EBC22 | The Metaverse: A $1 Trillion Revenue Opportunity

three two one [Music] welcome everybody good morning I hope you're caffeinated because we're gonna go into a really fun topic today you want to do some testing it works yes it does we're in the physical world it's really difficult we have to rely on actual technology here uh welcome this is going to be a session about the metaverse and uh prior to introducing our our panelists I want to just do a quick survey of the audience because doing this every year is kind of a kick so um by a show of hands I can't see you but it doesn't matter this is sort of like an emotional internal exercise by a show of hands how many people here have ever owned Bitcoin do people not have hands what's going on okay so over over half how many people um own other tokens maybe know what a web 3 token is have web 3 tokens okay how many people have lost money in defy it's not funny that's not it's not funny um anyone rug pulled anyone here ever been rug pulled my man there you that's there's a lot of honesty here it's fantastic okay great so welcome to the metaverse panel uh and uh it's a pleasure to be here uh with you my name is Lex from consensus and uh we'll we'll do a quick round of introductions with Cody and Laurent and so maybe Lauren kick us off with an introduction and then we'll go across Hello nice to meet you it's a real pleasure to talk with you guys about the metaverse and maybe more than what it is currently but what could it be in the next future I am a trump Dao advisor a kind of Veteran no uh in our industry you're actually 24 years old yeah and uh I'm 49. I'm clearly an idiotist and the reason why I'm involved in what I'm doing on a daily basis I mean trying to build an inclusive sustainable open-minded multi-chain ecosystem I clearly think that our next future is multi-chain and I do my best to onboard people to explain the full potential of what we are building it's not only a about economics topic but far away I think there is a lot of amazing experience there in several now mostly that aim to experiment new way to um manage our daily life and it's also a this that I try to to share with everybody to be totally aware that we are part of a unique moment in the humanity story we are experimenting offering a real sustainable alternative and solving uh huge problem absolutely Cody so it's great to be here with you today and back in person maybe in some years we celebrate this in in the metaverse right so I'm Cote de Monteverde I'm leading the Krypton blockchain Center of Excellence at Banco Santander we've been working with this technology for almost six years and we've been working with digital identity self Sovereign identity payments Bonds on the blockchain and and we realized that with three metaverse blockchain digital assets has a great potential right so that's why we are here today and I'm also at the board of alastria alastria is our National blockchain Association that it has over 500 members and we recently um set up our art nft metaverse sectoria so we also believe that it's a very important for the for the next decade fantastic and I'm Alex I'm from consensus where I lead the crypto economics team consensus is known for metamask so if you've been wrongful you're welcome this is recorded this is terrible I've had too much coffee and metamask is the leading web3 wallet with over 30 million monthly average users so if you're interacting with the economics of of these worlds you're likely using it and then of course if you're a builder and you want to connect your software into web3 maybe you'll use inferior or truffle or other developer tooling okay so uh what I'd like to just start out with is laying the ground word for this incredibly embarrassing geeky word that if you say out loud I mean I'm sort of like embarrassed to say the word metaverse uh it invokes for me um the very low quality movie uh Ready Player one of a much better book and then it also evokes for me uh Mark Zuckerberg and his hour and a half rendering of himself as a skeleton uh telling people why they should buy Facebook stock so so that's kind of where I am can you help me understand a little bit better what is the necessary architecture within this construct that we call metaverse like why does the word matter what is what is in there that is interesting for us what is maybe unique or necessary so Lauren if you want to start yeah it's it's a really interesting question but you know in order to to Define uh what is the metaverse I think we have to travel make a time travel and imagine what it will be temporarity in my opinion it it's the main uh question uh I I will uh quickly switch to uh what brings everybody mostly here I mean the Satoshi Nakamoto white pepper and everybody is trying to figure out what is bitcoin what is the really utility of Bitcoin and so on and I used to say guys we are just child in the sandbox and playing for the moment it's just a Alpha version of what it will be why because the real moment it's when the last Bitcoin will be meant in 21 42 21 43 and we have to also try to imagine what will be the materials in 50 years to understand what we have to build right now I think that currently we have at the prayer prehistoric stage uh there is amazing Innovation but we are still experimenting uh I have met several projects working on the next metaverse it it will be not one metaverse it will be like the universe no we admit it's a question of Multiverse it will be a meta Multiverse and what does it mean what what do you need to reach this goal and this is the real question to to consider when you build right now a project if you base your Innovation uh your definition of the metaverse on what is currently existing you miss the point uh it will not be a pixelized world it will be the real reality we will switch from The Real World to the real metaverse uh constantly on a daily basis to go to work it will it will not be any more question about remote work we will go to the office in the metal Earth we will go to the cinema in the metaverse we will travel in the metaverse so what do we need to offer such experience uh and maybe in a more um extensive way that we can experiment in real life considering this for sure we will see two kind of projects the centralized one built by big Corporal big companies like Facebook and so on and we will see some fully decentralized governed by Dao uh and it will be I don't think we will see one uh way of um delivering or governing or promoting uh Metals it will be um a coexistence I dream about I'm a dreamer and I like to dream to try to figure out what it will be and which direction I have to follow and I advise several projects in the domain since he hasn't and and I onboard a lot of projects on trondau what it will be we need today we we see the first cross Chain Bridge we will need the same some bridge to go from one metaverse to the other one without leaving without logging out and doing whatever we will go somewhere in the metabase we will open a door and switch to another one to leave another experience and when we consider what it will be so you can Define what we have to build absolutely I am I feel very logged on right now and I think that paints are an aspirational experience right where it's not about like click this button or download this app or drill this particular USB port into your brain and have Elon Musk download himself there but it's it's more the sort of the accessibility of this this world being right at the edge Cody I want to ask you um a similar definitional question but about how you would think about the financial architecture of a place like this right so in in the current world if you want to go buy a sandwich you invoke Visa you invoke point of sale systems you invoke core banking you probably end up in some brokerage cash oh what what cash and equivalents um that's a joke for the bankers uh how do you think about the financial architecture of a place uh like like the one that Lauren describes let me link first to the previous question so I think that depends are we talking about a web to metaverse or a web 3 metaverse I guess that we are all here because we believe in a decentralized future right so I would tend to think that the metaverse in singular and it's going to be based on web 3 it's going to be an ecosystem of different platforms but all interoperable thanks to blockchain technology and orchestrated through tokens right so that Financial ecosystem of the metaverse obviously should be digital and unprogrammable right so I think that we are talking about a financial system based on all type of tokens I'm digital cash I was saying cash because I wanted to introduce digital cache maybe cbdc's stable coins and Commercial Bank deposits being tokenized as well cryptocurrencies um well you name it and obviously nfts which we haven't mentioned yet and are a core piece of decentralized metaverse right it's a way to represent the ownership of those virtual assets so as you mentioned before wallet in that Financial system is going to be built around wallets wallets where you store all your digital assets that are not only money but also anything that you can imagine that can be represented with an with an nft and and there's a lot of things to do right because we are all here used to deal with crypto assets but um but we need Mass adoption as well so we need a great ux on-ramp of ramp systems to these new digital economy can you double click on what those systems are like what's the what's the connectivity in your mind between non-digital cache digital cash payment rails rails as they Connect into uh crypto systems and then further how would that spread into an environment like the one that Lauren describes like what are the bare components of that so um as I mentioned before I think wallet it's going to be that Central piece whereas your really your identity in that wallet and we've already heard some um governments like here in the Europe that they want to regulate our digital identity that could be a core piece of that um wallet obviously tokens we all know what they are right but you need those mechanisms to get into this digital economy so you get your salary to your bank account but how do you transfer that salary into digital money that you can use in the metaverse and that's a piece that it's right now let's say missing or at least missing in a seamless easy way for everyone in the street and and for me those pieces are the ones that financial institutions could be building to make um to make an easy transfer of our analogues world or financial system into that Digital World um but as I mentioned the core piece of a decentralized metaverse would be the wallet and it's well you are an expert in wallet so I could ask you this question how how are you thinking about that future metaverse and and the role of wallets it's a it's a good turning of the tables but uh I'll answer the question um I want to also kind of tweak one thing which is either your employer pays money into your bank account or alternately your Dow pays into your wallet account right and so these things in the long run are identical although quite awkward now you know but things like payroll systems and so on um so I'll share my mental framework for what a wallet is um and hopefully this is helpful and interesting so I think in the physical world um money is very flat it's it's very abstract so it's an abstraction layer on top of economic activity right because uh bartering isn't isn't really that great uh we can't all carry around infinite Commodities we can't carry our houses around and certainly not more abstract things like services and so we abstract all of our economic output into um into some unit of account which is cleared by the economy and markets and then that's what you put in a wallet right so your physical wallet might have cash and your digital wallet might have a representation of cash in a bank but it's this it's this abstraction of the real thing um the the I think unlock magic of something like metamask and other wallets and web3 in general is that you actually get rid of the abstraction out of the economy you actually you don't have to compress the economic activity so you lit your wallet literally has your house and it has all your clothes right and it has um the it doesn't have so for example your passport which is a sticker that summarizes all the things you've done to get membership your your web 3 wallet actually has your real membership accrued as history um on on chain and so I think that's one of the aspects of um a crypto wallet that's really interesting is that it it's more of an inventory than it is a wallet it's an inventory in the sense that it actually contains all your things without without compressing them down I've gotten so excited about my own uh my own mental model that I've forgotten entirely what we're talking about um I've I've wanted to establish another thing about the metaverse before we kind of jump into the economic activity that you see there which is that blockchain is the the economic and property layer and we've talked about the financial systems and then on top right there's there are other technologies that have gotten far enough to be useful and interesting that this this term congeals together so things like augmented and virtual reality have gotten far enough to be to create compelling user experiences where people actually want to be you know not for too long or you'll get nauseous but generally speaking people want to be in these experiences and so there's a hardware and a software component that has nothing to do with blockchain that's being built um that's really meaningful and then the other one is is the the state of artificial intelligence and Machine Vision and the ability to kind of digitize the real world and augment it with um with digital objects right I mean if the metaverse is with us all the time it's probably not in a VR headset is probably a digital twin of the world and so it's contextual to where everybody is today and I think that's a really interesting idea as well but let me let me come back in with a question Laurent to you about economic activity and the creative potential right so just because you have an empty room in VR or in the physical world doesn't make it special it's what you can do in that room it's what what people create so what do you think is the economic activity of the space what what are people making and what will they make um you know it's it's something uh it's um really um fascinating question because I I'm constantly thinking about what it will be and not in two years I have two years honestly it's not so fascinating but what it will be in one century and uh more far away you think about what it could be uh the more you can Define what we have to do right now I say it again it's for me it's really important to to think in a with a long-term perspective we we are always trying to figure out uh which financial potential it could be one trillion dollar opportunity but what does it mean in one century one trillion dollar it means mostly nothing in fact uh rather than trying to define the value in a you know let's say based on what we know today what what will push the metaverse adoption and then you can consider this potential going through several Paradigm for like for example I often explained that everything all the decision made today by a politician are mostly based on The Meadows reports published in 1974 saying where there is no infinite growth in an infinite World and when you introduce the metals it's changed completely with Paradigm because in the metaverse it's there is an Infinity of possible we can do everything with mostly the same footprint so uh two months ago I was in London saying guys you will see that soon we will have to stay one day per month or one day per week at home to save the planet and it's so boring remote work and so on Netflix and so on and then Demetrius we will go in the metaverse all to travel to go to do shopping to meet our friends whatever uh last few days in Germany if there is a German people they will be able to confirm they try to think again to reintroduce a low uh that they will they have passed by the past in 1974 during the previous uh oil crisis no cars on Sunday don't use your car on Sunday what we will do we stay at home no we will go in the materials it will be a natural step in fact we are all uh thinking about how embodying the next billion users guys it will come naturally because there is several factors that push us together to experiment a new way of living simply a combination between the real world and the digital one but with no Frontier it will be really natural in five ten years part of the attendees were will be in the metaverse we will see them because we will have the technology to show to us these people Revere but they will be from home from their office from a dedicated space somewhere where you sit down your scan and boom there you are I I agree with you in that I think the answer to the narrow question of in you know in the long run what is the economic activity and the answer is all human economic activity and social and so on Cody we're uh we're we're coming up against our time uh because this is an awesome topic but I want to ask you with the same question but with a lens of you know in the short to medium term in terms of economic impact on Industries what do you see kind of the the trends that are happening now where do you see the most impact whether it's you know the financial services or media where is it going to make the most difference so we're talking about short term so um that future metaverse where you can do everything we are not talking about that one yet so I think that um most adoption is going to come from the entertainment industry that's where I see most potential in the short term so I'm talking about in two years from here to two years more or less and I'm talking about gaming events advertisement obviously fashion industry you you all seen that there are already a luxury Brands getting into the metaverse because they want to connect with them consumers they want to create communities right so so I think that in the two coming years that's where we are going to see more activity entertainment and obviously in the gaming industry um in the future obviously as we were mentioning it has a potential to change all aspects of our lives but that that's what we are imagining but we have to say that we haven't said it a yet that this has been this is under construction we don't even know if it's going to be a web 2 metaverse um plus I would have three coexisting it's just going to be um a set of different platforms or interconnected I mean I mean we have to be honest we don't know what's going to to be there but right now where we are experiencing what companies are doing testing and learning are all related to having experiences with their customers to getting close to the audience and to create those senses of community so I see in the entertainment Industries where we are going to see a lot of activity awesome um I think that the there's two things I'd add which is um I remember speaking with folks in the in kind of the virtual reality space and the framing of that technology is often as the the empathy machine so it's it's a way for people to feel other people's feelings in a way that a 2d screen doesn't give you and so I think when we talk about like Beyond The nft Experience Beyond just the ux of like I can charge you more for my um for my video game there is this idea of just embodying and being with people in a more authentic way and then the second thing is I think as we build this thing under construction the financial and economic architecture by the nature of it has to be on chain it has to be web 3 native so if you're building a web 3 native economy you're going to have a web 3 native financial sector and if if any bank is having trouble with that I mean that's just it's just not gonna happen unless you're engaged in it early on and so I think when we recontextualize some of the failures of D5 for example if we think of that as a financial sector for web 3's economy rather than as a financial engineering Factory it becomes a lot more clear that the real focus of the industry should be on building out this economic activity so with that we've got one minute left we've been asked to make room for questions and so I'm going to create an awkward pause until the question appears thank you yes please the question is about Brands so how are Brands creating their own metaverses their own worlds or are they going to open and become interconnected with other things Ron do you want to take it uh I I really do think that you can't we can't imagine a metaverse segregated in fact if Brands will want to survive they will have to be uh um to integrate all metaverse and finding a way to offer the best experience to switch from one to one you you they will be maybe in uh entertainment metaverse and you will be you will be able to go through uh dedicating for traveling learning the brands have to find the best way to offer this simple way to switch from one minute events to another one and like we see now I say it again multi-bridge cross chain solution it will be the same you open the door and you switch technically oh it's visible it's not really important there is so much brilliant people in our industry that it's in my opinion I mean our topic yeah you go where your users and where your clients are and they're going to be everywhere thank you everybody pleasure thanks to you thank you