Disclaimer: This article is intended to convey more market information and does not constitute any investment advice. The article only represents the author's views and does not represent the official position of MarsBit.
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Source: a16z
Original title: Virtual Society, Blockchains, and The Metaverse
In 1986, the early Internet provider Quantum Link and entertainment company Lucasfilm Games released the first MMO game titled: Habitat based on the social world of virtual characters. Players can access the world through a 300-baud modem ($0.08 per minute) and the user's Commodore 64 ($595, about $1,670 at today's price). Habitat departed from the text-based MUD games that dominated the early Internet connectivity market at the time (it was multiplayer but lacked images) and the freely distributed USENET forum (which was text-based of course, but lacked formal gameplay).
In short, Habitat is a virtual civilization with real-time player chat, transactions and interactions. It can be said that Habitat is now also a controversial (both defined and territorial) "metauniverse" that may one day become a precedent. In reflections published a few years after Habitat’s launch,
developers Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer describe the complexity of a world with emerging forms of political, economic and user-generated content. The Habitat environment looks and feels different: a universe that has grown to over 20,000 regions, including players’ homes, shops, arenas, theaters, newspapers, workshops, and a "wild" area where crimes such as theft and murder can be committed (a Greek Orthodox priest who led a one-week chapel in the aforementioned Habitat environment strongly opposed this practice in his number "San Halnut Church" church).
has a story about in-game currency arbitrage, a loophole that allows some courageous players to buy low-priced game props from ATMs and then sell them at a higher price in the store on the other side of the city, resulting in hundreds of thousands of in-game tokens printed overnight. There are treasure hunts created by developers and commercial adventures created by users in the game. The whole reflection on Habitat has an atmosphere of novelty and lawlessness. Even the Internet standards established by Habitat will no longer exist within a few years: the OSI (Open System Interconnection) "presentation" and "application" layers, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer once complained that "a purely a higher level of misunderstanding of communication protocols in cyberspace" was defeated by the simpler TCP/IP Internet standards a few years later, and today's networks are based on this standard.
These early tensions may be best summarized using the title of Morningstar and Farmer's reflection on the Habitat experiment: "Detailed central planning is impossible to succeed; even do not try." In fact, one revelation we can get from Habitat is that attempts to impose order behavior from top to bottom are almost always subverted or destroyed by natural phenomena in the free market.
I first learned about the environment in Habitat, a forthcoming book about meta-universe , author Herman Narula is the co-founder and CEO of impossible, a company that has been building for gaming, digital experiences and now meta-universe infrastructure for the past decade. Narula's main argument about the metaverse is what Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer might agree: The metaverse, regardless of who is built, how users access it, or the underlying infrastructure that supports it, should be designed to promote a powerful form of interaction for users. What is equally important is that (although Morningstar and Farmer do not mention), the objects and experiences in different virtual worlds should be able to interoperate. In Herman Narula's words:
"The meta-universe is a collection of reality that includes the real world or "family reality" and a series of other worlds that society gives it meaning. Events, objects, and identities can exist in and be modified by multiple worlds of the meta-universe, and the role of the meta-universe is that it can promote meaningful and fulfilling experiences in the world it consists of."
Many debates about meta-space focus on what it looks like.Should it be 2D or 3D? Should it be immersively accessible in VR and AR, is it the desktop or mobile platform suitable?
's focus on aesthetics is actually a debate about standards. "What it should look like" is the abbreviation for "what developers should expect." How do you coordinate between JSON and XML data types? If you were designing for 3D, how many polygons should your assets consist of? Should the avatar be provided in glTF, USD, VRM or other file formats? Should the experience that happens on the Unity client be able to communicate with games on the Unreal Engine client? What happens when you introduce NFT into this combination (or what happens when you unilaterally decide to completely ban them from Minecraft without any warning)?
I think these questions are very valuable because they mark an open attitude to interoperability, which is crucial for any future version of the metaspace. But aesthetic and technical considerations also seem to be confused, perhaps at the expense of economic or political considerations.
In the words of Herman Narula, "These metacosmic worlds are not alternatives for us to choose to escape reality, they are more reality."
How do you promote "more reality"? Is it even proactively or is it more organic - the result of unique cultural and economic factors across eras? In the early chapters of Virtual Society, Herman Narula traces the first instance of the "meta-universe" to the earliest times of civilization—buildings like Göbekli Tepe, Egyptian pyramids, and ancient myths like Icelandic Huldufólk (basically elves)—which not only occupy the imagination of past civilizations, but actually influence the way society works and continues to operate in the physical world.
For example, Herman Narula points out that Huldufólk's idea actually influenced modern conservation efforts in Iceland. As Herman Narula puts it, “The mirrored world helps catalyze protectionist efforts in the real world”. What Herman Narula argues in the first few chapters of Virtual Society is that the early metaverse had a reciprocity between the “imagined” world and the real world. If you extend this concept to today, then we should have a similar ideal: No matter what form the meta-metamorphosis takes, there should be a kind of infiltration 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.
Herman Narula spent a lot of time in Virtual Society explaining how he defines meaningful interactions in the metaverse and the technological innovations that Improbable enables users to interact. For Herman Narula, definitions can be measured by "operands per second":
" by reflecting how much information is being sent or needs to be sent simultaneously to simulate the environment, how many independent and simultaneous things can happen in a virtual environment. For example, at the time of writing this article, a " Fortnite " game that allows 100 players to interact with each other requires about 10,000 communication operations per second. This statistics means that the server needs to process all these messages and also needs to quickly send them to each connected user machine that needs them."
This summer I participated in a demonstration in an impossible M² network, and the team intends to become a meta-universe network where users can connect in highly dense environments and transfer NFTs and other virtual avatars between the worlds. There were over 4500 users present, all of whom were in the same server instance (in other words, no shards), talking and interacting with each other. Over time, M² intends to grow and grow, not only supporting Otherside metaverse, but also supporting other creative efforts: musicians’ concerts, community spaces, events with artists and creators.
In many ways, the challenge M² is designed to solve - how to get a completely different group of users to agree on the concept of temporal sharing - is also the core challenge that blockchain needs to solve.And in many ways, we are also starting to see blockchains, and applications built on them, starting to solve other issues that plague the early construction of the Internet and the metaverse.
We can think of blockchain as a game-like social network with unlimited customizable front-ends, taking Ethereum as an example: you have a public key as a login form; optional identities bound to that public key (such as ENS, Farcaster); asset lists (NFT, ERC20 tokens); applications accessed through your public key (such as Uniswap, NFT transactions, on-chain games); and historical concepts of sharing (can be viewed on Etherscan or parsed on Ethereum nodes). The smart contracts running on
on Ethereum are open source, which means users can audit their security and, just as importantly, they can be modified by forking. These modifications may extend the underlying code base (e.g., composable applications interacting with smart contracts, new clients or front-ends built for smart contracts, or derivative projects based on initial protocols). The more you interact and expand with a smart contract, the more valuable it will be.
Some of the most interesting experiments in Ethereum today are in the field of mixing art, social, economic, political and similar game elements. A good example here is NounsDAO, which launched last summer. In short, NounsDAO is an NFT project that holds auctions every day, selling a Nouns NFT, and the proceeds from the sale go into a treasury shared by Nouns holders, and they can initiate proposals on how to use treasury funds and vote. Most importantly, auction agreements, art and governance are all done entirely on-chain. The DAO-funded proposal made Nouns memes and spirit spread across the internet and physical worlds — largely thanks to the way the project attracts the imagination of artists and developers.
On Ethereum, we have seen projects like 3D Nouns generator, derivative auctions and projects funded through Prophouse (which is an infrastructure funded by the Nouns Treasury, but has now evolved to support other NFT projects), as well as efforts to support multiple developers to build alternative clients for Nouns. In the physical world, we have seen the creation of luxurious Nouns glasses, Nouns branded coffee and many IRL activities. In addition, other projects using the Nouns code base also emerged without the NounsDAO funding: Examples include Public Nouns, a branch of NounsDAO, which uses its funds to fund projects in the public goods sector; and other projects such as Lil Nouns, Nounlets, and nouns.build.
and 157 NounsDAO derivative projects links: https://nouns.center/projects (this is not the complete data yet)
Many things are worth our detailed understanding. For example, the 3D Nouns generator is open source and has GLTF, OBJ and VOX file formats - this shows that file format problems can be solved freely by independent developers and users can freely port these assets. The efforts to develop alternative clients for NounsDAO prove the concept that a protocol should be resilient and provide users with a wide range of options for how they access it. The success of the NFT project itself is just an example of the ubiquitous presence of NFT collections—images in the metaverse should be freely forked, mutated, and enjoyed by anyone who wants to use it.
Although the project, the encrypted network and the metaverse space themselves are still in its early stages, I think NounsDAO represents a compelling example of what the elements of metaverse space will one day look like: A powerful ecosystem surrounding the core spirit or culture that will persist in both the digital and physical worlds.
I noticed that the efforts behind the corporate-driven meta-universe, a big irony is that these teams are often building for previous large internet brands. It feels like working to rebuild a digital society, as if the social disintegration and microculture shown by the Internet have never happened (in my opinion, it is a futile act).One thing Herman Narula hints about: I don't see a lot of people talking about - those who tend to build on metacosmic platforms (whether it's Ethereum, other blockchains, or platforms that prioritize interoperability experiences) may be Internet native communities and creators who want to reserve wealth for their culture. In Herman Narula's words:
"In order for a metaverse to have a world and experience of sufficient quantity and quality, and to make it worthy of anyone's time, then, it must be like an inverted pyramid where infrastructure providers get the minimum proportion of value, and the rest of the value is created by the creator and accumulated in the hands of the creator."
decentralized blockchain eliminates middlemen. We live in an era where app stores charge 30% commission, opaque algorithms, and more and more content competes for attention among constantly differentiated audiences. The large amount of value created on these networks is sucked away by the platform itself, and there is a similar level of uncertainty when it comes to terms, services and standards allowed by these platforms.
blockchain — and the smart contracts running on it — provides a most pressing platform: if you compare the total Gas fee for Ethereum to the total value of on-chain transactions, the blockchain charges about 0.05%. With more adoption of scale solutions and more first-tier chains, this number may drop in the coming years.
Also, most blockchain applications have much lower usage rates than their web2 results. Given that decentralized blockchains are computers that can make commitments, developers and users have the initiative to build and enrich a robust ecosystem that stems from the strong guarantee that the smart contracts they interact with will not suddenly change.
Earlier this year, our team’s Arianna Simpson, Eddy Lazzarin and Liz Harkavy published an article about “7 basic components of the metaverse.” In our description of the metaworld, we think it is crucial that “the open meta universe is decentralized, allowing users to control identities, execute property rights, fair incentives, and ensure that value accumulates on users (rather than platforms).”.
With this in mind, whether the next generation of the internet is VR or AR, or on desktop or mobile clients, it is not that relevant. The metaverse will need to promote meaningful interactions, and also make immutable commitments to the user's economic rights.
In The Virtual Society, Herman Narula presents a compelling history about human impulse to build this possible world and thinks that if these worlds cannot interoperate, we are at a dead end. As more people make a living online and build experiences specifically for the digital realm, we need to continue to advocate for decentralization and openness. Or quote Morningstar and Farmer as saying: "Detailed central planning is impossible to succeed, don't even try."
Editor: Lynn
Should it be 2D or 3D? Should it be immersively accessible in VR and AR, is it the desktop or mobile platform suitable?'s focus on aesthetics is actually a debate about standards. "What it should look like" is the abbreviation for "what developers should expect." How do you coordinate between JSON and XML data types? If you were designing for 3D, how many polygons should your assets consist of? Should the avatar be provided in glTF, USD, VRM or other file formats? Should the experience that happens on the Unity client be able to communicate with games on the Unreal Engine client? What happens when you introduce NFT into this combination (or what happens when you unilaterally decide to completely ban them from Minecraft without any warning)?
I think these questions are very valuable because they mark an open attitude to interoperability, which is crucial for any future version of the metaspace. But aesthetic and technical considerations also seem to be confused, perhaps at the expense of economic or political considerations.
In the words of Herman Narula, "These metacosmic worlds are not alternatives for us to choose to escape reality, they are more reality."
How do you promote "more reality"? Is it even proactively or is it more organic - the result of unique cultural and economic factors across eras? In the early chapters of Virtual Society, Herman Narula traces the first instance of the "meta-universe" to the earliest times of civilization—buildings like Göbekli Tepe, Egyptian pyramids, and ancient myths like Icelandic Huldufólk (basically elves)—which not only occupy the imagination of past civilizations, but actually influence the way society works and continues to operate in the physical world.
For example, Herman Narula points out that Huldufólk's idea actually influenced modern conservation efforts in Iceland. As Herman Narula puts it, “The mirrored world helps catalyze protectionist efforts in the real world”. What Herman Narula argues in the first few chapters of Virtual Society is that the early metaverse had a reciprocity between the “imagined” world and the real world. If you extend this concept to today, then we should have a similar ideal: No matter what form the meta-metamorphosis takes, there should be a kind of infiltration 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.
Herman Narula spent a lot of time in Virtual Society explaining how he defines meaningful interactions in the metaverse and the technological innovations that Improbable enables users to interact. For Herman Narula, definitions can be measured by "operands per second":
" by reflecting how much information is being sent or needs to be sent simultaneously to simulate the environment, how many independent and simultaneous things can happen in a virtual environment. For example, at the time of writing this article, a " Fortnite " game that allows 100 players to interact with each other requires about 10,000 communication operations per second. This statistics means that the server needs to process all these messages and also needs to quickly send them to each connected user machine that needs them."
This summer I participated in a demonstration in an impossible M² network, and the team intends to become a meta-universe network where users can connect in highly dense environments and transfer NFTs and other virtual avatars between the worlds. There were over 4500 users present, all of whom were in the same server instance (in other words, no shards), talking and interacting with each other. Over time, M² intends to grow and grow, not only supporting Otherside metaverse, but also supporting other creative efforts: musicians’ concerts, community spaces, events with artists and creators.
In many ways, the challenge M² is designed to solve - how to get a completely different group of users to agree on the concept of temporal sharing - is also the core challenge that blockchain needs to solve.And in many ways, we are also starting to see blockchains, and applications built on them, starting to solve other issues that plague the early construction of the Internet and the metaverse.
We can think of blockchain as a game-like social network with unlimited customizable front-ends, taking Ethereum as an example: you have a public key as a login form; optional identities bound to that public key (such as ENS, Farcaster); asset lists (NFT, ERC20 tokens); applications accessed through your public key (such as Uniswap, NFT transactions, on-chain games); and historical concepts of sharing (can be viewed on Etherscan or parsed on Ethereum nodes). The smart contracts running on
on Ethereum are open source, which means users can audit their security and, just as importantly, they can be modified by forking. These modifications may extend the underlying code base (e.g., composable applications interacting with smart contracts, new clients or front-ends built for smart contracts, or derivative projects based on initial protocols). The more you interact and expand with a smart contract, the more valuable it will be.
Some of the most interesting experiments in Ethereum today are in the field of mixing art, social, economic, political and similar game elements. A good example here is NounsDAO, which launched last summer. In short, NounsDAO is an NFT project that holds auctions every day, selling a Nouns NFT, and the proceeds from the sale go into a treasury shared by Nouns holders, and they can initiate proposals on how to use treasury funds and vote. Most importantly, auction agreements, art and governance are all done entirely on-chain. The DAO-funded proposal made Nouns memes and spirit spread across the internet and physical worlds — largely thanks to the way the project attracts the imagination of artists and developers.
On Ethereum, we have seen projects like 3D Nouns generator, derivative auctions and projects funded through Prophouse (which is an infrastructure funded by the Nouns Treasury, but has now evolved to support other NFT projects), as well as efforts to support multiple developers to build alternative clients for Nouns. In the physical world, we have seen the creation of luxurious Nouns glasses, Nouns branded coffee and many IRL activities. In addition, other projects using the Nouns code base also emerged without the NounsDAO funding: Examples include Public Nouns, a branch of NounsDAO, which uses its funds to fund projects in the public goods sector; and other projects such as Lil Nouns, Nounlets, and nouns.build.
and 157 NounsDAO derivative projects links: https://nouns.center/projects (this is not the complete data yet)
Many things are worth our detailed understanding. For example, the 3D Nouns generator is open source and has GLTF, OBJ and VOX file formats - this shows that file format problems can be solved freely by independent developers and users can freely port these assets. The efforts to develop alternative clients for NounsDAO prove the concept that a protocol should be resilient and provide users with a wide range of options for how they access it. The success of the NFT project itself is just an example of the ubiquitous presence of NFT collections—images in the metaverse should be freely forked, mutated, and enjoyed by anyone who wants to use it.
Although the project, the encrypted network and the metaverse space themselves are still in its early stages, I think NounsDAO represents a compelling example of what the elements of metaverse space will one day look like: A powerful ecosystem surrounding the core spirit or culture that will persist in both the digital and physical worlds.
I noticed that the efforts behind the corporate-driven meta-universe, a big irony is that these teams are often building for previous large internet brands. It feels like working to rebuild a digital society, as if the social disintegration and microculture shown by the Internet have never happened (in my opinion, it is a futile act).One thing Herman Narula hints about: I don't see a lot of people talking about - those who tend to build on metacosmic platforms (whether it's Ethereum, other blockchains, or platforms that prioritize interoperability experiences) may be Internet native communities and creators who want to reserve wealth for their culture. In Herman Narula's words:
"In order for a metaverse to have a world and experience of sufficient quantity and quality, and to make it worthy of anyone's time, then, it must be like an inverted pyramid where infrastructure providers get the minimum proportion of value, and the rest of the value is created by the creator and accumulated in the hands of the creator."
decentralized blockchain eliminates middlemen. We live in an era where app stores charge 30% commission, opaque algorithms, and more and more content competes for attention among constantly differentiated audiences. The large amount of value created on these networks is sucked away by the platform itself, and there is a similar level of uncertainty when it comes to terms, services and standards allowed by these platforms.
blockchain — and the smart contracts running on it — provides a most pressing platform: if you compare the total Gas fee for Ethereum to the total value of on-chain transactions, the blockchain charges about 0.05%. With more adoption of scale solutions and more first-tier chains, this number may drop in the coming years.
Also, most blockchain applications have much lower usage rates than their web2 results. Given that decentralized blockchains are computers that can make commitments, developers and users have the initiative to build and enrich a robust ecosystem that stems from the strong guarantee that the smart contracts they interact with will not suddenly change.
Earlier this year, our team’s Arianna Simpson, Eddy Lazzarin and Liz Harkavy published an article about “7 basic components of the metaverse.” In our description of the metaworld, we think it is crucial that “the open meta universe is decentralized, allowing users to control identities, execute property rights, fair incentives, and ensure that value accumulates on users (rather than platforms).”.
With this in mind, whether the next generation of the internet is VR or AR, or on desktop or mobile clients, it is not that relevant. The metaverse will need to promote meaningful interactions, and also make immutable commitments to the user's economic rights.
In The Virtual Society, Herman Narula presents a compelling history about human impulse to build this possible world and thinks that if these worlds cannot interoperate, we are at a dead end. As more people make a living online and build experiences specifically for the digital realm, we need to continue to advocate for decentralization and openness. Or quote Morningstar and Farmer as saying: "Detailed central planning is impossible to succeed, don't even try."
Editor: Lynn
