Partnered With:

a16z: Virtual Society, Blockchain and Metaverse

a16z crypto

Read this article in 22 Minutes

A strong ecosystem around a core ethos or culture that persists in both the digital and physical worlds

Original title: "Virtual Society, Blockchains, and The Metaverse"

Original author: Elena Burger, a16z

Original compilation: Block unicorn

In 1986, early Internet provider Quantum Link and entertainment company Lucasfilm Games released the first MMO title: Habitat, a virtual character-based social world, which players can access via a 300-baud modem ($0.08 per minute) and a user's Commodore 64 ($595, about $1670 in today's prices). Habitat was a departure from the text-based MUD games (which were multiplayer, but lacked graphics) and the freely distributed USENET forums (text-based, of course, but lacked formal gameplay) that dominated the early networking market at the time.

In short, Habitat is a virtual civilization with real-time player chat, trade and interaction. Arguably, Habitat is now also a precedent for what the much-discussed (both by definition and territorially) "metaverse" might one day become.

In reflections published a few years after Habitat, developers Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer describe a The complexity of the world of politics, economics, and emerging forms of user-generated content. Habitat environments look and feel different: a universe that grows to over 20,000 locations, including player homes, shops, arenas, theaters, newspapers, workshops, and a "wilderness" area where crimes like theft and murder can be practiced (A Greek Orthodox priest who leads a house of worship in the aforementioned Habitat setting strongly opposes this practice in his digital "Holy Nutcracker" church).

There are stories about in-game currency arbitrage, a loophole that allows some enterprising players to buy cheap The in-game items were sold at a higher price in a store on the other side of the city, resulting in hundreds of thousands of in-game tokens being printed overnight. There are developer-created treasure hunts and user-created business adventures in the game. The whole reflection on Habitat has an air of novelty and lawlessness. Even the Internet standards established by Habitat will cease to exist in a few years: the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) "presentation" and "application" layers, Chip Morningstar and F. A higher-level misunderstood ", which was defeated a few years later by the simpler TCP/IP Internet standard on which today's web is based.

These early tensions are perhaps best summed up in the title of Morningstar and Farmer's reflections on the Habitat experiment:< b> "Detailed central planning is unlikely to succeed; don't even try." Indeed, one lesson we can take from Habitat is that attempts to impose orderly behavior from above are almost always subverted or destroyed by the natural phenomena of the free market.

I first learned about environments in Habitat, a forthcoming Book about the Metaverse by Herman Narula, co-founder and CEO of Impossible, a company that has spent the past decade developing new ideas for games, digital experiences, and now the Metaverse. Cosmic infrastructure construction. Narula's main argument about the metaverse is one that Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer would likely agree on: the metaverse, no matter who builds it, how users access it, or the underlying infrastructure that supports it, should be designed to facilitate powerful user interactions form.

It is also important (although Morningstar and Farmer do not mention it) that items and experiences in different virtual worlds should be able to interact with each other operate. In the words of Herman Narula:

“The metaverse is a collection of realities which includes the real world or “home reality” and a A series of other worlds to which society assigns meaning. Events, objects, and identities can exist in, and be modified by, multiple worlds in the Metaverse, and the role of the Metaverse is its ability to facilitate meaningfully fulfilling experiences in the worlds of which it is composed. "

A lot of the debate about metaspace centers on what it looks like. Should it be 2D or 3D? Should it be accessed immersively in VR and AR, should it be a desktop or mobile platform?

The focus on aesthetics is really a debate about standards. "What it should look like" is shorthand for "what developers should expect". How do you reconcile between JSON and XML data types? If you're designing for 3D, how many polygons should your assets consist of? Should avatars be provided in glTF, USD, VRM or other file formats? Should experiences happening on the Unity client be interoperable with games on the Unreal Engine client? What happens when you bring NFTs into the mix (or if you're Microsoft, when you unilaterally decide to ban them from Minecraft entirely, seemingly without warning)?

I think these questions are very valuable because they signal an openness to interoperability, which is Metaspace for any future releases is critical. But aesthetic and technical considerations also seem to have been mixed, perhaps at the expense of economic or political considerations.

In the words of Herman Narula: "These metaverse worlds are not an alternative to the escapism we choose, they are more reality".

How do you promote "more reality"? Was it even actively facilitated, or was it more organic—the result of unique cultural and economic factors across time? In an early chapter of The Virtual Society, Herman Narula traces the first instances of the "Metaverse" back to the earliest civilizations - structures like the Gbekli Tepe, the Egyptian pyramids, and structures like the Icelandic Hulduflk (essentially elves) Such ancient myths -- they not only captured the imagination of past civilizations, but actually influenced the way societies functioned and continue to function in the physical world.

For example, Herman Narula points out that Hulduflk's ideas have actually influenced modern conservation work in Iceland. As Herman Narula puts it: “Mirror worlds help catalyze conservationist efforts in the real world”. What Herman Narula argues in the early chapters of "Virtual Societies" is that the early Metaverse had a sense of reciprocity between the "imagined" world and the real world. If you extend this concept to today, then we should have a similar ideal:Whatever form the metaverse takes, there should be a sense of osmosis between the virtual world and our physical world.

When something happens in metaspace, you should feel its resonance in the physical world, and vice versa The same is true.

Herman Narula spends a lot of time in The Virtual Society explaining how he defines meaningful interaction in the Metaverse, and Improbable's technological innovations that enable user interaction. For Herman Narula, the definition can be measured in "operations per second":

"Simulates The environment, how many independent and simultaneous things can happen in a virtual environment. As an example, at the time of writing, a Fortnite game that allows 100 players to interact together requires about 10,000 times per second Communication operations. This statistic means that the server needs to process all these messages, and also need to send them quickly to every connected user's machine that needs them."

This past summer, I participated in a demo event on Impossible's M² network, which the team intends to become a metaverse network where users Can connect in highly dense environments and transfer NFTs and other avatars between worlds. There were over 4500 users in attendance, all on the same server instance (in other words, no sharding), talking and interacting with each other. Over time, M² intends to grow and support not only the Otherside metaverse, but also other creative endeavors: concerts by musicians, community spaces, events with artists and creators.

In many ways, the challenge M² of users agree on a shared concept of temporality—a core challenge that blockchains address. And in many ways, we're also starting to see blockchains, and the applications built on top of them, start to solve other problems that plagued the early construction of the Internet and the Metaverse.

We can think of the blockchain as a game-like social network with an infinitely customizable front end, take Ethereum as an example: you There is a public key as a form of login; an optional identity bound to that public key (e.g. ENS, Farcaster); a list of assets (NFT, ERC20 Token); an application accessed through your public key (e.g. Uniswap, NFT transaction , on-chain games); and a shared notion of history (viewable on Etherscan or parseable on an Ethereum node).

Smart contracts running on Ethereum are open source, which means users can audit their security, and equally importantly Yes, they can be modified by forking. These modifications may extend the underlying codebase (e.g., composable applications that interact with smart contracts, new clients or frontends built for smart contracts, or derivative projects based on the initial protocol). The more a smart contract is interacted with and extended, the more valuable it becomes.

Some of the most interesting experiments in Ethereum today are in fields that mix art, society, economics, politics, and game-like elements . A great example here is NounsDAO, which launched last summer. In short, NounsDAO is an NFT project. An auction will be held every day to sell a Nouns NFT. The proceeds of the sale will enter a treasury shared by Nouns holders, and they can initiate proposals and votes on how to use treasury funds. Best of all, the auction protocol, art, and governance are all fully on-chain. The DAO-funded proposal proliferated Nouns memes and spirits across the internet and the physical world—largely due to the way the project captured the imaginations of artists and developers.

< p>

On Ethereum, we have seen projects like 3D Nouns Generator, Derivative Auctions and projects funded through Prophouse (the project is funded by the Nouns Treasury , but has now grown to support other NFT projects), as well as the efforts of multiple developers to build alternative clients for Nouns. In the physical world, we've seen the creation of luxurious Nouns glasses, Nouns-branded coffee, and many IRL events. Additionally, other projects using the Nouns codebase have sprung up without the support of NounsDAO funding at all: examples include Public Nouns, a fork of NounsDAO that uses its funds to fund projects in the public goods space; and other projects such as Lil Nouns, Nounlets, and nouns.build.

And 157 NounsDAO derivative project links, see here. (This is not complete data yet)

Many things are worth understanding in detail. For example, the 3D Nouns Generator is open source and available in GLTF, OBJ, and VOX file formats—meaning that file format issues are free to be resolved by independent developers, and these assets are freely ported by users. The effort to develop an alternative client for NounsDAO is a proof of concept that a protocol should be resilient and provide users with a wide range of choices in how they access it. The success of the NFT project itself is just one example of the ubiquity of cc0 (public copyright) NFT collections — images in the Metaverse should be free to fork, mutate, and be enjoyed by anyone who wants to use it.

While the project, the cryptonetwork, and the Metaverse space itself are still in their early stages, I think NounsDAO represents a compelling An example of what elements of the metaverse space might one day look like:A robust ecosystem around a core spiritual or cultural that persists in both the digital and physical worlds.

One of the great ironies I've noticed with the efforts behind the corporate-driven Metaverse is that these Teams are often building for previous large Internet brands. It feels like an effort to rebuild digital society, as if the social fractures and microcultures that the internet manifests never happened (a futile act, in my opinion). One thing Herman Narula hinted at: I don't see a lot of people talking about it - are those that are most inclined to build on metaverse platforms (whether it's Ethereum, other blockchains, or platforms that prioritize interoperability experiences) of people may be internet-native communities and creators who want to preserve their wealth for growing their own culture. In the words of Herman Narula:

“In order for a metaverse to have a sufficient number and quality of worlds and experiences, let It's worth anyone's time, then, it has to be like an inverted pyramid, where the infrastructure provider gets the smallest percentage of the value, and the rest of the value is created by and accrued to the creator."

Decentralized blockchain eliminates middlemen. We live in an age of 30% app store cuts, opaque algorithms, and more and more content vying for attention among ever-dividing audiences. Much of the value created on these networks is sucked away by the platforms themselves, and there is a similar level of uncertainty when it comes to the terms, services and standards these platforms will allow.

The blockchain—and the smart contracts that run on it—provide a platform that squeezes the most: if you Comparing Ethereum's total gas fees to the total value of transactions on-chain, the blockchain charges around 0.05%. This number is likely to decline in the coming years as scaling solutions gain greater adoption, and more layer 1 chains are launched.

Furthermore, the usage of most blockchain applications is much lower than their web2 results. Given that decentralized blockchains are computers that can make promises, developers and users have an incentive to build and enrich a robust ecosystem that stems from the fact that the smart contracts they interact with do not suddenly change. ensure.

Earlier this year, our team Arianna Simpson, Eddy Lazzarin and Liz Harkavy published an article on "7 Basic Components" article. In our description of the Metaverse, we believe it is critical that "the open Metaverse world is decentralized, allowing users to control identity, enforce property rights, equitably incentivize, and ensure that value accrues to users ( rather than a platform)".

With this in mind, whether the next generation Internet is VR or AR, or on desktop or mobile clients, Not so relevant anymore. The Metaverse will need to facilitate meaningful interactions while also making an immutable commitment to users' economic rights.

In "Virtual Society" In One Book, Herman Narula presents a convincing history of the human urge to construct such possible worlds, arguing that if these worlds cannot interoperate, then we have reached a dead end. As more and more people both make a living online and build experiences specifically for the digital realm, we need to continue advocating for decentralization and openness. Or to quote Morningstar and Farmer:"Detailed central planning is impossible, don't even try."