The Look Up! Podcast: The Future of the Metaverse with Gabby Dizon
In this podcast, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon explains the concept of the metaverse, the different jobs you can do in it, and how a multi-chain world can be possible.
The Look Up! Podcast presents guests who have embraced the rise of NFTs within their own creative endeavors like Ryan Gill (Co-founder and CEO of Crucible) and Justin Blau (American DJ also known as 3LAU).
The Look Up! Podcast is hosted by Marc Weinstein, a serial investor who has invested in companies like SmartDeFi, a non-custodial, robo-investment app, and Authereum, a platform for onboarding people to decentralized apps on the Ethereum network. Marc is also Head of Platform at Mechanism Capital, a fund that is primarily focused on decentralized projects and providing public research. The company has also invested in Yield Guild Games (YGG), Biconomy, and NFT Oasis, along with other leading DeFi frameworks.
This episode of the Look Up! Podcast features Gabby Dizon, co-founder of YGG. In the interview, Marc and Gabby discuss how the concept of the Metaverse was conceived and what it brings to the DeFi universe.
The Look Up! Podcast - Empowering Labor in the Metaverse - Gabby Dizon
Marc (33:30): I don’t know if this is public, but you also invested in Star Atlas, which is a game built on Solana, and Solana is an entirely different blockchain than Ethereum, and there are all these layer 2 platforms that are launching, and you have different Metaverses that are not even blockchain-based that might eventually, we hope, open up - like Roblox and Fortnite. Do you think that ultimately we converge on one overarching universe in which all these games coexist and interoperate, or do you think that we will have fragmented populations and economies with nation state type borders? What is your vision of the Metaverse, not today but 100 years from now when our grandchildren, God willing, are playing or more likely living in these worlds?
Gabby (35:04 ): I do believe that we are going for a multi-chain or multi-world environment. And I think what’s really important in the open Metaverse thesis is that there are bridges that will let me easily go from one world to another, which means if I am in the world that is on the Ethereum blockchain, I want to be able to go into the world that is on Matic or on Solana and that is what differentiates us from current game Metaverses. “If I am a character in Roblox, there is no way for me to go to Minecraft, there is no walkway for me to go into Halo,” they are just different closed worlds and the world that I would like to see is where the player owns their character, items, and assets in the Metaverse, and they can go with what they have and visit these different worlds and interact with them.
Marc (36:02): Will the Metaverse need police officers, and firefighters, and are we going to recreate the problems that exist in our established physical reality and end up recreating them because they remind us of home - so to speak - or are we going to have a new set of problems, and what would those problems be, and can we create a Metaverse that is really a utopia?
Gabby (36:46): That’s a really great question because it’s really philosophical and a lot of what you are talking about in relation to shared service institutions the police, firefighters, even the lawyers, exist because we want people to act a certain way and when people deviate from that, then we have to course correct it. What I am hoping for in the Metaverse is that we can minimize that in certain ways: One is the adherence to smart contracts, so if the NFT that pertains to my land title is in my wallet then no one can claim it as theirs, it is on the chain where everyone can verify it and there is nothing anyone can do about it, short of stealing my wallet. The second is that because of the social coordination structures like DAOs, I think we can do group cooperation and incentivization which is a lot harder to do in the physical world, where it’s difficult to create groups towards doing the same thing because the incentives are not aligned, and then you end up needing a lot of these management structures or corrective structures. I believe that a lot of management overhead can be replaced by coordinating incentives and culture instead, and this is what we are trying to do with Yield Guild. We have a very small core team, specifically six people right now, and it's six people with maybe five to ten close community members that are contributing a lot and another 6,000 or so that are loosely connected to us. We don’t have a lot of rules that coordinate us. Rather, we have incentive structures and shared culture that we want to involve our community in. And that is the kind of world I would like to see in the Metaverse.
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