What’s the vision?
You can check out the rest of articles in this series here: The Universal Asset framework series.
Raison d’être (reason for being)
The first thing we should do is ask ourselves, why bother going through all the trouble to have a truly interoperable Metaverse? It is my opinion that the best realization for the Metaverse can only be achieved with meaningful levels of interoperability. So what does this look like? It’ll probably look similar to what we’ve seen in movies like Ready Player One, but even more empowering for users and world-builders, and less reliant on any big companies running the show.
The type of Metaverse I want is one where users have full control of what their avatars/players look like, their appearance, their clothing, their equipment, their magical spells, their progress… And are able to create them outside any given virtual world, yet seamlessly import them to any virtual world and game they want to visit. They also get to own their assets. We empower users to create whatever they want, instead of the current status quo of offering them a select menu of options to choose from that others created for them. This is an exercise in giving the most creative freedom possible to users, while reducing the burden on world-builders to create worlds with interoperability mechanisms.
At the moment it might seem that the current option of offering people a series of choices to choose from is good enough, and so far it has been. But we must not forget or underestimate the advent of tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI), that will soon be competent and powerful enough that anything any person can imagine in their head, can be translated into a real digital asset by merely having a conversation with an AI, in the same way today that happens with a real human being, a professional artist/creative. This is what will spark the User Generated Content (UGC) revolution. The commoditization of creating digital assets and virtual worlds.
Now this will not replace the need or value of human creatives, but it will unburden them from having to serve the needs of the rest of the planet who have not perfected an artistic craft. Instead of having a few million artists serve all the creative needs of humanity and its collective 8+ billion people, 8+ billion people will be engaged in the artistic process. Similar to how digital photography and putting cameras in smartphones made everyone start taking pictures, AI will eventually help every person make their personal avatars and worlds look and feel like they want them to. And it will be virtually free, a mere app on your phone, thanks to your AI assistant.
It is also my opinion that this version of the Metaverse will require a strong decentralized social/governance layer. Interoperability will not be merely a technological solution, but a social effort. People need to arrive at compromises, pick what primitives or mechanics to make interoperable and support, there is no universal interoperability tool that makes everything you want interoperable. World-builders must agree before building their worlds to implement a very select collection of interoperable primitives and mechanics, and in order for interoperability to be effective, most worlds must agree beforehand on implementing the same set of primitives and mechanics. Arriving at this social consensus is where the social component comes in, this requires governance.
The shape of this governance will probably be in the form of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) or similar, where cryptotokens are used to represent voting power. Not a single token, but a myriad of tokens acting as governance tokens to vote on proposals, each type of token with a different weight/voting power, and different means for people to earn/mine them. In addition to token-less checks and balances in the form of institutions, constitutions, etc.
Final remarks
This is not an imposition but an invitation. Interoperability is not something we force on people, but encourage, incentivize, reward. The one thing I truly want to remark here is that this type of Metaverse we’ve described, seems to be misaligned with the traditional incentives we’ve seen so far in the entertainment and gaming industries. We haven’t had true interoperability so far between virtual worlds and games because the incentives favor siloed worlds, high-cost and production pipelines of development with teams of hundreds if not thousands of people, and worlds/games that must be “retired” (or drop any kind of support, such as online servers) after a few years.
This is not a problem that will be solved for us by the current entertainment industry, it is not a product we buy and consume. The Metaverse will be a universe of virtual worlds — we the users will build, we will connect, and we will govern. And for that we need a framework and a roadmap on how does one achieve things like true interoperability, what does this look like, what are the tradeoffs, what are the compromises we must collectively make and agree on, and what possibilities does it unlock for everyone.
This, is what we will be exploring in the following series of articles. Pick a snack, pick a shovel, and let’s start building the Metaverse we want — together.
