Cryptographer interviewed aaron mcdonald founder of futerverseBetween Apex Developer Summit hosted in amsterdam ripple.
In a nutshell, Futurverse is a metaverse based on the Ripple ledger. 250/300 people in 16 countries. The company’s headquarters are in Auckland, New Zealand, and Los Angeles, with employees primarily located in Japan, Colombia, and Germania.
One of the first speeches that started the Apex Developer Summit was Aaron talking about Futurverse and its development.
“There are 4 million NFTs in the ecosystem, 20 different collections, and a significant amount of content and experience.”
he said during his speech.
Aaron also has an interesting perspective on what the Metaverse is.
“I don’t understand the idea that digital society and physical society are separate. It’s stupid. Nothing is separate. If you take the digital out of the physical, you won’t have an economy as we know it, or an economy as we know it.” Society will cease to exist. And it’s good for businesses to offer more experiences to their customers.”
But The Cryptonomist also had the chance to interview him to learn more about AI and NFTs as well.
You and Shara Sendarov recently launched Born Ready, a $50 million fund to invest in emerging technology companies. What made you step into the venture capital world?
The idea of Born Ready is to have a fund that can support founders across different stages and different types of activities. Generally, it focuses on her three areas. So as people put infrastructure around the Ripple network, you can think of node infrastructure, wallets, exploration, all sorts of things that can add functionality on top of the network.
And then the next area is people who are interested in building something on the network or using our tools. We have a group of tools of this kind that help people build applications that integrate into the rest of our ecosystem, all powered by Futuverse tokens.
And the third area is people who want to build experiences and applications using the content that we create, such as worlds and games.
How do AI and Metaverse work together within the Futurverse platform?
The way I see it, there are two connections between digital identity and AI. Because AI will have such a huge impact on the world, we believe that AI agents and models should be owned by communities, in the same way that we believe financial infrastructure should be owned by communities through blockchain, not by large corporations. is important.
Because if that happened, it would be a hell of a world. So we are working on a tool that will allow users to own her AI agent. The second part is about data.
AI cannot live without data. So if data is the fuel for artificial intelligence, we need to treat them with the utmost respect, and things like privacy matter. Therefore, you need to ensure that the inputs that go into your AI are appropriate and respected. User Privacy.
And let the community own and control the output. And then the next part is the content creation side. So we have AI that can create content, and we want to make sure that shared ownership, provenance, and traceability of that content is also on-chain.
You mentioned in your speech that you are collaborating with FIFA. Could you tell us more about that?
Our first strategy at Futurverse is to make technology invisible, so everything we do is to onboard users in a very frictionless way and bring interesting experiences to the forefront. I’m trying to get it out.
And the second part of our strategy is “play to learn.” I think one of the reasons people aren’t interested in Web3 is because it’s scary. So we try to get them to do something fun. And you will be surprised by the game. A protocol that enables what was previously impossible.
FIFA is one example. We were the first Web3 company to sign a contract with FIFA to create games for FIFA, so we built the FIFA AI League. This is an AI in which he consists of his two teams of four soccer players and each player on the team can be owned. And train.
Simply put, people are participating through mobile apps on the App Store and can actually create blockchain accounts, mint NFTs, train AI, but don’t know anything and are just playing around. Just a fun game.
The Metaverse concept has lost much of its hype in 2021. Will we have to wait for the next bull market for this sector to become mainstream again?
I see the hype surrounding AI as Metaverse hype. It’s not true that the Metaverse hype is gone because it’s the same thing and there’s no distinction between the two. All that has changed is the words we use to describe it.
So, in my opinion, the metaverse will continue to run wild because this is how the economy works. There is no doubt that this will revive people’s imagination. Vision Pro is scheduled to launch next year, and it will have a big impact on how people view the technology’s potential.
Apple is famous for being good at making things cool, and it’s never failed them yet. So I don’t think we can expect them to fail this time. And you don’t want to be in the hype, you want to be in the moment after the hype. Because that’s where real growth lies. Once the hype is over, the real business begins.
On Futurverse, you can find “FuturesPass”, a passport to access the platform’s digital experiences. Could you tell me more about that?
It is a digital passport to the Metaverse and Ripple Futurverse that onboards users as Web3 natives with an existing wallet or as Web3 newbies like those coming from social media, email, phone numbers, and smart onboarding. You can create a chain account.
Users don’t have to worry about private keys etc. The technology also has some really smart features built in to control the interactions between your wallet and the application, so you always have a secure experience and can even have multiple wallets. Connected to one FuturePass. It works across chains, so it also works with Ethereum, Ripple, and you don’t need to move your NFTs for example.
This protocol is called Donuts, and it is a patented protocol that works like cookies in Web2, but works in Web3 for privacy and permissions. Cookies were first, then Google invented layer cookies called macarons, and decentralized cookies are donuts.
