 Hello 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. Small gathering of the influencers and the people making it happen, powered by digital bits, sponsored by digital bits, presented by digital bits. Of course, a lot of happening around decentralization. Web three, the metaverse. We've got a powerhouse influencer on theCUBE here. Ryan Gills, the founder of OpenMeta. Been in the industry a while. Ryan, great to see you. That's coming on. Great to be here, thank you. You know, one of the things that we were observing earlier conversations is, you have young and old coming together, the best and brightest right now in the front lines. Been there for a couple of years. You know, I guess some hype cycles going on, but that's normal in these early growth markets. But still, true North star is in play. That is, democratize, remove the intermediaries, create immutable power to the people. The same kind of theme has been drum beating on. Now come the metaverse wave, which is the NFTs. Now the metaverse is, you know, at the beginning of this next wave, this is where we're at right now. What are you working on? Tell us what's OpenMeta working on? Yeah, I mean, so there is a reason for all of this, right? I think we go through all these different cycles and there's 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, you know, so I recognize the importance of an OpenMetaverse 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 you know, I've catalyzed a lot of that from the beginning and 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. 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 you know, I kind of come in the New York Times guy and comment on the line like, hey, I remember AOL wanted a monopolized dial-up internet. And look, the OpenWeb obviously changed all that. They went to side of the extinction. Not the same comparable here, but everyone wants to have their own little walled guard and they feel comfortable first-party data. It's a data business. So balancing the benefit of data and all the IP that could come into, whether it's a visualization or 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 ex that new name for Facebook, you know, big bully, tons of cash, you know, looking to get their sins forgiven, so to speak. I mean, you got Google, probably will come in. Apple's right around the corner. Amazon, they get the whales out there. How to, is it proprietary, is walled guard the new proprietary? How do you view all that? Because it's still early and so there's a lot of change that happened. Well, it's an interesting story that's really playing out in three acts, right? We had the first act, which was really, truly open, right? There was this idea that the internet is for the end user. This is all just networking. And then Web 2 came and we got a lot of really great business models from it and it got closed up, you know? And now as we enter this sort of third act, we have the opportunity to learn from both of those, right? And so I think Web 3 needs to go back to the values of Web 1 with the lessons in hindsight of Web 2. And all of the winners from Web 2 are clearly going to want to keep winning in Web 3. 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. And, 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. It's the whole Web 2 thing is, the history is interesting because, you know, when I started my podcasting company in 2004, there's only like three of us, you know? The Dave Weiner, me, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey. And we thought, and the blogging just was getting going. And the dream was democratization at the time. Mainstream media was the enemy. And then now blogs are at the media. So, and then all of a sudden it like, maybe it was the 2008 area with the debt recession. It stopped and then like Facebook came in. Now see Twitter was formed from the death of Odeo podcasting company. So the 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 did the open come back? Well, it's a generational thing. If you go back to like, you know, Apple as a startup, they were trying to take down IBM, right? It was always, there's always the bigger thing we're trying to sort of unbundle or unpackage because they have too much power. They have too much influence. And now, you know, 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, you know, 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, right? 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, more significant, 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 DAO as well, out of Switzerland, it's called Open Meta. We actually, we named it this six months before Facebook changed their name. And so this is just the track we're on, right? And what we develop is a protocol. We believe that the internet built by game developers is how you define the metaverse. And that protocol's in the DAO? It is in the DAO. Is that Crucible protocol? Open Meta, you can think of Crucible as labs. Got it. We're building everything. So incubator, kind of R&D kind of thing. Exactly, yeah. 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, you know? And what we're developing is the emergence protocol, which is basically defining the interface between the wallets and the game engines, right? 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 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 built. And I think there's an entire generation that's really feeling- 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 the open rails? Yeah, I mean, I think that 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? Yeah. Every room you've ever been in on Earth, people are using two or three of Facebook's products, right? 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 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 and to make it bigger? I mean, it shouldn't be too small. So if you- If there's tracks, you could 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 DAO, you have a voice at the table. 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. So a global hackathon for game developers where we just go through a giant exploration of what is possible. I mean, you think about gaming. I always said early adopters of all technology in the old web one was porn and that was because they were there. Ignostic of vendor pitches or whatever. If it made money, they 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, that the audience doesn't want vapor. They want it to work. They want technology to be solid. They want community. So it's now the new arbiter. So gaming is the pretext of metaverse, clearly. Gaming is swallowing all of media and probably most of the world. And this game mechanics under the hood, all kinds of underlying stuff. How does that shape the developer community? So take the classic software developer. May not be a game developer. How do they translate over? Are you 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 web three movement is web developers. It's in the name, right? 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 skill set of game development. This is a whole discipline. It's a whole expertise, right? 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 skill set. 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. Getting to low code is going to be good. I was saying earlier to the young gun we had on, his name was Oscar Belly. He's a argover, he's 25 years old. He's like, he made a quote. I'm too old to get into eSports. I'm like, 22 old, we'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 physical experiences and 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 web three 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. They understand how to build and design avatars. 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 attached to it. Why are game developers holding back is because they're like, I asked who? Not ready yet. I'm too more elite or is it more, you know? 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 of time right now. If you remember Henry Ford when he produced the car, everybody wanted faster horses. They didn't understand the cultural shift that was happening. They just wanted an incremental improvement, right? 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. Yeah, 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 it like yourselves. We do. Cue them watching. So my objective over the next, say three to six months is to identify which game developers see the value in Web 3 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. We just need to identify where are they, right? 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 is 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&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. Now people are like, it's free software. It's like not a big deal. Everyone knows it's, what? It was never proprietary. But we were fighting the big proprietary code base, as you mentioned that earlier. Is there a proprietary thing for music? Well, not really, because it's licensed rights, right? So in the metaverse, who's the proprietary? Is it the walled garden? Is it the gamers? So is it the consoles? Is it the investment that these gaming companies have in the software itself? So I find that open source vibe is very much circulating around your world. Obviously open matters in the world open, but open source software has a trajectory. Foundations, contributors, community, building, same kind of mindset. Music, not so much, because no one's, it's not direct comparable. But I think here, it's interesting, the gaming culture could be that proprietary IBM, the PlayStation, the Xbox, you know. If you dive into the modding community, right? The modding community has sort of been this like, 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. Counter-Strike is a mod, right? 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. Quake and Quake was better, but I remember the first time on a 1.5 cable mode I'm playing with my friends. I remember vividly. Now the graphics weren't that good, but that was mod. It's mod. So you see mods. I mean, and then you go into these other subcultures like Dungeons and Dragons, which was considered to be such a nerdy thing, but is this a deeply human thing? It's a narrative building collective experience. Like these are all the bottom up type approaches. Modding, world building Dungeons and Dragons. 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, create a fabric of a baseline, somewhat collected platform, tooling and components, and let it just self-form. 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 the game engine. So we 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. 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 opportunity for them. Entrepreneurs, the circumvent the system. Absolutely. Go directly with open meta and build their own open environment. Like I said before, I like to own the things I 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 unbanking. 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. Ryan, thanks so much for coming on. Real final question, what's going on here? Why are we here in Monaco? What's going on? This is the inaugural event presented by Digital Bits. Why are we here? Monaco Crypto Summit. I'm here, some friends of mine, Brittany Kaiser 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. We love it. Thanks for coming on. Okay. Cube coverage continues here live in Monaco. I'm John Furrier. Here on the Monaco Crypto Summit. Love the Dames. Come back next year. It'll be great. Rebecca, 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.