Star Atlas CEO interview | The Most Anticipated AAA+ Metaverse Game

all right so dave we are jumping into another metaverse project out there you guys know it as star atlas i think you're gonna love this interview my name is paul baron welcome back to tech bath the gaming industry when it comes to blockchain has really exploded there's a handful of companies that are starting to kind of come to the top and really are making waves and one of them is a company and a project called star atlas joining me today is michael wagner their ceo so great to have you on the show hey paul great to be here thank you excellent so you're coming to us live from las vegas i love that part anyway because there's not many blockchain companies that are in las vegas so i i love the fact that this has kind of become a global community i'm talking to people in beijing one minute and then you know sydney the next and dubai the next and now we've got it's good to have a home a home crowd here on the show so it's fun yeah i mean las vegas is a it's a city that never sleeps and uh building this company has proven that that's a necessity but love vegas great city but yeah fantastic to be joining you so michael in in the organization itself talk to us a little about kind of the first the genesis of star atlas what were you guys trying to do and then how did you go about the process of launching the team the devs really kind of the evolution of where star atlas is today sure um i would really take you back uh quite a few years now going back to 2013 is where i got my start in uh cryptocurrency and bitcoin through uh scriptcoin mining with gpus um you know i come from a background in traditional finance i'm a cfa charterholder worked in portfolio management investment in securities analysis and identified pretty early on that these you know cryptocurrencies digital assets could be an alternative asset class in fact i was pushing pretty hard back in those years to uh get things like bitcoin included in client portfolios but um clearly the industry was still in a in a very uh infant stage and so a lot of skepticism around the potential of it but um you know i got in in 2013 scriptcoin mining really poor timing on my own behalf it was right at the peak of a bull market cycle at that time and um uh you know this immediately preceded the collapse of mount gox and so from a business standpoint creating these gpu rigs to minecoins uh wasn't very lucrative but fortunately for me it did captivate my interest in the potential of the technology and the potential of the industry and so i spent the next couple of years just doing as much research and analysis as i could about uh what was possible with this new realm of tech and so in 2015 went full-time into cryptocurrency gave up my formal career launched my first company in 2016 and through that process of launching that company i ended up recruiting uh two guys by the name of danny floyd and jacob floyd now these are two team members that went on to co-found star atlas with me and so we were operating this other company i own it's it's called tokes it's at the intersection of crypto and cannabis providing decentralized financial infrastructure for the legal cannabis industry um but we were experienced a bit experiencing a bit of a lull so um in mid 2020 we were still kind of in the depths of uh secular bear cycle i guess i would say in crypto currencies and um we had identified what was emerging through not only nfts and predominantly collectible nfts not utility driven nfts at the time but also this emergence of d5 so decentralized finance as well as the very nascent stages of blockchain gaming and uh danny jacob and i all have a deep background in gaming uh danny in particular has an enormous amount of experience in aaa game development and so uh mid 2020 we conceptualized star atlas and the core concept was we can build a triple a quality game the the highest caliber and quality gaming experience and enhance that through financial incentives and mechanisms only available through blockchain and through decentralized networks so incorporating things like nfts for true asset ownership uh crypto native assets that enable decentralized governance as well as a form of play to earn and then you know looking forward at other decentralized finance primitives that we could introduce to the game to further enhance our user bases earning potential okay so a lot to unwrap there i mean the fact that you know one your lineage in in the space itself i think has a lot to speak for kind of the evolution of where and what we're seeing in the gaming community right now were you surprised obviously you were kind of an early adopter but were you surprised at the amount of growth that we've seen in the sector right now and the number of i mean if i was looking at a vc roster just yesterday that absolutely blew me away in terms of the total number of vcs active in the not only the gaming but in the metaverse space itself which can encompass a lot of different project layers but where are you surprised at the growth in such a short time from a timing perspective yes um we we saw the metaverse space and blockchain gaming space as being very promising in the first place um you know made relatively bold statements in the past that that blockchain gaming and metaverse is going to lead to one of the largest mass migrations of users into the cryptocurrency space um it's one of the you know preeminent uh maybe not first but preeminent applications uh within blockchain that has true utility value and potential to attract users for experiences that exist beyond things like pure speculation and trading of assets and really kind of the reimagination of traditional finance instruments inside blockchain so um not surprised that that at the growth um this has been an absolutely blockbuster year though and we're seeing just an enormous amount of innovation going on around blockchain gaming in general and also you know major companies like facebook rebranding and pivoting themselves to meta so pretty pretty amazing yeah it is i mean we've seen just the uptake on uh just metaverse in general much less the amount of game companies that are really coming to market and and also just in general the the whole idea of blockchain gaming and kind of the evolution of what that means to play to earn and play and earn one thought and i and this i ask a lot of some of the ceos we cover here on at least in the gaming sector when you see this because you know i've lived through the era of the da bomb era where we saw a massive run-up of startups and then the vc community that kind of followed along with that it has a lot of similarities eerily to that era do you think michael that we have maybe too much froth in the space right now and do you think we'll see some major correction at least in a lot of these projects that maybe never really get off the ground kind of your thoughts on that well i don't know if i would say too much froth i still think we're at the earliest stages of the emergence of this kind of concept and so i'm sure there's a lot of projects that are presenting um their project proposals and opportunities many of them will fail just like in every other you know startup environment many of these will not succeed and many of them are kind of over promising or or associating themselves with the technology in a way that might might not be entirely genuine but uh so those projects sure they're they they likely will not succeed in the long term but um i don't think we're at a phase right now where we're in euphoria where it's overly frothy yeah and i think we're just starting to see the the beginnings of this that's good to hear i'm glad to hear that because sometimes i'm too close to the bubble i feel like you know because we see so many projects coming in and the analysis that we're looking at the number of uh ceos and dev leads that we talk to it you know you start to get that overheated feeling so it's good to hear that from you someone who's seasoned and experienced in this space michael let's get into the gameplay let's talk a little about really what kind of separates star atlas from what we've seen in early stage game development at least in blockchain what is it about star atlas that you guys are trying to do that really kind of separates you from the pack sure so star atlas as a video game concept is a grand strategy space exploration mmo or massively multiplayer online game um what really separates us was our choice to use um the game development engine that we're building in which is unreal engine 5. and so comparing us to maybe the existing gaming projects not only across well well predominantly across blockchain but you know we're looking at uh a hyper realistic fully immersed immersive cinematic worlds um i see we have uh the trailer on screen here and yeah the idea here is that we can build worlds that are almost indiscernible from reality and and bring our players into the metaverse and into star atlas as a game and have them feel like they are truly living in this space and what's you know secondarily differentiates us from a lot of these other projects is that we've put an enormous amount of thought into the underlying economic design both from a token economic standpoint a gameplay economic standpoint but also a real world economic standpoint and you know once again uh kind of contrasting the way that we've developed our economy from uh existing gains is that our ambition is to build a product that can genuinely live in perpetuity and we can get in and discuss a little bit of around you know how decentralization and decentralized governance with the star atlas dao will enable that but metaverse concept at large is a platform right that enables content creators innovators and entrepreneurs to build and generate value for themselves um uh you know gaming so star atlas as a game is the first application that will live within the star atlas metaverse um but our ambition is to allow this product to evolve through global contribution of users creators and content um you know this this differs from a lot of the like more simplified rudimentary gameplay mechanics that exist in blockchain where it's truly extractive base and emission base so it's one thing to utilize nfts and then um emit or inflate tokens into the economy over time but how do you create the circular ecosystem where value is contributed and created by every one of the participants which just leads to a virtuous uh feedback cycle in which more players more users want to join because they can experience um the concepts that are being built by external teams not exclusive to uh what we're building at star atlas studios yeah i think well that in itself i think does really kind of separate star atlas when we've looked at and analyzed the just the token projects in general and then you get into the metagame or the metaverse games and the projects and the people that we've talked to you know the continuation and the narrative that we continue to look at is kind of really there's going to be layers of blockchain development there's going to be more advanced gameplay there's going to be what you're talking about aaa level studio quality games and then kind of this next evolution of both play to earn and play and earn because that's one of the arguments that many people make around just blockchain gaming in general is this it can't fall back to just a play to earn you know economy because you're kind of forcing people into that kind of format versus somebody who's really going into the game to enjoy themselves and have you know a complete new experience and oh by the way there might be some earning opportunities in there as well so i think that is going to be a big separator of games that really make it in the future on that point let's talk about your nft marketplace and kind of how will that work how successful has it been kind of what the role of the nft side is going to play in star atlas the star atlas marketplace was one of the first products that we actually brought to market um so we announced and debuted to the public just in january of this year as a as a concept so that that included the release of our uh white paper with all of the gameplay mechanics and gameplay pillars uh as well as an announcement around an initial initial uh kind of seed round funding through token sales and um you know starting in january we we were already recruiting new engineers and new talent to the team um and then as early as april we launched uh really the most robust and one of the first uh nft marketplaces on the solana ecosystem so our marketplace is is built entirely on chain uh you know as i mentioned we are we're building on the solana blockchain for a number of reasons and we were able to leverage project serum so the serum decentralized exchange tech open source code we pulled that in and our entire marketplace is built directly on on project serum so when we list a new asset for example it gets it gets listed on the decentralized exchange and then becomes immediately available for purchase from uh anyone operating within that that ecosystem what's uh i think really promising about building on serum is is this concept of the central limit order book that was introduced by the team behind serum uh this differs from the most decentralized finance applications work wherein you essentially have a single pool of liquidity that exists on on any one of those defy platforms across solana and the serum ecosystem any user interface can actually tap into the the same unified uh liquidity pool and so we've actually seen a quite a bit of innovation go on uh and arise around the star atlas project with people that are building their own ui tapping into that same liquidity pool and tapping into that same decentralized exchange so we launched uh we launched this marketplace in uh in april of this year and our first nfts to come to market were part of a campaign that we called rebirth genesis of a metaverse and these were digital collectibles what we call multimedia meta posters so art created in-house enhanced with augmented reality and then we partnered with some mainstream musicians like blondish and bass jackers and dead mouse to produce audio soundscapes that underlie those posters and what the user is able to experience is is kind of the first sense of immersion into the metaverse uh scanning a qr code viewing their poster comes to life in 3d and then audio plays behind it a couple of couple of questions here i mean obviously you've seen we showed a few of the marketplace assets on screen there but is there any direction that you guys are seeing that are maybe what to collect first from an nft standpoint so in april uh excuse me in september of this year we we went to market with what we call the galactic asset offering uh so these are uh the first assets that we sold that will be usable in game and these are ships now we have a wide range of ships that are going to be available for play uh currently scoped out over 140 ships and we've released something like 21 of those ships to date and they all have uh different size classes categorization of what their intended uses so things like freighters versus fighters stealth bounty hunters racers we have all kinds of different ships that are available so i you know it's hard to recommend um any make any broad recommendation as to which one to purchase it it really depends on what the uh the gamer's gameplay style intended gameplay style is so if you want to be mining uh and extracting ore from a planet somewhere and hauling that across the universe then you know owning a freighter would probably be most suitable for them but if you if you want to go out and engage in pvp or player versus player combat then having a fighter uh would be relevant but really what we're seeing are massive guilds forming now in the star atlas nomenclature we call these decentralized autonomous corporations and they're operating right now as real corporations they're out there minting their own nfts issuing their own digital currencies raising capital and then utilizing that capital to purchase fleets of assets from us with the intention of deploying that and operating across the star atlas universe yeah we've been actually have been in contact with a few of these that i've been amazed at kind of this ecosystem that's already starting to develop around star atlas for sure when you okay so you look at the ecosystem you look at kind of how you guys have reformatted what nfts really are about uh talk about the meta posters again because i thought this was really something you glossed over on and i feel like this is a huge variation in nfts that really could kind of leverage up where the nft market is going how did meta metaposters come about kind of what's the future of that any secret or hidden potential agenda down the road well it was a it was a really fun campaign so it uh rebirth ran from uh the end of april through the end of july and uh we had a couple of motivations there obviously generating revenue was one of those um but through this 14 poster 14 week campaign uh what we executed on was revealing lore and background and story behind star atlas so once again thinking about very high quality images that we produced in-house um and then the augmented reality and audio soundscapes behind them uh the idea was okay let's introduce people to the story how we got to where we are in the star atlas universe which is really an extension of our of our physical reality as it exists today um at least in the in the plot and story of star atlas but uh over uh each one of these weeks as we reveal a new poster uh the user gets to expand their uh knowledge and awareness of that lore of the game and so uh it enabled us to generate a pretty considerable amount of revenue especially early on it was uh you know in the six and a half million dollar range over the the 14-week period um you know obviously this revenue is being uh 100 reinvested back into the growth and development of the company because we have a very ambitious uh vision ahead of us that and a very long development roadmap but um so it also allowed us to continuously grow and expand on our community over those 14 weeks because there's a lot of social media sharing and it's one of the reasons why we wanted to create this this immersive experience is because people were super excited about seeing these and uh while we believe more in the potential of utility driven assets in the long term uh i i absolutely appreciate the art and cultural value of collectibility as well so those were you know just just some of the motivations behind uh behind the campaign but on top of that we also had a pretty great economic structure with incentives and bonuses that were baked in so for users that were purchasing the posters and collecting through this series um reaching various tiers or milestones of of the collection they were also rewarded with in-game assets now we executed on that through a a snapshot a blockchain snapshot so kind of capturing a state of the blockchain at a fixed point in time and then based on that snapshot data we delivered things like ships and skins custom emotes uh land and land claims and then buildings and structures and mining equipment that would live on that so the value that we delivered significantly outweighed the kind of the cost of the posters initially and it was one of the ways that we were able to reward those early supporters that were purchasing these collectibles from us yeah i i thought it was you know seems to be you know kind of next level for the nft side of things is we are seeing a lot more innovation in how nfts are being constructed especially with utility aspects around nfts explain how you see the utility future with that nfts within the star atlas ecosystem and gaming opportunities so the primary asset classes that exist across the store atlas include the ships um now these ships uh are going are fully 3d modeled you know interactive fleets that people can pilot and staff with crew members so it's it's your ships it's your crew members it's components uh um and modifications that you can make to your ships a weaponry and shields and thrusters things like this these are all nfts and then also land so virtual real estate can be purchased buildings and structures that exist on that land some farming equipment mining equipment um the farming and mining equipment all go into one of our dedicated gameplay loops which is essentially a crafting system so extracting ore from the planet enables um kind of the introduction of these materials into the supply chain and through the refinement of the materials and aggregation of them players are able to create and mint their own nfts based on blueprints that that will be released over time and so uh we have guilds that are dedicated to nothing but mining operations because they want to be mass manufacturers of nfts in the future um and then uh you know so beyond the land and building there's also more uh call it social social real estate usage and so these are player habitats that will exist on space stations and while the habitats are not productive in nature it provides an environment a virtual environment for people to socialize hang out with their friends put their collectibles on display and otherwise just spend time with other people and and hang out in uh in space i like it i think you know that's what we're going to see i think a lot of in turn in terms of how utility tokens or excuse me utility nfts will will really kind of expand the kind of the game functionality into the next level i'm curious as to seeing will those start to take uh kind of a life of their own and create these economies much like what you guys have had happen within the star atlas ecosystem of people starting to build upon upon that and kind of grow from there when you look at i want to jump over to gameplay types and a little bit around kind of the grand strategy exploration the rpg game space flight simulation etc which route are you guys going to take in terms of first release so we're developing on two concurrent tracks um we are releasing this concept of a mini game which is an in-browser web app um and concurrently we're developing out the hyper realistic fully immersive world in unreal engine 5. now unreal engine 5 development is going to take considerably longer than it will for us to develop out more of the rudimentary gameplay mechanics that we can deliver in browser so the first releases that users will see and actually we have a release that's targeted uh to to come out on december 16th so just in uh eight days now uh is what we call score this is ship commissions on remote expeditions and effectively what it is is the ability to take your nfts and list those in the faction in one of the three factions that you will have joined as a player across the star atlas universe and um and manage resources associated with those ships so food fuel ammunition and then making sure that your ship is repaired once again this is kind of one of the unique aspects of the way that we're developing the star atlas economy is that we we treat it uh very much like real world business operations so while players are able to earn with any of the assets that they own uh there is a responsibility on them and kind of a burden on them to manage the efficiency of their operations wherein a portion of that revenue needs to be reinvested back into maintaining various assets so if you're a pilot of a ship that means you have to refuel it over time if you take damage you have to repair that you have to feed your crew as you progress through space and and likewise on land you're paying land value tax just to own the land uh which is kind of a recurring consistent expense for the landowner as well as replacing and repairing mining equipment if your mining drill wears out and you want to continue extracting ore you have to purchase a new mining drill and and so all of these expenses though actually get recaptured by the metaverse economy itself and those flow directly into our star atlas dao so without getting too deep into that side of things the the star atlas dao is essentially what is going to enable full decentralized governance and decision making around the future design development and evolution of star atlas over time and so the part of the reward mechanism for them is that all of the economic operating costs that exist uh throughout the entire gdp of star atlas economy flows directly into that into that dow and they get to determine those governors and stakeholders get to determine what to uh what to do with those proceeds i think first of all i think the dow uh you know role in a lot of where some of these ecosystems will go in the future because i think that is truly going to be the future of how especially in when you think about blockchain gaming and what that means to community driven projects like what you guys are trying to build uh it's going to be even more and more evident that that's going to be the route to take i want to jump into solana obviously you guys are are building within the solana ecosystem your thoughts of what the advantages are there with that and uh kind of where that future might go in maybe the next say 18 months we were quite an early adopter to solana you know this was part of the early conceptualization phase of star atlas in mid 2020 analyzing what uh you know we we consider to be generation three layer one protocol so kind of the emerging layer ones that were that were coming out at the time and you know really the the most critical aspect of selecting a protocol to build on was you know what is the scalability of this network we're looking at star atlas in terms of not hundreds of thousands or even millions of users but as we emerge into the metaverse space and create this open economy potentially billions of users from around the world will be will be using our platform and so we need underlying tech a platform that we're building on that is capable of scaling uh to those levels and and while solana might not be there yet we believe that it is probably the only network that is going to be capable of that going into the future and so that includes things like very high transaction throughput greater than 65 000 transactions per second um currently uh capable on on solana uh um low transaction costs uh less than one penny per transaction on solana and then really one of the other critical aspects for us was uh this low latency so sub second finality on state changes on the network that's very very important if you're a gamer um any of the gamers out there that are listening will will fully appreciate that one of the things that's most frustrating when you're playing a video game is if you're experiencing lag right that will get you killed and it just reduces the quality of the gameplay experience overall so again from a tech standpoint we really saw solana as being superior but also we saw a major opportunity to have a symbiotic relationship with them through the early selection of that platform at the time when we uh kind of finalized our relationship this was august or september of 2020 there were only maybe uh 20 projects 20 or 25 projects that were actually building on the network at the time uh they saw massive potential in us to bring a huge user base uh into the solana ecosystem and we also saw the potential for them to you know cross promote and support and leverage uh the existing community that they had um and we did see that materialized they were they were very helpful in promoting us uh to their community early on this bootstrapped the growth of our community and it's really only grown exponentially from there and then one final point that i would kind of add on this is that we do have a major emphasis of integrating d5 components into star atlas and one of the major emphases of development across solana is the you know the d5 ecosystem and so we're able to benefit from all of the innovation from all of these teams all over the world um in developing um protocols uh and code that we can essentially directly integrate because we're all on the same protocol uh so this would include things like insurance policies that you might want to purchase insurance policy on your ship in case it gets destroyed in space um things like decentralized lending which uh we saw this uh really come to fruition through yield guild games on axi infinity which is one of the earliest blockchain games uh but through their scholarship model wherein not everybody can purchase some of these assets you know because of uh you know financial access but they can borrow one of these assets utilize it in game and the trade-off for them is that they're you know they're spending time to be an operator they earn income and then that income gets shared with the owner of the asset and so um you know this these are these types of tools are currently coming to solana now and we're very much looking forward to providing that tool set to the user base you know michael we've we've watched uh you know projects like axi if you look at elluvium which are somewhat i won't say based on but in in some way anchored to what's happening with ethereum and just high gas fees kind of the evolution where e2.0 is going to go for ecosystems that are building in that obviously solana is a completely different you know uh animal in itself i was surprised to hear you say that you know in terms of scalability you feel like that might be the only one of the only blockchains in this layer one uh kind of these gen three uh blockchains that are really going to be able to handle that kind of behemoth of user base and the transactions all that kind of thing do you feel like you'll see more projects start to move into these other layer one um chains to kind of avoid this or do you feel like eth eventually is going to kind of make its way through the system and eventually be able to handle the kind of scalability issues that it's facing right now i would say it's questionable obviously the discussion around moving ethereum to proof of stake um and also you know eth 2.0 which should improve the efficiency of the network lower cost uh create higher transaction throughput you know i'm sure that those are areas that they're working on although those have been you know this proposal for each 2.0 has been around for years now we've seen it it came came to kind of came to market so um what the advantage that ethereum has is first mover right so they uh evm was the first smart contract platform to exist launched in i want to say 2014 or 2015. and um and so now there's a tremendous amount of innovation that's going on there but uh we're very quickly seeing different layer one protocols take market share from ethereum and yeah you know the the tech where it stands today is is superior on at least for these applications the superior on other chains and and um with that being said though we you know we are still very very early across all of the ecosystem and across blockchain adoption in general so while ethereum had a great first mover advantage i'm kind of curious to see where these many new millions of new users that are going to be entering crypto what will be their first experience on blockchain and to my exact point earlier on uh we see the potential to on-ramp millions to billions of users and we'll be bringing them out to solana because that's where we're building right yeah well and i think your your point to that is scalability is going to come much faster back to my point that i made in the beginning of the show is that we've been surprised at the scale and growth of the segment uh as aggressive as it has grown especially here in 2021 where we're seeing just absolutely no stopping if anything just an acceleration we may be on the very edge of just seeing where that bell girl will grow so i think you're right to your point is scalability on-ramp ease of use and the ability to go mainstream is going to be very critical with any games that really start to go global uh in in this era talk to me about the token architecture with atlas and polis and how those will be utilized in the game kind of give me a rundown of what what the functionality is going to look like within star atlas for the token architecture yeah we we operate a dual token ecosystem as we say atlas is uh the in-game currency and i say in-game currency somewhat loosely uh again referencing back to what the metaverse will ultimately become these are effectively nation states especially when executed on chain and through decentralized uh ecosystem so uh within the star atlas universe uh the atlas is the is the currency for which all income and expenses are denominated so if you're operating a ship and you complete a mission you earn rewards in atlas but as i said earlier you also have to pay for things like repair and food and and fuel for your ship over time with atlas um so with that said atlas is the primary reward mechanism across our atlas and it's it's not only used in game but it's also used for things like purchasing uh ships from us on our nft marketplace polis in contrast is our decentralized autonomous organization or dow token and what that will permit is owners who hold polis stake it they become governors of the network they are able to introduce proposals and the community is able to vote on proposals in terms of what the future design and development of star atlas looks like in general and that includes uh decision making around economics so what are inflation rates or release schedules inside star atlas while we have those predetermined and scoped out in our game economic white paper uh those the decisions of the community will directly impact how that gets effectuated in the future um but they also can decide decide on things like which gameplay features do they want to see next um what are the asset release schedules what is the general growth and inflation or expansion of the universe itself and then really going uh deeper into uh into the future there is the potential for the the governor's uh over time as as we admit more tokens um i i kind of want to place a caveat here and say uh for the next three to five years we have majority control over the dow that was intentional that's so that we can fulfill our obligations to develop and release this vision that we've laid out but over time they could it would be possible for the dow to essentially employ recruit and employ other game developers and studios to create content associated with star atlas and so what that leads to and why i refer to our metaverse as something that can live on in perpetuity not just 10 years or 20 years but really hundreds hundreds of years or thousands of years is that uh with or without us you know assuming that there there is stewardship of the metaverse through the dow uh new innovators and entrepreneurs can bring content and continue to build upon what star atlas is so it's not essential that we're here in the long term because the product can continue to evolve yeah for sure and i think those kind of lofty goals are going to be very critical to kind of uh when you look at the overall gaming aspect of what the global community looks like today in terms of total number of players the market size of where gaming is today i think it was this recent report around 350 billion and people now pointing that that could double in the next five to seven years so closing in on what could be in this decade a trillion dollar market for where especially when with the introduction of blockchain and the acceleration of blockchain gaming my question is between web20 and web3o development that we're we are seeing kind of just birth right here in front of us right now do you see that those two you know those two environments are eventually going to merge into one unification of how gaming in general will be looked at in the future or do you think we'll continue to see kind of two completely different arenas around blockchain and what we see now in traditional web20 oh i think web 3.0 is definitely the future and and what three is really uh and by you know decentralized distributed networks that are effectively owned and incentivized by the people that are operating within them um i think the metaverse is actually the next evolution of wet 3.0 and now they're you know they're actually being developed in parallel and kind of going back to your point on the potential economy of gaming while that might become a trillion dollar economy the potential of the metaverse itself is a multi-trillion dollar economy it is absolutely enormous because we're not only talking about gaming as i said gaming is one of the applications that we're building within the star atlas metaverse it is our flagship product and and it's going to be entertaining engaging exciting it's going to attract millions or billions of users but the metaverse itself introduces all different types of aspects of interaction with the platform so um you know mark zuckerberg for whatever people want to say about him you know i think he out and this is not an endorsement of you know their product meta but you know i think he outlines quite well what the social potential is for operating inside these fully worlds so whether that's working in space hanging out with friends um learning right education academies universities virtual learning inside uh inside metaverse will exist and then one of the areas that i think will be most disrupted is commerce uh e-commerce you know once when you have the opportunity to enter into a fully immersive world shop inside one of these locations um in star atlas and uh the goods that you purchase could be delivered to your physical residence that is a superior shopping experience to simply you know going on amazon.com or going on zappos or whatever your favorite e-commerce site of choices uh to purchase products you actually have the potential to interact with them either in ar or vr and there's another emerging technology that is haptic suits which is you know physical feedback mechanism for items that you touch as all of these things evolve and grow over time again i believe that that virtual shopping experience 3d shopping experiences is going to completely disrupt e-commerce so there's many many segments and industries that are just going to have to evolve in some way and i think web 2.0 eventually will die uh web 3 is the future and and the metaverse is essentially the future of the web in general it's so good to hear you say that because i am old school web20 and i feel like it needs its funeral it needs to it needs to move on to the next generation of what's going to happen in technology especially around what you're talking about because i think you are right in the sense that we've you know we've been obviously studying this for quite some time but the point is is there's just so much early innovation occurring and back to what could be multi-trillion dollar economy starting to really develop and change kind of the dynamic of maybe how the entire globe thinks about everything from working playing and all things in terms of a digital ecosphere that will be developed out there over the next few years over the next few decades really so i think that's going to be a big one uh michael wagner it's been great uh having you on the show today thank you so much for stopping in great to hear all that you guys are are doing over at star ass can't wait for this uh this drop that you guys have coming soon it's gonna be fun to watch great paul thank you so much uh really appreciate the conversation you bet all right so you guys are tuned in over here on the podcast right now make sure and jump over here to the youtube channel this is the place to catch interviews like this but also the analysis a lot of the technical side of things when we look at the crypto market and also blockchain in general also don't forget to join the diamond circle it's very simple it's where all of our analysis drop in we do a bunch of nfts and also digital asset giveaways we've got some big stuff coming your way as well in the diamond circle so it's easy to join and it's free for you guys to jump in and of course if you have a topic or maybe a game or a metaverse project that you want us to take a look at hit us in the comments below or you can of course hit me up on twitter it's at paul barron make sure and follow me there we'll catch you next time right here on techpath [Music]

Channel: Paul Barron Network

Views: 180,755

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Id: bhpe3Gu_TOA

Length: 41min 6sec (2466 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2021