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>> Hi, everyone!
Welcome back to live coverage here in Monaco
for the Monaco Crypto Summit.
I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE.
We have a great, great guest lineup here.
We're already in nine interviews,
a small gathering of the influencers,
and the people making it happen.
Powered by Digital Bits, sponsored by Digital Bits,
and presented by Digital Bits.
Of course, a lot of happening around decentralization,
Web3, the metaverse.
We've got a powerhouse influencer on theCUBE here,
Ryan Gills, the founder of Open Meta.
He's been in the industry a while.
Ryan, great to see you!
Thanks for coming on! >> Great to be here.
Thank you!
>> One of the things that we were
observing in earlier conversations is
you have young and old coming together,
the best and brightest right now in the front lines.
I've been there for a couple years.
I've got some hype cycles going on,
but that's normal in these early growth markets,
but still a true north star is in play.
That is democratized, remove the intermediaries,
create immutable power to the people.
The same kind of theme I've been drum beating on.
Now come the metaverse wave,
which is the NFTs.
Now the metaverse is at the beginning of this next wave.
This is where we're at right now.
What are you working on?
Tell us, what's Open Meta working on?
>> Yeah, so there is a reason for all of this, right?
I think we go through all these different cycles
and there is an economic incentive engine,
and it's designed in
because people really like making money,
but there's a deeper reason for it all,
and the words, the buzzwords, the terms,
they change based off of different cycles.
This one is a metaverse.
I just saw it a little early,
so I recognized the importance
of an open metaverse, probably, in 2017,
and really decided to dedicate 10 years to that.
So, we're very early into that decade
and we're starting to see more of a movement building,
and I've catalyzed a lot of that from the beginning
in making sure that
while everything moves
to a closed, corporate side of things,
there's also an equal bottom-up approach,
which I think is just more important and more interesting.
>> Well, first of all, I want to give you a lot of props
for seeing it early and recognizing the impact
and potential collateral damage
of not having open,
and I was joking earlier about
the Facebook little snafu
with the exercise app and FTC getting involved,
and I kind of call my "New York Times" guy.
I call him, and on the line, I'm like,
"Hey, I remember AOL wanted to monopolize dial-up Internet,"
and, look, the open web obviously changed all that.
They went to the side of extinction.
Not the same comparable here,
but everyone wants to have their own little walled garden,
and they feel comfortable,
first-party data, the data business.
So, balancing the benefit of data
and all the IP that could come into,
whether it's a visualization or a platform,
it has to be open.
Without open, then you're going to have fragmentation.
You're going to have all kinds of perverse incentives.
How does the metaverse continue with such big players
like Meta, themselves, that new name for Facebook?
Big bully, tons of cash,
looking to get their sins forgiven, so to speak.
You've got, Google probably will come in,
and Apple is right around the corner.
Amazon, they get the whales out there.
Is it proprietary?
Is walled garden the new proprietary?
How do you view all that?
Because it's still early,
and so there's a lot of change can happen.
>> Well, it's an interesting story that's
really playing out in three acts.
We had the first act,
which was really, truly open.
There was this idea that the Internet is for the end user.
This is all just networking,
and then Web2 came
and we got a lot of really great business models from it,
and it got closed up,
and now, as we enter this sort of third act,
we have the opportunity to learn from both of those,
and so I think Web3 needs
to go back to the values of Web1,
with the lessons in hindsight of Web2,
and all of the winners from Web2 are
clearly going to want to keep winning in Web3.
So you can probably guess every single company
and corporation on Earth will move into this.
I think most governments will move into it as well,
but they're not the ones that are leading it.
The ones that are leading it are just...
It's a culture of people.
It's a movement that's building and accumulating over time.
>> You know, it's weird.
The whole Web2 thing, the history is interesting
because when I started my podcasting company in 2004,
there's only, like, three of us,
Dave Weiner, me, Evan Williams, and Jack Dorsey,
and the bloggering just was getting going,
and the dream was democratization at the time.
Mainstream media was the enemy,
and now blogs are that media,
and then, all of a sudden,
maybe it was the 2008 area,
that recession, it stopped,
and then Facebook came in.
Now, see, Twitter was formed
from the death of Odeo Podcasting Company.
So, that moment in time in history was a glimmer of hope.
Well, we went under,
my company went under,
we all went under,
but then that ended,
and then you had the era of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.
Reddit was still around.
So, it kind of stopped.
Where did it pick up?
Was it the Ethereum?
Bitcoin and Ethereum brought that back.
Where'd the open come back?
>> Well, it's a generational thing.
If you go back to Apple as a startup,
they were trying to take down IBM.
There's always the bigger thing that was
that we're trying to sort of un-bundle or un-package
because they have too much power.
They have too much influence
and now Facebook, and Apple,
and these big tech companies,
they are that, on the planet,
and they're doing it bigger than it's ever been done,
but when they were startups,
they existed to try to take that from a bigger company.
So, I think it's not a fact that,
like, Facebook or Zuckerberg is the villain here.
It's just the fact that we're reaching peak centralization.
Anything past this point,
it becomes more and more unhealthy,
and an open metaverse is
just a way to build a solution,
instead of more of a problem,
and I think if we do just allow corporations
to build and own the metaverse,
these problems will get bigger, and larger,
and more significant,
and they will touch more people on Earth,
and we know what that looks like.
So, why not try something different?
>> So, what's the playbook?
What's the current architecture
of the open metaverse that you see,
and how do people get involved?
Is there protocols to be developed?
Is there new things that are needed?
How does the architecture layout take us through that?
Your mindset, vision on that,
and then how can people get involved?
>> Yeah, so the entity structure of what I do is
a company called Crucible out of the UK,
but I found out very quickly that
just a purely for-profit closed company,
a commercial company won't achieve this objective.
There's limitations to that.
So, I run a Dow as well out of Switzerland.
It's called Open Meta.
We named it this six months
before Facebook changed their name,
and so, this is just the track we're on,
and what we developed is a protocol.
We believe that the Internet built by game developers is
how you define the metaverse.
>> And that protocol's in the Dow?
>> It is in the Dow.
>> That's Crucible in protocol or--
>> Open Meta.
You can think of Crucible as labs.
>> Got it, okay.
>> We're building everything.
>> So, an incubator, of R&D kind of thing.
>> Exactly, and I'm making the choice
to develop things and open them up,
create public goods out of them,
harness things that are
more of a bottom-up approach,
and what we're developing is the emergence protocol,
which is basically defining the interface
between the wallets and the game engines.
So, you have Unity and Unreal,
which all the game developers are sort of building with,
and we have built software that
drops into those game engines to map ownership
between the wallet and the experience in the game.
>> So, integration layer, basically between the wallet,
kind of like how Stripe is viewed
from a software developer standpoint.
>> Exactly, but done on Open Rails
and being done for a skill set
of world building that is coming,
and game developers are the best suited
for this world building,
and I like to own what I built.
I don't like other people to own what I build,
and I think there's
an entire generation that's really fueling--
>> How do you feel about the owning and sharing component?
Is that where you see the scale coming into play here?
I can own it and scale it
through the relationship of Open Rails.
>> Yeah, I think the truth is that
the open metaverse will be a smaller network
than even one corporate virtual world for a while,
because these companies have billions of people, right?
Every room you've ever been in on Earth,
people are using two or three of Facebook's products.
They just have that adoption, but they don't have trust.
They don't have passion.
They don't have the movement that you see in Web3.
They don't have the talent, the level of creative talent.
Those people care about owning what they create.
>> On the, what can someone get involved with question,
is that developer, is that a sponsor?
What do people do to get involved
with you and your team to make it bigger?
I mean, it shouldn't be too small.
If it tracks, you can assume it gets bigger.
>> If you care about an open metaverse,
you have a seat at the table.
If you become a member of the Dow,
you have a voice at the table,
and you can make decisions with us.
We are building developing technology that
can be used openly.
So, if you're a game developer
and you use Unity or Unreal,
we will open the beta this month later,
and then we move directly into what's called a game jam.
It's a global hackathon for game developers,
where we just go through
a giant exploration of what is possible.
>> I mean, when you think about gaming,
I always said, the early adopters of all technology
in the old Web1 was porn,
and that because they were
agnostic of vendor pitches, or whatever.
If it made money, if it worked,
we don't tolerate-- >> They've always been first.
>> We don't tolerate vaporware.
Gaming is now the new area where it is so...
The audience doesn't want vapor.
They want it to work.
They want technology to be solid.
They want a community.
So, it's now the new arbiter.
So, gaming is the pretext to metaverse, clearly.
>> Gaming is swallowing all of media,
and probably most of the world.
>> And there's game mechanics under the hood,
and all kinds of underlying stuff.
Now, how does that shape a developer community?
So, like, take the classic software developer
who may not be a game developer.
How do they translate over?
You're seeing crossover from the software developers that
are out there to be game developers.
What's your take on that?
>> It's an interesting question
because I come to a lot of these events,
and the entire Web3 movement is web developers.
It's in the name,
and we have a whole wave of exploration
and NFTs being sold of people who really love games.
They're players, they're gamers,
and they're fans of games,
but they're not in the skillset of game development.
This is a whole discipline.
It's a whole expertise.
You have to understand IK retargeting, rigging,
bone meshes, and mapping of all of that stuff,
and environment building, and rendering,
and all of these things.
It's a stacked skillset,
and we haven't gone through any exploration yet with them.
That is the next cycle that we're going to,
and that's what I've spent
the last three or four years preparing for.
>> And getting the low code is going to be good.
I was saying earlier to the young gun we had on,
his name was Oscar Belli, he's a arcoverse.
He's 25 years old.
He made a quote, "I'm too old to get into esports,"
and I'm like, "Too old?
"You're 25, come on!
"I would love to be in esports."
I was commenting that there could be
someone sitting next to us in the metaverse here on TV,
on our digital TV program.
In the future, that's going to be possible,
the first-party citizenship
between this physical experience and the metaverse.
>> These cameras all are a layer
in which you can blend the two of them.
>> So, that's going to be coming sooner,
and it's really more of the innovation around these engines
to make it look real
and have someone actually moving their body
not like a stick figure or a Lego block.
>> This is where most people have overlooked,
because what you have is you have two worlds.
You have Web3 web developers who see this opportunity
and are really going for it,
and then you have game developers who are resistant to it.
For the most part, they have not acclimated to this,
but the game developers hold more of the keys to it
because they understand how to build worlds.
>> Yeah, they do. >> They understand
how to build this. >> They know
what success looks like.
They know what success looks like.
>> If you talk about the metaverse with anyone,
the most you'll hear is "Ready Player One,"
maybe "Snow Crash,"
but those things feel like games.
So, the metaverse and gaming are so--
>> Why are game developers holding back?
Is it because they're like, "It's too not ready yet.
"I'm too more elite,"
or is it more--
>> This is an episode on its own.
I'm actually a part of a documentary.
If you go to YouTube and you say, "Why gamers hate NFTs?"
There's a two part documentary, about an hour long,
that Robin Schmidt from "the Defiant" did,
and it's really a very good deep dive into this,
but I think we're just in a moment in time right now,
if you remember Henry Ford,
when he he produced the car,
everybody wanted faster horses.
They didn't understand
the cultural shift that was happening.
They just wanted an incremental improvement,
and you can't say that right now
because it sounds arrogant,
but I do believe that this is a moment in time,
and I think, once we get through this cultural shift,
it will be much more clear why it's important.
It's not pure speculation.
It's not clout.
It's not purely money.
There's something happening that's important for humanity,
and if we don't do it openly, it will be more of a problem.
I totally agree with you on that.
The silent impact is number one
and some people just don't see it,
because it's around the corner.
Visionaries do, like yourselves.
We do, theCUBE--
>> So, my objective over the next,
say, three to six months is
to identify which game developers see the value in Web3
and are leaning into it
because we've built technology that solves interoperability
between engines, mapping ownership from wallets,
all the sort of blueprints that are needed
in order for a game developer to build this way.
We've developed that,
but we just need to identify, where are they?
Because the loudest voices are the ones that
are pushing back against this,
and if you're not on Twitter,
you don't see how many people really see this opportunity,
and I talked to Epic, and Unity, and NVIDIA,
and they all agree that this is where the future is going,
but the one question mark is, who wants it?
Where are they?
>> You know, it's interesting,
I was talking to Lauren Bissell earlier.
She's from the music background.
We were talking about open source
and how music, I find that it's not open, it's proprietary.
I was talking about when I was in college.
I used to deal software.
You'd be like, "What do you mean deal software?"
Well, at AT&T source code was proprietary,
and that started the Linux movement in the 80s
that became a systems revolution,
and then open source then just started to accelerate,
and now people are like, "Free software is not a big deal.
"Everyone knows it's proprietary,"
but we were fighting the big proprietary code base,
and you mentioned that earlier.
"Is there a proprietary thing for music?"
Well, not really because it's license rights.
So, in the metaverse, who's the proprietary?
Is it the Walled Garden?
Is it the gamers?
Is it the consoles?
Is it the investment that
these gaming companies have in the software itself?
So, I find that that open source vibe is
very much circulating around your world.
Actually, Open Meta uses the word "open,"
but open source software has a trajectory,
foundations, contributors, community building,
the same kind of mindset.
Music, not so much,
because it's not direct comparable,
but I think here...
It's interesting, the gaming culture could be that,
that proprietary IBM, the PlayStation, the Xbox.
>> Yeah, if you dive into the modding community,
the modding community has sort of been
this gray area of gaming,
and they will modify games that already exist,
but they do it with the values of open source.
They do it with composability
and there's been a few breakthroughs.
Counterstrike is a mod.
Some of the largest games of all time
came from mods of other games.
>> Look at, Quake had a comeback.
I played first multiplayer Doom
when it came out in the 90s,
and that was all mod based.
>> Exactly.
>> And Quake was better.
I remember the first time,
on a 1.5 cable modem, playing with my friends.
I remember it vividly.
Now, the graphics weren't that good,
but that was mod.
>> Mod. >> So you see mods--
>> And then you go into these other subcultures,
like Dungeons & Dragons,
which was considered to be such a nerdy thing.
but is just a deeply human thing.
It's a narrative building collective experience.
Like, these are all the bottom-up type approaches,
modding, world building.
>> So, you're going to connect...
So, I'm just kind of thinking out loud here,
you're going to connect the open concept of source
with Open Meta,
bring game developers and software developers together,
and create a fabric of a baseline,
somewhat collective platform of tooling and components,
and let it just self-form,
and see what happens? >> Let it self-form.
Composability is much faster than a closed system,
>> What are your current building blocks you have now?
You have the wallet and you have--
>> So, we've built an SDK on both Unity and Unreal,
as a part of a system that is
a protocol that plugs into those two engines,
and we have an inventory service,
we have an avatar system.
We basically kind of leaned into this idea
of a persona of being the next step after a PFP.
>> So, folks that are out there,
girls and boys who are sitting there playing games,
they could build their own game on this thing?
>> Absolutely.
>> This is an opportunity for them, entrepreneurs,
to circumvent the system, go directly with Open Meta,
and build their own open environment.
>> Like I said before, I like to own the things I've built.
I've had that entrepreneurial lesson,
but I don't think, in the future,
you should be so okay with other companies
or other intermediaries owning you and what you build.
I think there's an opportunity to build value.
>> Yeah, and I think your point about the mod culture is
not so much going to be the answer.
It's what that was like,
the dynamic of modding is developing,
>> And then, therefore,
you get the benefit of sovereign identity.
You get the benefit of un-banking.
That's not the way we market this,
but those are benefits that come along with it,
and it allows you to live a different life,
>> And may the better product win.
I mean, that's what you're enabling.
>> Yeah.
>> Ryan, thanks so much for coming on!
A real quick final question, what's going on here?
Why are we here in Monaco?
What's going on?
This is an all-girl event presented by Digital Bits.
Why are we here?
>> Monaco Crypto Summit.
I'm here, some friends of mine,
Brittany Kaiser and and Lauren Bissell invited me here.
I've known Al for a number of years,
and I'm just here to support.
>> Awesome!
Congratulations, and we'll keep in touch!
We'll follow up on the Open Meta.
Great story! >> Thank you!
>> We love it, thanks for coming on!
Okay, theCUBE coverage continues here live in Monaco.
I'm John Furrier, getting all the action here
on the Monaco Crypto Summit.
Love the name!
Come back next year!
It's going to be great!
We'll be back with more coverage
to wrap up here on the ground,
then the yacht club event.
We're going to go right there as well.
That's in a few hours.
So, we're going to be right back.
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