Is Cortex an Open Metaverse Project?

We’ll answer that with a few announcements and then get into a discussion. First we have a new video! It describes Cortex the application and the fully decentralized stack we’re building on top of.

In addition, we made a new announcement of the developer grant received from Polygon. Our domain contracts are already live there and we’ll be announcing a domain drop very soon, like any minute!

Now for the discussion.

Now, there’s a lot of talk about the Metaverse lately. Everyone seems to believe that it is the future, and that we are currently building it, but nobody seems to agree on exactly what it is.

There are generally two camps.

To the company formerly known as Facebook, Meta, it’s about VR and connecting with people in a virtual space.

For crypto people, it’s a place where all digital stuff has an owners with provable identities (even if it’s an anonymous identity), and a provable history. In essence, a world where there’s only one of everything, all digital things become NFTs, just like the (non-fungible) world we live in.

The problem is, these two visions, much less the two live versions, don’t have a consistent way to connect them just yet.

At Cortex, we believe we are building a foundation for an open metaverse. How? We have a full decentralized stack that seamlessly brings data and crypto together in a meaningful architecture.

We have an infographic that explains a lot.

But here’s what’s missing: The first (VR) metaverse is missing a crypto foundation that’s open, a place where people can interact and transact in a space that isn’t owned by any one entity yet is globally resolvable.

For that you need crypto-enabled data to bring into these worlds. We are also building on a foundation of crypto-enabled data (where each file is also a place that can hold data AND crypto.)

We can merge these two versions and make a lot of cool stuff happen. Crypto now as space (the web locations), time, and identity. That’s essentially what real world objects have, a unique time and location.

On the technical side of Cortex, your domain is an NFT with an HD wallet that resolves underneath it. Each address is also a place that holds a file (on IPFS by default) and can hold crypto. Essentially, URLs and crypto addresses become synonymous, can hold tokens AND a file (with versions) and can be public or private.

Now you have a globally-resolvable system that works for both data and crypto, so you can build lots of news spaces the incorporate crypto.

With the Cortex architecture, you have space (the hierarchical, wallet-based file structures) along with time (the blockchain) and identity (PKI) all packaged neatly together. We’ll dive a little deeper into this stack in the next post.

We’re currently building on Polygon with domains that resolve across both Ethereum and Polygon and making some great progress. Our domain contracts are live on Polygon and Ethereum.

So yes, we believe in an open metaverse that belongs to the users.

Yes, it is the future.

Yes, you can start to build yours on Cortex and Cortex domains that will work across chains and use it to build and display NFTs and more.

You can will be able to build YOUR metaverse, and keep it yours.