NAB
Author Neal Stephenson coined the term ‘metaverse’ and now
he’s chief architect of a new project to see it realized. While his depiction
of the future internet in Snow Crash three decades ago was dystopian,
Stephenson wants to rescue the Metaverse from the clutches of Big Tech and
self-interested venture capital and secure an open environment for us all.
article here
While his pitch in a new white paper, is unashamedly written
in powerful purple prose this is no fiction. His new blockchain project, called
Lamina1, has the backing of some serious technology players. It is in beta and
represents a blueprint for how Web3, and by extension the Metaverse, can become
“a creative community that is free to innovate and transact” to give rise to a thriving economy.
His vision is also – and this cannot be coincidental coming
from a novelist – highly focused on how content creators can be served if the
internet’s third age goes according to plan.
It’s worth quoting Stephenson’s argument in full:
“Makers have long
relied upon financiers, platform owners and publishers to grant their ideas oxygen and provide a pathway to broad
distribution and monetization. Though the introduction of new software and tools has allowed more amateur
makers to enter the market, it
has not tipped the model toward creators. This is squarely what we’re interested in –– building a home with more
favorable economics for those who create the content we voraciously consume.
He continues, “Today,
storytellers, deep-thinkers and designers pitch and hustle in search of funding
–– in games, music, film, and fashion
–– only to hand over 30-70% of their revenue, oft post-recoupment, to lenders and middlemen. By acquiring the work of
creators, the platform owner
expands the portfolio with subscriptions, ad revenue and insights, none of which is shared with those who bring
the platform such success.
“Lamina1 lights a new path forward.”
Stephenson is far from the first to view Web3 as a once in a
generation (or lifetime) chance to redistribute power and wealth for the good
of all not retained in the hands of a few.
He’s also not unique in calling out existing Web3
applications, payment mechanisms and organizational structures as essentially
Web2 in the emperor’s new clothes.
He makes this explicit, again in the context of creators:
“Inexorable
economic forces drive investors to pay artists as little as possible while steering their creative output in the directions that
involve the least financial risk.”
There’s a groundswell of opinion that Web3 is broken –
crypto crashes in recent months prove this – and that a better (more robust,
interoperable, decentralized)
version needs to be got off the ground.
So what is Lamina1?
Well it is currently a theory, a set of ideas “under active early-stage development”.
But Stephenson and Lamina1 Co-Founder
Peter Vessenes (founding
Chairman of the Board for the Bitcoin Foundation) have a plan.
The roadmap calls for a Engine/web SDK and payment system to be in beta as
soon as January which is also
when Original Game Pre-Production
Begins is scheduled to begin. Lamina1 itself is set for launch Q2-Q3
2023.
Bones of the project
Lamina1’s goal is to
deliver a blockchain,
interoperating tools and
decentralized services optimized for the Open Metaverse –– “providing
communities with infrastructure,
not gatekeepers to build a more immersive
internet.”
Since no blockchain has been expressly designed to support
the unique needs of the
Metaverse or that of creative
communities, they argue, that’s what Lamina1 will be.
Lamina1 will be the foundation for an Open Metaverse.
The Open Metaverse,
as envisaged by Stephenson, will
benefit from open protocols for
payments and data, and a set of interoperating decentralized services to
support virtual worlds.
“Our mission is to
be the rallying point for an ecosystem of open source tools, open standards and enabling technologies
conceived and co-developed with a community of creators.”
Payment
It is reportedly in the early stages of building out “a highly performant, high-scale payment mechanism which, when launched, will allow users to easily create a rights payment group of
hundreds of thousands of recipients, safely pay them, and allow these recipients to cheaply receive their payments.”
Users will be able to pay for digital goods using “any tokens they wish.”
Rights payment
support on-chain is a critical
need for creators, especially
those deploying work created by large groups or with complex ownership/rights structures.
“Rights payments
support is a common request
creators have of blockchains
and making this cheap and fast on Lamina1 is an area of
active research.”
Metaverse-as-a-Service
Lamina1 hopes
to foster – with “heavy participation from the ecosystem” – the creation of a set
of interoperating decentralized services to support virtual worlds.
It calls this Metaverse-as-a-Service
(“MaaS”).
This is to enable the friction-free navigation of digital
goods as well as personal avatars passing from verse to verse.
Walled gardens of the current Web2 internet will be
consigned to history in this Metaverse.
“State changes must
be synchronized among all participants
and serialized to some kind of storage. A combination of on-chain and other decentralized services can achieve this.”
There is more detail about using cloud and what appears to
be a form of local peer to peer storage to render the pixels necessary to power
the 3D internet in the paper.
Game Engine
& Web Integration
Among the key tech participants that Lamina1 is working with
are games engine developers Unity and Unreal. That’s because the vast majority of today’s immersive Metaverse
experiences are powered by game engines, the most popular being Unity and Unreal.
Lamina1 will
provide software development kits for these engines to make it as easy as
possible for developers to “get
started and be successful in integrating our blockchain into games, immersive worlds, digital twins, simulations and
other content.”
Lamina1 will also
provide the same feature set to web developers, making it straightforward
to also connect immersive web experiences.
It also
wants to create a new web browser, one that is “Metaverse-enabled”.
Lamina1 will
explore this area by instrumenting browser and wallet tech that will push
the User Experience of blockchains forward. This includes
rendering 3D content for avatars, objects and scenes (versus just static or video thumbnails), as well as creating fun utilities and widgets
that enhance the user experience.
Standards
It is committed to
driving open specifications for the Open Metaverse and is a founding
member of the Metaverse Standards
Forum. Other open standards entities it admires include W3C, IEEE and Open Meta DAO.
Its Layer 1
Blockchain will be customized
to support the needs of content
creators “providing provenance
for creatorship and enabling attributive and behavioral characteristics of an
object to be minted, customized
and composed on-chain.”
It is also intended to be carbon neutral by being powered
(eventually, but not at launch) entirely by renewable energy.
Rebel with a cause
This is actually a call to arms more than anything. There’s
a hint of pleading with the creator community as well as developer that they
need to get on board – or risk everyone’s future.
“As this new
digital economy crystallizes,
so does the potential to reimagine the financial systems and foundational structures that fuel it. In its
early stages, the success of this movement depends on the conviction of companies, creators and consumers to demand
something different.”
Stephenson knows he is up against the might of VC who want
to control capital and that of Big Tech like Meta and Alphabet.
He is pitching Lamina1 as the Skywalker which will take
wrest power from the Empire and has enlisted Wired colleague Stephen Levy for a
quote:
“None of this works unless developers ignore
the lure of working with well-funded
giants and sign up to a rebel
effort devoted to an open metaverse.”
Stephenson himself ends on a note of which Karl Marx would
be proud.
“We march waving the pirate flag at the front of the cultural movement, asking both creators and consumers to join the fight for greater agency and ownership –– the fight for an economy that is imagined, produced and owned by its creators. It’s going to be hard and it’s going to take heart, but the upside of providing a maker direct access to their market is staggering.”
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