with the most favorable end game UI experience, which brought like-minded people together.

Chris: What kind of growth is specifically have you seen since the early days?

Boburjon: In terms of the market itself, we have witnessed growth through the beta test launches and demo version releases. It brought us a lot of people during those days. But since we were operating in the demo mode, we were not connected to the blockchain, so that there was no recording of the number of the users, but on the database side, we’re seeing at least 50,000 or 60,000 users coming during the whole period of the demo launch.

The market itself is pretty much concentrated on the metaverse. If the metaverse has a decent play-to-earn gaming economy with solid NFT use cases, it’s really easy to fall into the gross and become one of the leading Metaverses.

[11:24] Inside Meta-Space and Meta-City

Chris: And can you go a little bit deeper into the metaverse and the Dvision Network platforms, specifically, your NFT market in Meta-Space, Meta-City, and the architecture behind your ecosystem?

Boburjon: There are two main technological aspects that need to be considered. The first is the metaverse itself — the technology behind Meta-City and Meta-Space — it’s everything built on Unity technology. In the future, we’re thinking of connecting it and making it interoperable with the Unreal Engine as well. So, streaming and 3D objects are built with the help of tools that are enabled through the Unity engine.

On the NFT side, it’s everything happening on two main networks. We mostly use ERC-721 and ERC -155 standards. Apart from that, where we’re thinking about launching multichains. The multichain initiative, for us, the ultimate goal is to provide the best opportunity for the users to assess their digital assets or different mainnets and have the bridges ready for them.

Chris: Can you expand on the Dvision token and its use cases? I’m really interested to know more about the token model within the NFT market, the Meta-Space, and the Meta-City.

Boburjon: Right. As you might know, Dvision Network is fully powered by its utility and governance DVI token, which is built on top of the Ethereum network and, as I said, bridge to Binance Smart Chain. Here, the DVI token is the essential unit that provides access to the utility features in several aspects of our platform, including the Meta-Space NFT market and Meta-City.

The DVI token has utility features that are strongly linked to the NFT use cases that aim to sustain its long-term value by collecting the commission fees accumulated in the DAO treasurable.

The DAO pool is managed by the DVI holders that stake their tokens to the platform. Going back to the utility cases, DVI is used as a payment unit to purchase LANDs, avatars, pets, and many other NFT items. Apart from that, it’s also used as a governance token to provide the voting power to the holders to decentralize the future of the project.

As I previously said, there’s a Gitbook that we published about one week ago, along with the announcement of the launch of our Metaverse that fully covers the utility functions of the DVI token, its allocation, and the metrics. So, users can refer to that to learn more about the token economics of Dvision.

Chris: And what about virtual reality? So does Dvision Network provide virtual reality use cases today?

Boburjon: To be fully honest with you and with the followers here, Dvision actually previously put too much emphasis on the VR side of its development. But the current category that we try to position and feed ourselves is exclusively correlated with the metaverse and the play-to-earn model.

When it comes to the metaverse use cases, it can literally be anything from shopping malls to galleries. In fact, with our upcoming launch on November 1, we’re going to prove that Metaverse can actually be the ultimate gateway to virtual reality, where users can experience a limited amount of pieces of Metaverse content.

So, I can only ask not to miss the launch and make sure to pre-register on our website. We’re going to provide all different pieces of content, gaming, education, entertainment, and all this stuff.

Chris: Oh, that’s great; thanks for jumping into your next use cases because that was actually going to be my next question. What kind of other use cases do you envision for the future? It sounds like a strong pivot, and a focus on the metaverse is where you decided to go. So, you mentioned something about a pre-release — is there a date for that? When users sign up, so they’re ready to go?

Boburjon: We actually announced it two days ago, and currently, we’re running a giveaway for the users to pre-register their account on our main website. So, if the users go to dvision.app, they will be able to find the button that brings them to the pre-register UI so they can secure their spot and prepare their accounts.

[16:26] The Three Fundamental Pillars

Chris: Okay, great. Let’s move into talking about partnerships if we could. What are the key partnerships that you have that are essential to the growth of Dvision Network?

Boburjon: There are a lot of partnerships that we have established as a Metaverse project. As the head of business development, my task is always to look for the right sources for the company. Each partnership that Dvision establishes is built around three main fundamental pillars. The first pillar is bringing innovative use cases for the DVI tokens and NFTs. It can be anything from yield farming up to NFT loans.

The second pillar is advancing in the technological aspect, which is building partnerships with the leading blockchain or development companies such as Curvegrid, Certik, and other leading expert firms.

The last pillar includes diverse aspects such as cross-promotion, community engagement, etc. But, we’re mainly oriented towards increasing the brand awareness of Dvision. Given the nature of the blockchain industry and crypto market, some particular synergies between projects can yield a very good result.

Chris: Are there any partnerships you’re looking forward to establishing in the near future that you can talk about here?

Boburjon: Currently, the main partnerships that we’re trying to establish are all built in terms of technological or use case enlargement or building some sort of engaging cross-promotion.

The next level of partnerships that I can currently talk about are the large marketplaces, like Ethereum and the Binance Smart Chain, such as OpenSea, to push the LAND sales through to the platform. So, this is in the short-term perspective.

Speaking of short-term versus long-term, what does Dvision Network’s roadmap look like for the rest of the year and into next year as well?

It’s in our Gitbook as well. We like to leave the checkmarks of the milestones that we achieved on our roadmap. Right now, we’re at the most important phase of our roadmap, where we have finally completed the development of the metaverse itself and deployed it on the blockchain. This is definitely the most significant progress that we have been aiming for the last few years.

In the long-term perspective, we plan to open up the metaverse to the larger public through the partial and gradual releases of the Meta-Series. Conduct the LAND sales to allow users to buy the virtual estates and build their content there. We will open up the DAO mechanism to fully decentralize and give the metaverse back to the public’s hands. That’s the current plan.

Chris: It’s exciting. I like it. So, projecting ahead in the crypto space is hard to do, seeing how things move so quickly. But I’m sure our audience would love to know what you think of the price points for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Even some of the other ascendant assets like Solana and Cardano could look like a year from now, not to mention five years from now. So I think the question is, really, aside from what you’re doing a Dvision Network, what do you see for the rest of the crypto space?

Boburjon: First of all, I do not like giving out financial advice, and this is definitely not financial advice. So, whoever is listening to this, make sure you do your own research before listening to anyone’s opinion. To make it brief, I’m majorly bullish on the further appreciation of the asset prices, particularly Layer-1 and DeFi protocols.

That puts Ethereum and Solana on the long-term bullish pattern. I still see the role of the store of value to be preserved by Bitcoin in the midterm and long-term perspectives, but my perspective on this is that the industry itself has a lot of utilities. So, that’s why Ethereum or Solana are the ones that lead the market.

But the recent development in the sphere, particularly the emergence of the first Bitcoin ETFs, pinpoints the fact that the future of digital assets is going to be bright rather than dark. But, there’s still a lot of things that need to be reformed in the industry. Most DEX protocols are still rug pulls, and 90% of the GamiFi and NFT projects are doomed to cease to exist given their unsustainable tokenomics and business models.

Still, it’s exactly the remaining 10% of the solid projects that will transform the way we see and interact with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology as a whole. We will continue witnessing big corporations, banks, and even countries legally accepting cryptocurrencies; I guess it’s just a matter of time and proper legal regulation and taxation approach.

[22:39] Emerging Use Cases for DeFi tools and NFTs

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I really couldn’t agree more with you on all of that. And he was very insightful. And of course, do your own research — DYOR — when it comes to investing, but it certainly seems like there are some trends that are really starting to play out. In terms of Layer-1s, when it comes to Dvision Network, are there any in particular that you see yourself going deeper in or working with in the future?

Boburjon: We’re pretty much chain-agnostic in terms of Layer-1 or even Layer-2. Having the bridges between the chains becoming the real multichain is the actual freedom that the users will receive at the end of the project. You can use their tokens or NFT’s on different chains; you can just connect that to any ecosystem that it belongs to.

Let’s say we mint an NFT on Ethereum; the user will access Open Sea because Open Sea does not provide support to the Binance Smart Chain. The user goes back to Dvision as a bridge, transfer the NFT from Ethereum to Binance Smart Chain, and they can go to the Binance NFT to do the sale or NFTb or any other marketplaces available there. In the same sense, it applies to the DVI token as well.

Chris: Well, I think that wraps up most of my questions and our audience’s questions when it comes to Dvision Network and the metaverse in particular. But I’d love to ask you one more question, which is really open-ended. Is there anything else you wanted to mention about Dvision or anything else before we wrap up today?

Boburjon: Of course. I’ll just talk in general — it’s always a good idea to look into the future, taking into account the peculiarities of the current growing industries and emerging use cases with the utilization of the DeFi tools and NFTs. The gaming industry has been an obvious fear where NFT would make its progress, and I kind of knew this at the beginning of 2019.

At this point, not only did it succeed in penetrating this area, but also it opened up a lot of opportunities for many projects to establish. We kind of see the pattern like the GamiFi work; play-to-earn projects are gaining up to 1 million users and more.

The utility of the NFTs became such a huge thing that I couldn’t even imagine in early 2020 when I used to communicate with the Open Sea team weekly and discuss cross-promotions; I couldn’t imagine that their platform would reach 1 billion. This is the reality that we are witnessing today.

But one thing to note, NFT’s and DeFi tools are in their early stages, and they both have very significant room to grow. For instance, NFT’s can easily be integrated into the content industry, where musicians, artists, and content creators as a whole can opt for centralized ways to manage their proceeds from the sales and distribution.

Similarly, DeFi tools can easily switch most of the existing banking and financial services, which will help the users get rid of the intermediation-like burdens. And there are tons of use cases for all of the blockchain-related services.

Chris: I’m really glad you gave that background and persuasion. I was going to ask you about any other projects or blockchains, cryptocurrencies, or anything else you were interested in watching that you think the audience would be smart to pay attention to.

Boburjon: I don’t actually like calling out the names exactly, but I’ll give one insight that helps me understand the leaders of tomorrow’s market. It’s mostly the project that has sustainable and very smart token economics. The token itself needs to adopt some sort of monetary policy because it’s the currency. It should be managed properly to not cause inflation or reduce its volatility.

Chris: I think it’s something that really goes overlooked, especially with all of the high APR coins running around trying to incentivize users to join. It sort of feels like they’re gamifying adoption for the sake of long-term success.

Boburjon: Definitely.

Chris: Well, thank you very much for joining us today.

Boburjon: Thank you very much for having me today.

Chris: Thanks to our audience for listening to The Bit — The Bittrex Global podcast. Our guest today was Brian, Head of Business Development at Dvision Network. To learn more about Dvision Network, visit dvision.network. That’s dvision.network.

To learn more about Bittrex Global, please visit global.bittrex.com, and please make sure to subscribe to our podcast. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and making The Bit one of the fastest-growing podcasts in the world of crypto. My name is Chris Sinkey, the Chief Business Officer at Bittrex Global.