We're in 1999 for Web3 (Here's What Happens Next)

Sean Weisbrot: Steve McGarry is the founder and CEO of Sandstorm, a platform that connects brands with designers who help them to enter the metaverse. I've chosen to talk to Steve because companies are spending billions of dollars on the metaverse, even though it is a still nascent industry.

Sean Weisbrot: We're still trying to figure out what it's going to actually be like in the future with companies like Meta, formerly Facebook committing to spending billions a year alone on making their vision come to fruition. Sandstorms Marketplace is generating seven figures a year, which shows that not only is there money willing to be invested by VCs into the Metaverse, despite the current market conditions, but there's also hard cash being spent by brands on marketing, pr, and.

Sean Weisbrot: designs that will help them to get into the metaverse and interact with the people that are buying their products now and into the future. So I think that's something really worth discussing and that's why we're here today with Steve. So I hope you enjoy this interview. And Steve, why don't you tell everyone a little bit more about yourself and how you got into Sandstorm to begin with, and we'll go from there.

Steve McGarry: Thanks so much for having me on Sean. And a quick background about myself. I really got into crypto, what's now, I guess, considered Web3 back in 2013. And I was out of college. I got a corporate job and had quit the corporate job to go to a program in the Harvard Eye Lab and got really inspired by, a sign that was, a Bitcoin sign that was like this wizard that was magic internet money in Cambridge.

Steve McGarry: and we were sleeping on the floor in Dogpatch Labs in Kendall Square and kind of leaching off of the free food at MIT Sloan and just trying to kind of learn the whole startup scene in 2013. And went to a couple meetups there around MIT about Bitcoin and everything and really fell in love with it.

Steve McGarry: 'cause I majored in economics and. Understood what was potentially gonna transpire when you have like an actual fixed supply of something that people could store value in. And I had never really played around with it too much. So, at the peak, fast forwarding to today, we actually played games of ping pong that were worth probably a hundred thousand dollars at this point back then.

Steve McGarry: And we were just joking around, playing around a lot. Tinkering around with Dogecoin and stuff like that when it first came out. And that led me to start a company called Lend Layer in 2014 with a couple co-founders. We went to California from Boston and raised a couple million dollars in Mountain View while there were four of us living in a tiny little two bedroom apartment.

Steve McGarry: And, it was a really great concept around peer-to-peer lending, and it was inspired by a lot of the core of crypto. I'd like to think where. It was connecting these very high net worth individuals who could release capital as loans to students that were gonna learn programming through coding bootcamps.

Steve McGarry: And these coding bootcamps were like 12 week long programs where kids could learn how to code and get jobs. So a really low risk profile. And we moved up to the city. We were kind of part of the tech problem in San Francisco back then where you'd apply for an apartment and they were like, oh, there's 20 people ahead of you.

Steve McGarry: They have all the right prerequisites. They have all the people that they need to sign off on them. And us as a startup, we needed a place to live. We said we just raised money. Here's the whole year of rent upfront. And the landlords say, all right, skip the line, all the other people outta the way you come on in.

Steve McGarry: So that happened every day in San Francisco, back then where people that had just raised all this money needed a place to live in the city. And it was just such a problem for the city. And I won't go into that too much, but I got a place to live there. Shortly after we'd seen this sort of explosive growth with coding bootcamps in the city and expanding into the Midwest, Southeast and overseas, all over the world basically.

Steve McGarry: And we got acquired in 2015 by Max Leens Company, an Affirm. They just went public, I think last year or something like that. and I was there for about 6, 3, 6 months, something like that. I forgot how, how long it was. And really learned the intricacies of running a very large organization like that.

Steve McGarry: And left that to start a company called Grow Your Base. That became the seventh largest landowner in Sandbox Metaverse, in 2020. And then last year I started Sandstorm. Raised a round 2.5 million from, about a handful of well-known VCs in the space, and we're connecting brands with thousands of metaverse builders to bring people into the metaverse.

Steve McGarry: That's kind of where we're at.

Sean Weisbrot: Thank you for the introduction. I appreciate it. As you were talking about your story, I just started going, oh yeah, I've got question, question, question. Okay, great. I've got like a bunch of questions now. The one most relevant to what you just said was. Why would web two brands want to build for the metaverse and spend millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars? Getting there

Steve McGarry: off the back of this pandemic that we all got experience, pretty quickly working remotely or just communicating with relatives if you don't work remotely. everything got pushed. It was just a shove into this virtual experience where if you're on Zoom or how we're talking to each other right now, there became this question.

Steve McGarry: Where it became a little bit more prevalent in the virtual world of talking to each other, and people were kind of challenging these young people who were in Minecraft all day and Roblox all day. But the question that was posed to a lot of people was. What makes this shirt valuable that I'm wearing on Zoom, and what makes it more valuable than one that I would buy and wear on my avatar in Minecraft or Roblox or one of those?

Steve McGarry: Like what is the difference? It's self-expression. It's me sitting here talking to you and you know we can do that. In an avatar setting, in a virtual experience, I can actually wear cooler things and, and look like a, however I wanna look and, and, and change it around in all these different cool self-expressed ways.

Steve McGarry: So brands have, they're savvy. They picked up on this pretty quickly, that self-expression and fashion. were at the forefront of this. So last year. You saw a lot of big name companies like Gucci's and these households, kind of fashion brands coming into things like Roblox and these, these virtual worlds where they said, we're gonna test the waters.

Steve McGarry: We know Gen Z and Gen Alpha are spending. Eight, nine hours a day with their friends on all these different platforms, which is just to, to all the other generations that are listening to this. They might say like, that's insane, but it's just this hyperconnectivity that. Is coming and listening to the young people, listening to what they're doing, where their friends are, where they're transacting, where they're, expressing themselves.

Steve McGarry: And the brands are trying to get at the forefront of that. So they're, they're watching the wave come and they're all trying to get positioned for the mega wave of all these people that are doing self-expression. They're all really in these unique environments together, exploring it because it's a very exploratory phase.

Steve McGarry: And there's a lot of excitement around the brands that are involved early in that, just like the first websites, everybody was excited to go to pets.com and they were excited to go to all these clunky old nineties websites. Very similarly in these virtual environments is kind of how I. I would frame the way that very savvy brands are getting in right now.

Steve McGarry: 'cause they wanna get in in advance before the sort of young people bring in all the rest of the, the other generations. I'm

Sean Weisbrot: a big proponent of virtual reality. I have quest two. I've had one for, for over a year now. Love it. Use it all the time for not work, not productivity, but for sociability playing games like ping pong and mini golf and you name it, these kinds of things. Right? And one of the biggest problems to the growth of the VR industry is that. It costs too much for people to buy the devices. They're not educated on them yet. They're, it is just, it's not there yet. Right. Metaverse is similar in that regard, although I think the metaverse will take longer than vr.

Sean Weisbrot: It may be its potential, it's potentially that VR is a stepping stone to make the metaverse happen. We can have that conversation later. So basically, my, my question is. Why not wait and see what it looks like? Because as I mentioned in the intro, we don't know what it looks like yet. We have an idea of what it could be. There's no guarantee that is what it's gonna be like. So, what do you think the metaverse will actually look like? How long will it take to get there and are people spending money right now just kind of like trying to get PR basically to say, oh, look at us, we're hip, we're trying to be part of this movement that's not ready for mainstream yet.

Steve McGarry: First we should lay the groundwork of, of what Metaverse really kind of is, and it's in my view, a spectral lot of people would agree with that. It's a spectrum of your centralized metaverses that are your Minecraft, your roadblocks, where they're controlling the experiences of millions and millions of people where you have these concerts taking place where millions are showing up with Travis Scott and Justin Bieber and all that.

Steve McGarry: And then on the other end of the spectrum have these fully decentralized experiences that are empowering users to have ownership over not only the assets within the world, but also the world itself in many of these cases. So you have this full blown spectrum from your centralized world that is, a powerhouse of getting these big name people in and doing these big experiences that are very much centralized and all that own ownership. Is by one big company and then you have your decentralized owned by the players. So I'm more of a believer in the future being digital ownership within these worlds for the players, and there hasn't really been any innovation. On that front in gaming for a decade, buying skins that are owned by the publisher doesn't count as ownership because I, the, I don't own them, it's just me sinking money into the game, the game company.

Steve McGarry: So I think that what we're watching now is a shift over ownership in these worlds. So I think the metaverse itself is here. as it is today in all these different forms in between the spectrum that I was saying. So it is, it's more of a question as to how, how soon does the virtual world and ownership come together and work together soon?

Steve McGarry: I think this is the question. And that is, kind of the exciting part. If, if we knew exactly how this played out long term. It wouldn't be fun. There wouldn't be that big experiment. There wouldn't be all these big players coming in. And I think ultimately you need that unknown. And I would venture to say that unless, there was that unknown, there wouldn't be a lot of people coming in, taking swings, doing huge bets and just kind of taking a shot at it.

Steve McGarry: So I agree with you. Virtual reality is right around the corner, probably sooner than this decentralized approach. But the exciting thing is, these young entrepreneurs are coming in heavy and they're coming in with a lot of really great ideas. And to add, finally onto that, I see this as breaking into a bunch of worlds here.

Steve McGarry: There's gonna be words for work. There's gonna be worlds for commerce. There's gonna be worlds for mental health. There's gonna be worlds for gaming. There's gonna be worlds for events and social events and things like that. And individual companies are gonna try and have their own worlds. I think there's gonna be all these different ways where you can communicate with each other and be in each other's presence that have never existed before.

Steve McGarry: and I, I challenge a lot of people that are listening to this maybe, that are saying like, oh no, gaming's been around forever. This is just a game lobby. You never owned anything in those games. So this is the shift to, to really think about what it looks like if you spend. 12 hours a day putting equity into an account on a game and you never before used to be able to withdraw that equity.

Steve McGarry: You can now, which is a revolution, in my opinion, of how this whole virtual world plays out.

Sean Weisbrot: So you said something really interesting there, which was that people want to be able to own their assets and create equity within these metaverse instances. This brings me to two large contentions I have with the idea of a metaverse that a lot of people seem to hawk, but I think hasn't been thought through and may need another decade or more to be able to properly manage, if ever at all. That being the first one that will be able to like a ready player, one moves between worlds very smoothly. Now if you're creating a metaverse world and you're not using a single sign-on that every other brand is using, you're gonna have to log out and log into this other application. Like I just, I don't see how that's gonna be done unless you have every company in the world agreeing to use a single sign-on method that obviously, metaverse or Meta was trying to create, or, Microsoft might be trying to create.

Sean Weisbrot: But, I think that that's. A goal for the metaverse that. May struggle to come to fruition. What do you think about that?

Steve McGarry: The buzzword interoperability is one that people throw around a lot in the Web3 space, and the intention there is what you're describing of people will be able to fluidly move between these worlds, but ultimately. I think that this is gonna be more like apps on your phone. When you look at your phone, you don't have one login for all these different applications. You have a separate login for each one of these applications. 'cause each of those are private companies. you're able to actually go in and develop content on Instagram.

Steve McGarry: You're able to go into TikTok and develop content there. And these are all siloed. And I think that this plays out the same way because that's what we know. The idea of being able to fluidly move between the two is great and it's a, a beautiful concept and there are cool innovations like Ready Player Me that are focusing on at the avatar level, being able to get you through all the different types of virtual worlds, using like heavy, heavy tech in the background to kind of get a root of value from each world into the next one.

Steve McGarry: But. I think it plays out more so as these silos where you have individual logins, you're able to seamlessly log into each one of these. But separately, I. And I think brands are also playing this card as well, where they don't necessarily want their brand represented in certain worlds. They want it to be represented in a certain style.

Steve McGarry: They want it either in a hyper realistic format or a playful one like Sandbox where its Vox lies. There, there's a lot of different things at play and everybody has a different style preference, so they're all gonna be. Very different is how I kind of view it. So it's a great concept, but in practice, I think it's all gonna be separate, separate logins, separate styles, separate formats.

Steve McGarry: And I was actually privy, as a final note to that question, I. Two were in the first meeting of the open Metaverse alliance, which was basically in New York City where I think it was about 15 of the CEOs in the metaverse. You had sandboxes, voxels, decentral land, all of these people that I was mentioning earlier, for listeners.

Steve McGarry: On the end of the spectrum where they're actually giving ownership to the users through different types of technology, all those types of projects where they're trying to take a decentralized approach to virtual environments. They were in this room and there was talk about interoperability, what that looked like, what it looked like to buy an avatar in one of these worlds and move it into another one.

Steve McGarry: And there were some big personalities there. A lot of, kind of fun, fun banter and back and forth. That took place there and ultimately that did form, I think it's called OMA three now, the Open Metaverse Alliance and Web3 consortium where there's like a lot of really cool things that they're doing.

Steve McGarry: But being in that meeting was very helpful in understanding how these platforms or thinking about it, and they want to keep it open. They want to be able to allow a kid in their garage to disrupt. Things that are going on in these different worlds. And I think that thinking is the right thing, the right approach to something that could crack that nut that you're talking about, Sean, or like how, how these play nicely together is someone could come along and completely disrupt how we think about this. But for now to answer the question, I think it's silly.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm glad that we agree because I think when. A lot of the crypto bros were coming screaming earlier this year and last year about how the metaverse is gonna be great and all this interoperability. I'm going, that just sounds like the ICO craze and the NFT craze and the defi craze. It's like, it's a pipe dream. I'm sorry, but it's just, it's, it's impossible. If you actually understand how code is created and you understand how capitalism works, the chance of interoperability between these worlds is highly unlikely. Due to the fact that data is super important, companies want to keep data to themselves and they want to be able to have the right to sell that data.

Sean Weisbrot: And if data's flowing between all of these different applications, it would require each of them to have integrations. It'd have to be a single, cloud based user database. It's just beyond the realm of sanity, I think, to be able to make that assumption that those things are going to happen. And, as you alluded towards the end of your response to, to the last question I had, you had mentioned designs. And I, again, I was going to ask, but you basically already answered it. It's incredible to think that you could also buy something in one game or one instance of the metaverse and carry it over to another application because, one, one brand may use Unity, the other one might use Unreal.

Sean Weisbrot: They're not going to pair well. One of them might use one design file type, and the other uses a different design type file type. How are you going to seamlessly transfer or translate or transcode that file? what if the, as you said, realistic versus, versus cartoony. What if you buy something that's cartoony?

Sean Weisbrot: Is it gonna become hyper realistic in that next version? No, of course not. That's ridiculous. Maybe you would need, pointy from open AI to potentially help you to, to transcode these things, but like, it just sounds fantastical to a point that I don't think it's ever gonna happen.

Steve McGarry: There's a lot of people working on, at least on the protocol level as to how interoperability works, where you actually move assets between different blockchains and stuff like that. So the decentralized infrastructure. It underneath all of it is where people are really trying to develop and, and move assets between the, the different chains. So I think that word being focused on the protocol level, and we're talking about what's being built on top, where these, these virtual worlds are.

Steve McGarry: So you got a couple different layers there. And I think that from the virtual world perspective and moving like GB or dot vx file formats across these different worlds, I think is, is gonna be, I. Very, very, very difficult to do. And my take on this with Sandstorm is I think the builders themselves are the ticket.

Steve McGarry: If Nike comes to Sandstorm and says, I need a shoe, a builder's gonna be able to deploy that across five different virtual worlds, five different formats, and allow them to tap into all of those communities, like all five of those different communities. And that is the approach that I think is how.

Steve McGarry: If we get to some world where people are locking arms and they're fluidly moving across each other in, in avatars, maybe that comes from the protocol level where assets sit. And if as long as they're built on the same blockchain, they can render in, in that, in that world, I don't know how it's gonna play out, but I feel like the builders right now are deploying across these different sorts of siloed, gardened, worlds. Is how we get some semblance of one brand, having a presence across multiple experiences and different views. That's kind of how I think one, one brand can get across all these different worlds and a player would need to get those different assets to go across those different worlds. Which is another barrier to entry, more friction.

Steve McGarry: And there's just so many different things that we run into with the, the barriers like you were talking about before, where you have free to play games that are, very, very important out there where people can buy things in the game. they don't own those items. I think we're in a weird place now where people actually have to pay to play in many of these situations where they have to have some dust in their wallet or they have to have some T in their wallet or polygon or whatever it is.

Steve McGarry: And I think that's a bigger problem as to like getting people in and getting people interested in the space because traditionally you could just kind of log on to a, a, a browser game of some kind and, and tinker around and play around, you didn't really need to buy anything or do anything. And I think that's the struggle right now, at least from what I'm seeing and hearing from a lot of the developers, is just trying to figure out how to lower that barrier to allow more people to come in.

Sean Weisbrot: Blockchain interoperability, right? You're talking about protocol level. The problem with that is there's thousands of blockchains and for. Interoperability. Every blockchain would have to create interoperability with every other blockchain in order to make sure that every metaverse that's using any blockchain it wants has the ability to transfer those assets. On top of that, you mentioned that designers can create the different file formats and spread them to the different metaverses.

Sean Weisbrot: The problem with that is even if they do that, I mean, I could be wrong. Even if they do that, it doesn't mean that every metaverse world is going to accept their submission as an asset that can be visible or purchased in their world. And even then, how would the metaverse know that an asset is already owned by a user from another world?

Sean Weisbrot: And then how, how would they. Deal with allowing it to be visible in this new world that they've moved to. And wouldn't they want to charge you a transfer fee or something to enable you to be able to use this asset in this world? Right? So there, there's so many difficult steps even in the protocol levels. And then, and on top of that, once you get, once you handle the technical difficulties, getting the companies themselves to tolerate this and, and to make it profitable for them, it just seems really difficult. Do you have any insight into how that could potentially be dealt with?

Steve McGarry: There's a lot of different swings that have been taken at interoperability on the protocol level One company in particular. that I've been working with closely and know quite well is called Axel R, and I know that attempts previously. With different bridging, meaning I want to send one ETH to, avalanche or one of these different blockchains out there. The way that bridging worked traditionally, as far as I understand it, I'm not like programming on the protocol level daily here, but it would effectively lock up.

Steve McGarry: My, whatever I'm trying to transfer, it would lock it up into a smart contract and give me something that was wrapped on a different chain. And for everybody listening to this, this is getting into the weeds as to how assets move from one network to one network. In five years from now, this is all gonna be in the background.

Steve McGarry: Like this is just gonna be something that operates in the background, just like a database. And for example, when I type in www Google, I don't know exactly all the different layers that are required in the backend, like HTTP to be pulling me to that website, showing me all these things. You don't need to know in five years what chain is being used in the background.

Steve McGarry: And the goal here is in the backend to actually have it be fluid in some way. So what, what you're bringing up Sean, is valid, concerns about the complexities 'cause it is hyper complex. Fortunately there's brilliant people working on trying to figure out how. How these assets can either bridge or be wrapped and move between these different chains.

Steve McGarry: Because very similarly to the networks with the internet, we're, we're all trying to figure out how to get a better interface and the internet's done a good job. Web two, I don't need to know exactly how all of these things work as a consumer. It should just be in the background. NFTs are going to be a thing that operates in the background. Blockchains operate in the background. I don't need to know if this site runs on MongoDB. I just need to know that it runs, I just need to use it. Click a button and it uses it. So a lot of the things in every beginning of an industry, especially in the internet in the mid nineties. It was all very abstract.

Steve McGarry: people were like, oh, why would I do that when I could listen to the radio? Why would I, why would I do that? And there were all these really sort of, big issues that came up that they didn't have the solutions to. they were like, okay, well what really matters is that really interesting.

Steve McGarry: Engineers come into this space for the next 20 years and build things that can help us develop. So. I, I would say you're, you're, you're partially right in terms of that you're, you're, Concerned, interoperability could never come, but I would say people in the beginning ages of the internet could never imagine that you and me would be talking via video recording on this really fancy, all-inclusive app, this closely to when the internet launched.

Steve McGarry: So just the, the rate of innovation is just insane with this technology as, as the internet and web two is kind of proven. So I would, I would challenge it and say that. If this continues at our current rate of innovation and people coming into a space and learning about it, tinkering and developing and figuring things out, it connects the dots and, I think we're super early on. As you pointed out, that interoperability isn't solved yet. It's a billion dollar potential problem if people can. Figure it out and, and how to, how to figure it out. But there are a lot of big mistakes that have happened. All you have to do is search on Google interoperability hacks and you'll see hacks of hundreds of millions of dollars where what I mentioned earlier with the wrap in the smart contract, hackers just attack that contract 24/7 all day.

Steve McGarry: 'cause they say, okay, there's, there's hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in this one little honeypot. It's where everybody's locked assets to, to wrap 'em onto a different chain. I'm gonna attack that. And it, and it became a real issue with a dozen or so projects over the last two years that have tried to take a home run swing at this, because it's such a huge potential outcome if you can solve it.

Steve McGarry: But it, it, results in some pretty explosive issues. You have to appreciate that level of, of risk and that level of, ambition to go after something that is so high risk. But I think Axel is a great example of some guys at the forefront. MIT guys are really brilliant in terms of how they're thinking about this.

Steve McGarry: And there will be more, there will be more companies that are trying to come in and help in the background. but for everybody here listening, It is something just like I said, that you don't have to necessarily be concerned about. It needs to be something that is for the engineers and developers to really focus on and you can learn about it, but, it is, it is going to operate in the background.

Sean Weisbrot: I've been saying since 2016 that crypto wallets have a horrible interface in 2022. I'm still saying they have a horrible interface. So if someone solves interoperability in a way that makes it something you never need to think about or talk about, I would argue that's a hundred trillion dollars problem or, or opportunity because by the time they fix it, the US Federal Reserve will have printed so much money that we will be into the quintillions in the global economy.

Sean Weisbrot: All jokes aside though, I have spoken to a number of people in the blockchain industry and whenever I talk to someone, I always try to make the argument that blockchain isn't necessary for what you wanna do. I would like you to create an argument for me about. Why the Metaverse doesn't need blockchain or Crypto or NFTs

Steve McGarry: Web one was read only where you just had static websites where you could just read things. Web two was where you could contribute, publish, upload content to these Goliath companies like Google and YouTube and stuff like that. And Web3 being, I actually own the things that I create in this environment. So. I would say that we can definitely continue with Web two and the Googles of the world can continue to, to vacuum up us as products and our data and everything like that.

Steve McGarry: And it could work like, and it has worked with Minecraft and Roblox and these companies where. They run smoothly. there's not some sort of dao where there's a bunch of drama all the time. People like clawing at each other all day every day too, to get a decision done. And there, there's none of that.

Steve McGarry: and there's decision making happening. Like there's, there's a hierarchy. There's all these things that have proven to work. So I would say that the point to offset the need for blockchain as a whole, for the metaverse would be. If we want to continue business as usual, we can do that. We can totally offer up our data as the purchase price, and get into these worlds.

Steve McGarry: They can run smoothly, to a certain extent, and we can, of course, continue business as usual. Now, if we want to. Move forward into a digital world where AI replaces everybody doing anything redundant and creatives are the ones that can actually survive a disruption like that. I think we should own it.

Steve McGarry: I think we should be able to own whatever we create. I think that when we upload this podcast, it is giving that to a publisher. and I think that there is a, a really controversial. Piece over ownership that's taking place right now. And for perspective on what we were talking about before with your comments around the user interface.

Steve McGarry: So with adoption, and that's like a buzzword in, in the Web3 slash crypto space. In 1999, 2000 ish, there were about 250, 300 million people using the internet. That was like the real explosion that happened in 2000 and in 2 19 95, I think there were like 15, 16 million people. And to give everybody context, I. You have roughly between what's estimated 200 to 300 million people have participated in crypto. They have a crypto wallet of some kind and they've, they've tinkered with it. So if you just overlay those two into very, sort of disruptive networks that have happened to us as a species, you have.

Steve McGarry: 2000, we'll call it the 1999 internet is where we're at in terms of the phase of Web3. And if you fast forward to, let's call it 10 years from now, I think that we're gonna be looking at a totally unique interface, of something that we don't really know what it's gonna look like, but I would wager that people are gonna get tired of being the product.

Steve McGarry: They're gonna be tired of throwing out. I've, I've heard this analogy used. They literally throw the baby out, and the crib and the bath and the bath water. When it comes to signing up for a website, you're like, here, take everything from me in terms of data and use it like everything. And you click the box and say, I accept and. It needs to be an agreement of some kind where I say, Hey, you can have this, but you can't have this, and I need to know what that is In a really easy interface. And a really easy to use transaction takes place when I click that button that says, yes, you can have my age and where I live and that, but you can't actually have like my purchase history from credit cards that you're buying.

Steve McGarry: As I sign up and cross-referencing it, like there, there are certain things that you gotta draw the line on and I think people are getting smart when it comes to this especially. With the level of, of content being produced and as people realize, like actually. I need to own the rights to this and I need royalties for this.

Steve McGarry: Instead of cents on the dollar, I wanna make a couple of dollars, or I wanna make a full dollar. And there is a world where that exists. How far along that is. That could be 10 years, that could be 20 years. But if anything has proven itself as much as the internet has, things happen faster than we expect.

Steve McGarry: And coming 22 years later, after 300 million people are on the internet. I mean, how many, how many are in it today? I think it's, is it 6 billion? I forgot. I forgot what the number is. but it's, it's in the, in the high billions. So we're, we're still early. and I know that that's like a phrase that people say a lot, but I would.

Steve McGarry: I would just encourage everyone to know business as usual doesn't last long when people kind of wanna own what they're doing in a digital world, right?

Sean Weisbrot: Maybe the metaverse does need something that kind of takes away some level of control from companies and, and hands it to the user. But why does that need to be blockchain? Because blockchain in its current form. The version isn't really good. There's a lot of problems. Notably, the fact that the transactions per second isn't really good. So if you wanna have potentially a hundred million people on an application and the metaverse at one time, you need to have an amazing blockchain.

Sean Weisbrot: Now, with that in mind. Wouldn't it make sense to build something better than a blockchain and have that be the thing that powers the metaverse?

Steve McGarry: I think that a hybrid of the two makes perfect sense to get us to a place where, there's a, there's a spectrum of these worlds where if I want to go to a place where I can own a hundred percent of what I'm doing, that's great, but it's gonna move slower.

Steve McGarry: it's, it's, it's gonna be a much slower experience for now. If there's a front end that's like a web two interface that allows speed and everything that we currently have with web two, and then the back end allows for actual ownership because there's nothing else out there as far as I'm concerned, that allows you for verifiable ownership in terms of things that I truly custody myself that no one can, no one can come and, and get my, my private keys.

Steve McGarry: Like I, I, I think that there's. The argument there is that other technology could be verifiable through ownership, that is self custodied. And I, I'm not aware of anything unless you are of, of, of how that would work in terms of like a verifiable piece of ownership.

Sean Weisbrot: In fact, there are some blockchains that don't actually have blocks, and we call them blockchains because we don't know what to call them. And you'll find them on crypto market cap and, and coin market cap. but they don't use blocks. And I think even though they were created years ago, there's probably something that could be done to make it better. It's possible that with the help of something like, chat, GPT or some further instance of it, we might be able to use AI to make something better than a blockchain in a very quick period of time that could outshine it.

Sean Weisbrot: Maybe it would require artificial intelligence to work with quantum computers in order to create something that's better, right? A quant system to power the metaverse. And, and probably that will be the second version of a metaverse. something that someone that uses a quantum computer that has an AI coding its structure, um. I dunno, maybe that's, maybe that's 20 years, 30 years from now. But, I dunno. I love to dream.

Steve McGarry: Totally. And I, I'd love to dream too. I think it, it, it can be a, a, a hybrid of the two. I, I think we're, I. We're in a space now where it's so much experimentation. I mean, these billion dollar experiments are going imploding left, all over the place.

Steve McGarry: I think it's very important to know we're in an experimental stage where 90 plus percent of these blockchains fail. There are going to be leaders that do cool experimental things, like you're talking about with different lattice structures and DPOS of allowing people to govern the chain and things like that.

Steve McGarry: I think there's a lot of cool experimentation that's going on, and I would say that. If settlement of these different in-game assets happened at a later time, you don't really need a high throughput of transactions per second. if, if I'm going around playing my game, whether it's Fortnite or Minecraft or Roblox, and then I look at my dashboard and say like, okay, settle up and everything is pulled down.

Steve McGarry: To the blockchain level that says, yep, I can verify that you own this, this, this, and this. You have your private key, so you therefore own those items. And it's just, on, on the dashboard level. So I, I can see that items are, are there, I can see that I own them. Maybe I can opt into playing with certain items and transacting when I go, go through and, play different games and things like that.

Steve McGarry: But there's, there's a lot of different moving parts to the virtual environment and you're really into vr. So I think it's, it's, it's cool to be able to talk to you about this because if I'm in a virtual environment, I think that all the assets that have been created, that unique user generated content that's been created around me, if I wanna purchase something or I wanna transact in any way, the people who created that need to be able to get rewarded for that.

Steve McGarry: If it's not an overlord structure like an Epic Games that owns it, if there's a hundred different creators that have made a beautiful experience that I'm in and I wanna buy a couple of these items. They should be able to get that payment. and if it's in a, a truly sort of, mixed hybrid web two, Web3 metaverse, it's possible sooner than I think we, we, we expect, where I could buy something and three creators get royalties when I do that one transaction and that's the only settlement that takes place.

Steve McGarry: And there's not really much TPS that needs to be required unless millions of players are transacting all at the same time. And maybe thathappens in the future and there's like sharding and all sorts of fancy things that are going on in the background. But, for now, I think just getting people comfortable with that self custody and with that ownership can be done on a smaller scale and kind of usher people into just that, that slight little. Tweak over ownership of overlord versus the user.

Sean Weisbrot: Is there anything that we haven't covered that you'd like to add?

Steve McGarry: I mentioned that we are early and that technology is gonna move into the background and there are these very, very speculative booms and busts that happen, these cycles that come through where everybody with a project is coming out and saying, Hey.

Steve McGarry: Check this out. We have a million transactions per second. We're the future. And people go in and they buy into it and it's speculative, rush up and then rush down. And this just happens time and time again with all different types of technology. And I would just encourage everybody out there to, you don't have to buy anything. You don't have to, go and invest.

Steve McGarry: Not everybody should just be a day trader or anything like that when you. When you experiment around and when you look at different things, just try to read white papers and read what these people are building and just try to think through some of the logic that they're bringing to this tech because somebody listening to this show could completely change how you and I just walked through all this, Sean.

Steve McGarry: I mean it. I like to always be very open with that. It's experimental and people are tinkering. They're playing around, they're taking shots, they're taking risks, and. I think you as the, the builders and the listeners and the consumers and the players and the creators and everybody have a role, which is just try to, try to break things, try to go in and, and play around and, and experiment and have fun with it, because there's not many windows in a lifetime when you get to, to challenge these centralized sort of authorities and moving to decentralization is something that.

Steve McGarry: Is very, very, a big undertaking. So it takes a lot of people to learn about it and to get involved and to play around with it. So I just wanted to add that little motivational note in, in that you, you don't have to buy a bunch of stuff. You can just learn about it and, and really like learning about it too, to get involved.