The Open Metaverse Breakdown

Here at Morning NFTea, we like to write educational newsletters that keep our readers up to date with the latest in NFT technology and innovations. Sometimes, we even break down revolutionary projects that are using NFTs in interesting ways to further the Web3 space's progress toward mainstream adoption.

In today's deep dive, we are going to take a sneak peek decades into the future and cover some incredible developments on the Metaverse. You’re going to want to stick around for this. It’s some real Ready Player One stuff, so without further ado, let's introduce the Open Metaverse (OM) project and how this single platform aims to onboard 100 million people — yep, 100 million people! Let’s jump into it.

Overview

There’s no doubt that the Open Metaverse (@OM100M) is an ambitious project. The goal with OM is to build a self-sustaining and sufficiently decentralized platform that onboards the next 100 million people into an open and free metaverse. Launched by the team at 6529 Capital to combat a metaverse becoming a walled garden governed by a singular authority such as the way web2 platforms went, 6529 is facilitating the development of a digital future created by the people, for the people.

But first, let's take a step back and look at how NFTs have opened Pandora’s Box in terms of digital identity and authenticated digital assets. As an amalgam of blockchain tech and consumerization, we’ve been able to witness culture outperforming general finance first-hand; since the average person cares and relates more to identity and culture than finance every day of the week. 

NFTs now allow you to tokenize intangible aspects of culture and make them transactable on the blockchain, facilitating the development of brand-new interconnected platforms, like a metaverse. This breakthrough moment not only enables true digital ownership, but also unlocks the ability to onboard millions of people — both individuals and industries — into Web3, allowing them to be introduced to our eventual metaverse future.

The metaverse is by no means a new concept. In some people's eyes, with the amount of time we spend on digital devices, we’re already living in the metaverse! However, it's important to understand the metaverse is not some silly 3D game; it is an evolution of the internet with better visualization and persistent digital objects. While a huge bulk for the future of the metaverse could be centralized due to tech behemoths like Meta and Google having the resources, reach, and control to monopolize Web3 like they did Web2, the OM project is a refreshing attempt to try and ensure that we maintain sovereignty and independence in the digital world that our society is increasingly spending time in; all while ensuring policy-makers can make well-informed decisions on the future of virtual platforms.

The Team

As with any project, it's important to understand who's steering the ship. Regardless of whether you’re an NFT noob or an NFT veteran, you might have stumbled upon @punk6529 through one of his informative Twitter threads or through his holistic insights on the NFT and crypto industry and its future. Being in crypto since 2013, 6529 has built a remarkable Twitter following of 420k friends. Over this time, 6529 has grown a well-respected and thorough reputation for himself as a visionary of everything Web3 and NFTs; he cares deeply about the technology and has built a pretty remarkable collection that he shares with others through digital galleries, which we will touch on later.

The entity backing this progressive project is 6529 Capital, founded by 6529 — to quote the man himself, “The 6529 mission is to accelerate the development of an open metaverse”. 6529 Capital is unique because it's the first venture capital investment fund in the space that’s led by people who are truly ‘crypto-native’; the team is made up of people who are regarded as some of the best collectors in the industry, and thus, respect web3’s values of decentralization, sovereignty, pseudonymity and privacy.

While not all members of 6529 Capital are doxxed, the fund itself is registered in the United States and is fully compliant with US regulations. To read more about the fund in detail, you can check out this thread or visit their angellist page.

Together, the team leading OM has a well-respected track record of building community and value in the NFT space, potentially being one of the most underrated and powerful teams in all of web3. A purpose-driven organization run by members who aren’t looking for short-term financial incentives; instead looking to progress society towards a safer and more inclusive digital future. 

About The Open Metaverse

While the end goal is to scale this complex platform into the millions, it is driven by the simple mission “to create a decentralized Open Metaverse (OM), bridging virtual and physical spaces, that people use in their day-to-day lives”.

What stands out to us the most is the last clause of the sentence: "that people use in their day-to-day lives". When throwing around the term “metaverse”, it’s easy to get swept up in all the media and sci-fi depictions which admittedly are far more interesting. However, another way of looking at it is considering it as the natural progression of the internet, where people can interact with the digital world that we all access every day, but instead of just two fingers on our phone we will be much more immersed with a higher throughput interface. 

When thinking decades into the future, this more immersive and interactable internet could replace all current screen time; primarily augmented reality, it will be your ambient digital reality. This type of metaverse will be hugely appealing at scale and at maturity (forecasted by OM for 2030+), but given the all-encompassing nature of the metaverse, it would be a massive societal error for this to be controlled by a small group of firms. A monopoly of the metaverse could make organizations unthinkably powerful (hence Facebook heavily investing in their new brand Meta), which may inevitably lose that power to the state and lead to the greatest expansion of state power the world has ever known (global, constant, persistent surveillance). This is where OM comes in as an early attempt to steer our future in the right direction.

What the relatively new technology of the blockchain has enabled is a decentralized and internationally interconnected digital system, able to support the interoperability of platforms that were never before possible with just the Internet. OM is an immersive virtual world built on the blockchain by existing as a protocol layer; this is a low-level base layer that is created to support a host of other applications and is usually meant to be permissionless. For example: Ethereum is a base protocol layer for applications like smart contracts that can be hosted on its permissionless blockchain.

The underlying engine behind OM is built by OnCyber (6529 Capital is an investor in OnCyber), a team at the cutting edge of immersive experiences that are creating the virtual worlds of the future. With a focus on decentralization, OnCyber follows an approach that creates files that render locally in the browser. Even though this is a much harder route than, say, running a game engine on the server side, OM believes client-side rendering is the only currently viable approach for a decentralized open metaverse. 

Many people believe the metaverse will be a mix of the physical and virtual layers of our life. OM aims to be an open virtual layer in the mixed reality that will likely be our future. Here’s the way OM’s infrastructure is meant to be structured:

50 Cities100 Districts in each city100s of buildings in each district1000s of community spaces in each buildingAll inside 1 Open Metaverse

When asked if this will be 6529’s world, the answer is “No. We are building a viable horizontal world open to all. Once it is built, we may run spaces or buildings or districts in this world, just like anyone else. But I do not aspire to be the mayor of 5,000 districts; instead I would like to watch 5,000 different communities blossom”

Why The Open Metaverse

OM separates itself from its competitors by pioneering certain concepts and Web3-native values. Let’s break them down, shall we?

Decentralized and Community-driven

The Open Metaverse is meant to offer the infrastructure for an interconnected world built on a collection of community spaces that operate in a decentralized and interconnected environment. On the topic of our continually increasing digital footprint, @MLeeJr best summed up this topic in a recent 6529 memes Twitter space when he said “If we've learned anything over the last decade, it's probably not in our best interest to have our entire digital lives stored on the servers of just random tech companies”.

OM aims to be truly decentralized, working towards on-chain ownership of everything that happens in the metaverse, even the chat function (although chat won't be restricted to OM, with support for services such as Signal or WhatsApp — another way of putting power into the hand of the people).

Although you may say that using the OnCyber engine is one way of centralizing the platform, OM says “OnCyber is sufficiently decentralized already that, even if it disappeared tomorrow, we could rebuild the OM elsewhere with a manageable amount of work. We believe by summer OM will be sufficiently decentralized and on-chain to allow us to open up more generally”.

It is these decentralized districts that offer the opportunity for communities to have the freedom to build and develop how they see fit, just like in our real world. So far only a few districts have been opened in the current version of OM, but several communities have since added buildings into these districts and started creating spaces for their members to spend time in. Some examples of existing projects that are leveraging these virtual spaces to build more connected communities include

• University of Nicosia

• NFT Asia

• ObscuraDAO

• Wild and Free

• The Landscapers Collective

• And many more

Composability and Interoperability

Composability is the ability to operate several different components as blocks of a larger function. An example of this is smart contracts leveraging NFTs, e.g. the owner of a CryptoPunk NFT is able to get access to another project’s pre-sale just by virtue of ownership. This is only possible in permissionless public blockchains, i.e. you cannot port your data and content from Facebook to Tik-Tok or vice versa as they’re closed systems.

OM allows for composability and interoperability. Currently, you can have your NFTs interact with the Open Metaverse’s virtual world whether they’re on any of the supported blockchains.

• Ethereum

• Polygon

• Tezos

• Solana

• Counterparty(XCP)

Daily Usage and Experience

The metaverse term can mean many things to many different people, but if we look at actual examples of currently implemented “metaverses” like Decentraland, Sandbox, or Yuga Labs' Otherside, we see that pre and post-launch, the biggest challenge is adoption. How do you build an enticing enough proposition that makes people want to come back to spend time in the virtual world?

Unfortunately, this is not a simple question and likely one of the only answers is patience and time, as our society slowly continues to progress further down the digital rabbit hole, as well as waiting for technology to mature to a point that improves accessibility and user experience. A primary reason for the struggle of these centralized organizations' attempts at a metaverse is also setting rigid tokenomics from the start by doing token launches/sales and/or land sales. OM is being built without any of those overhangs, with a sizable investment being made by 6529 Capital upfront for infrastructure development. 

Scalability

The ability to scale is one of the biggest hurdles when it comes to anything digital, and it has proven itself as the Achilles' heel of every Web3 platform that has launched. Even Bitcoin is severely restricted in scale with the amount of throughput it has for high transaction volumes!

Although OM has yet to officially prove a scale close to what they are claiming the platform is capable of, OnCyber has had a very promising start with multiple events hosting multiple communities that choose to take part, including a recent event with $69 million dollar NFT artist @Beeple.

With some of the first attempts at the metaverse coming from centralized organizations like Meta with Horizon or Yuga Labs with Otherside, the trend is quickly showing that the default output of the metaverse is likely set to be centralized (i.e. a walled garden). On the flip side, OM aims to ensure that the true values of crypto are preserved — a means to create monetary sovereignty, permissionless decentralization and a right to privacy, all important rights that Web2 currently infringes upon with corporations holding and controlling our data through centralized servers. 

OM is an attempt to try and ensure that we maintain sovereignty in the digital world that we are increasingly spending our time in, powered by NFTs that centralize the digital world not around a corporation, but around the person.  

The Current Open Metaverse

The Open Metaverse is currently live and you can enter it here, I highly recommend hopping in and checking out the current state of this potential 100 million-person virtual world and its innovative use of in-browser rendering for one aspect of decentralization. Upon entering, you will be taken to the 6529 Museum District: this is the first district of the first city of OM, a Genesis City meant to be a sandbox for experimentation within OM as they iteratively refine and improve the user experience. 

The 6529 Museum District is a skeuomorphic representation of an actual museum district complete with fully curated museums by the team at 6529 Capital and several community buildings from some of the best communities in web3. In this alpha version of the district, OM has released the museums and the central square. They believe this is the most valuable collection of NFT art ever displayed in one space and the current state-of-the-art in NFT museum display, offering one of the richest examples of experiencing digital art in the digital world.

The goal of the district is to be the leading educational and onboarding hub for those interested in the NFT space. The world environment is multiplayer and gamified, where people are able to congregate in community spaces and actually spend time together as they would in a physical space, voice chat can be enabled allowing for conversations, and although avatars aren’t integrated yet they are coming soon as OnCyber has released some alpha prototype videos. 

Currently, this museum district is being used to connect communities around collections of NFT art, while acting as a testing ground for OnCyber and OM’s steady developments. So far 6529 has invested 7 figures in the 6529 Museum District alone. In time, they believe reaching a competitive scale vs other Web2 metaverses is probably a multi-billion dollar scale project.

Getting Involved

OM is free to enter through their online interface and currently, anyone can request to have their own space in the community neighborhood if you have a filled up OnCyber gallery of NFT art that can be shared with the world. 

Each district is meant to be a sovereign space governed by the communities that call it home, and since the Museum Districts launch, several neighborhoods have been added by active communities who want to get involved. OM has already touched multiple parts of the world, and regions have created buildings and virtual spaces including Dutch, Brazilian, Thai, Indonesian, Middle Eastern, and Latin America art communities to name a few. Apart from geographical communities, there are also plenty of projects that have gotten involved such as ObscuraMuseum by ObscuraDAO, ACK’s bar by @lphacentaurikid, a dedicated Pepe Art neighborhood as well as the University of Nicosia (UNIC) hosting the first 100% on-chain university course "Introduction to NFTs and the Metaverse" right in OM. 

That aforementioned UNIC course is a really interesting example of what OM can facilitate. Built on UNIC’s eight-year track record as the leading university in the blockchain with over 100,000 students to date, the introductory course to NFTs and the Metaverse is free to attend with registration through minting the course NFT (free + gas). This demonstrates how virtual spaces can pretty much bring anyone together for anything, breaking the idea of geographical barriers and centralised authorities holding the power of what should/shouldn't be done.

These are just some examples from the many online communities looking for a virtual space to create more immersive and connected experiences, and there will be plenty more to come as OM continues to open more districts and cities as the onboarding process continues.

Currently, the best way to get involved is by helping build OM. Any such online immersive world requires a sizable number of 3D designers, devs and creators helping build the platform. In case you or your project are interested in building inside of OM by creating a virtual space for your community, you can sign up here.

The Memes

Okay, so you might be wondering, ‘all of this is fine, but what's for sale? If there’s no land sale, how do we get involved? 

Ahem, SEIZE THE MEMES OF PRODUCTION! 

Memes are arguably the most important thing in the world, with the basis that they literally shape our reality. They are one of the only reasons why we believe in modern society, capitalism, the monarchy or even Bitcoin. Everything comes from “Memes” or myths propagating in our society.

The Memes by 6529 is a collection of NFT cards launched by Team 6529 in collaboration with several other artists from the digital art ecosystem. The Memes Collection is focused on the fight for the open metaverse (decentralization, community, self-sovereignty) and spreading this message to as many people as possible, utilizing the hype of NFTs and reach of memes. 

The Season 1 memes are:

• Seize The Memes Of Production

• WAGMI

• Don't Let The Institutions Steal Your JPEGS

• GM

• Use A Hardware Wallet

• Open Metaverse / OM

• Freedom To Transact

• Freestyle 

All Memes have intention as they point to key pillars of the foundations required for an Open Metaverse to exist, and aim to utilize internet culture in order to spread these messages.

The Meme cards are artistic representations of the 8 Memes mentioned above, each advocating for values that let people get a taste of digital sovereignty. The belief is that once people get a taste of digital sovereignty, they would be less inclined to go towards closed platforms that do not value their individual property rights or are inherently rent-seeking in nature.

For example, in a recent launch test, Meta (the company behind Facebook, Instagram and Horizon Worlds) put a 53% seller fee in regard to digital assets sold by creators on its platform. To put that into perspective, current NFT Marketplaces charge an average of 2% on sales on their platform.

Each Meme card is a collaborative piece done in collaboration with artists across the physical and digital spectrum inspired by Rare Pepes, Loot, CC0 and Community..

Meme Cards Mechanics:

• All cards are CC0 i.e. the underlying art is in the public domain and can be remixed or re-utilised freely.

• Edition sizes range between 300-1000 with the exception of Meme Card #8 i.e. First GM.

• Price on primary is 0.06529E 

• At the time of writing, 32 Meme cards have been launched over the course of the last few months with artists big and small! (@osf_nft, @reuben_wu, @MattScobel, and @RakeshPulapa being some of the more well known ones)

Conclusion

The Open Metaverse is by no means the first attempt at a virtual world, but we have chosen them for a breakdown over its competitors because it’s apparent that OM is building something completely different and long-term. This isn’t a project trying to raise first and deliver later; they’re trying to create a decentralized and permissionless protocol layer that bridges the physical and digital gap while safeguarding the values of digital sovereignty for decades to come. 

If we onboard millions of people to an open, permissionless protocol first, they will be less likely to fall back onto a walled garden that is inherently rent-seeking (think of the ads in Ready Player One). Whether you grab a meme to spread awareness or get involved by onboarding your community, or just spread the word of digital sovereignty, every little bit counts — because who knows, the future of the Metaverse may depend on it! 

We hope you found value in this breakdown! Just like the Metaverse, this was a collaborative effort from people all over the globe and a huge thanks goes out to everyone involved, especially you reading this! GM/GN friends.

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Writers: @amtwo_eth | @BuckyGang | @subvert

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.