Multiverse NFTs: Interoperable Digital Assets with Gaurang Torvekar
Welcome to this week’s episode of the All About The Metaverse podcast, presented by your co-hosts Chris Bruno and Alexis Nicosia.
In this episode, we are joined by Gaurang Torvekar, CEO at Indorse and Co-Author of ERC-5606, the multiverse NFT standard.
Ever wondered what the future of digital assets would look like when it came to the metaverse? Well now’s your chance to understand.
We explored:
ERC5606 – the new Multiverse NFT standard
The potential impact of AI on the Metaverse
The sneaker analogy – why siloed digital assets don’t make sense
and
Why Gaurang doesn’t believe there will be 1 metaverse to rule all metaverses
The All About The Metaverse podcast is brought to you by Social INK, the Digital Marketing consultancy for Web3 projects.
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Episode Full Transcript
Gaurang 0:02
Metaverses are in the disillusionment phase right now people are thinking, Oh, it’s just a passing fad. It’s not going to take off but it will be there. It will become mainstream in the next five years.
Chris Bruno 0:12
Welcome to all about the metaverse podcast, the show that keeps you up to date with the latest technology, trends and news about our future digital world. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to episode three of the all about the metaverse podcast. Super excited today. I have my co host Alexis with me. Hey, Alexis.
Alexis 0:30
Hi, everybody. Hi, Chris. Hi. Hi to our growing community. Delighted to be here. Nice to to tag along with this third episode looking forward for some more, even though the state of the metaverse has been a little bit limping in there, but as long as the metaverse survives, I hope I’ll survive. Yeah,
Chris Bruno 0:48
the good news is it’s not just about us today. And actually, hopefully, somebody’s going to tell us all about the good things that are happening in the metaverse right now. So without further ado, introducing Gaurang, our guest today CEO of endorse, that guy has been working on all sorts of projects, whether it be NFT projects with block bots, getting gaming systems together so that people could use digital assets within video games. But more importantly, recently, he has also co developed the ERC 5606, which we’re going to talk about in more detail, but Goring, thank you so much for joining us today.
Gaurang 1:18
Hey guys. Hi. How are you doing
Alexis 1:20
away? I’ll put my hands together for five or six. Achieving Well done. Well done.
Gaurang 1:26
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it’s been it’s very long road as well read. So no, I’ve been I’ve been I’ve been writing smart contracts for the last six, seven years now since 2016. And I think this is the first time I have written an EIP which has actually gotten accepted and finalised and now it’s ERC 5606 I’m really proud of that. Yeah, thanks.
Chris Bruno 1:49
Well, let’s tell people what ERC 5606 is what it does why you created it. Tell us a little bit about that.
Gaurang 1:55
Yeah, absolutely. So ERC five since we call it multiverse NF Ts. And you know, we believe that there’s never going to be one Metaverse which rules them all there’s going to be a lot of meta versus there’s going to be a lot of web three games. And each of these meta versus each of these web three games. They’re going to use NF Ts in the future in the near future. Already. A lot of them are using NF Ts. But NF T’s are going to become mainstream in these games and in these meta verses. So literally everything you do, everything you buy, everything you own will be an NFT. And in the future, what needs to happen is these NF T’s needs to need to be interoperable. So you know the holy grail of Metaverse is the holy grail of web gaming is that you should be able to take one weapon or like one item from one Metaverse to another one game to another. And that’s what we are trying to achieve with this new ERC 5606. We want to create interoperable NF TS we want to create a standard so that all these meta verses and web three games can adopt these interoperable NF T’s. And you know, from the ground up when you’re creating your NF TS when you’re creating your Indian game items, they should be interoperable. So that’s what this is all about.
Chris Bruno 3:13
So what we’re talking about here really is the idea that if you imagine this, I buy one particular item, let’s say sunglasses as a good example. So I buy a set of sunglasses. And if I buy that particular multiverse NFT it means that I can then use that in multiple different worlds. So things like decentraland or sandbox or voxels, or some somnium space or wherever it might be. But I’d be able to use that same item in those different universes.
Gaurang 3:35
Yes, yes, that’s the basic idea. So the way it works is what we have done is we we have kind of created like a wrapper NFT. So using the ERC 560 standard, you create something that we call a wrapper NFT which is an NFT at the top level. And this NFT essentially encapsulates all the different incarnations, or all the different outdoors of yours and classes in these various meta verses. Because one problem right now is that the sunglasses that you’re wearing in real life, or in one Metaverse, they are not compatible with other meta verses. So for example decentraland has high fidelity 3d graphics, while sandbox as voxels. And let’s say another Metaverse has some different style of 3d graphics. So your sunglasses need to be designed in different ways. Your metadata will be different for each of these meta verses. And hence, the same pair of sunglasses the same file will not be compatible with all these mattresses. So the way he or she faces there are six boxes. You buy one rapper NFT, which is at the top. And this NFT actually gives you the ownership. This gives you gives you access to all the versions of your sunglasses across these teams. Are these metal verses Yeah.
Alexis 4:51
Okay. I have a question on the sounds that it’s okay redundant is not the word, but it seems to be quite To have a difficult undertaking to design, you know, that particular design that suits every Metaverse out there. So now obviously, as you know, with the emergence of AI, are you guys planning to, you know, implement some AI eyes attached to that, to that system in order, you know, to facilitate, you know, so when you, when you when you when you meet your NFT, in five, six or six standard, the AI behind is already, you know, like a generating, you know, for, you know, suitable for five to 10 metal verses? Is that something that can be done? Yeah. No, that’s
Gaurang 5:36
a great and indeed, intriguing idea, right. So, actually, just, I was reading another report, so Adobe, they released their own AI now, and you can touch your videos, and you can do some colour corrections and everything in videos and in photographs using Adobe. And that’s crazy, right? Because I just remember chat GPD came out, like last year or something. And things are moving so fast. So you never know what’s going to happen, right? Because see, at the end of the day, if you take the same example, sunglasses, what do you need to do as you need to make sure that these sunglasses are actually compatible with all these different file formats, and I’m sure there will be an AI which can convert these things into different file formats. There will be some loss of graphics, there will be some loss of 30 Call the crispness, for example. But I think that’s okay. As long as your sunglasses can be worn in different matter versus different games, I think that’s what we all want, because we don’t want to be buying. Or let’s say we don’t want to spend $100, on buying sunglasses that work in decentraland. You don’t want to spend another $100 for sunglasses that work in Sandbox, and you don’t want to spend another $100 for sunglasses that work in fortnight, or, let’s say Call of Duty, because we want to buy the one item just one time. And we want to use it everywhere. Right? So I’ll give you an example. Right? So let’s say Alexis, you live in Thailand. Chris lives in London and we live in, you know, in the UK, we if we buy a pair of shoes, or if we buy a pair of sunglasses. And if I’m coming to Thailand, the Thai people, they cannot say hey, you can’t wear these shoes. Yeah, because they’re not compatible in Thailand.
Alexis 7:08
Watch them. Watch them. Buy a new pair here in Thailand. No, no, sir. No, no.
Chris Bruno 7:18
Somebody in customs in Thailand is like that challenging. is now on a watch list when he arrives Excuse me. So you’re gonna have to take those shoes off. They’re not compatible in Thailand for real?
Gaurang 7:28
Yeah, that’s that’s what is happening in meta was right now. There’s like so much gatekeeping right now, these items don’t work in other meta versus and we want that to happen. Simple as that.
Chris Bruno 7:39
We just talked a little bit and we’ve broached on the subject of like AI and I think this is really important here. Like, what in your opinion? Goron? What does AI and the metaverse look like? How does that come together? Because I’m reading a lot I’m seeing a lot. And there’s probably a couple of different schools of thought from imagine how amazing it would be to have procedurally generated characters, procedurally generated items, etc. All of this could be created by AI in the future. And I think this is a huge kind of moment of all this is very exciting. So what do you think? What do you think that future looks like? How does AI in the metaverse play together in the future?
Gaurang 8:14
Yeah, AI is here to stay. AI is not going away. We might or might not have autonomous agents in the next five to 10 years. But AI will help or AI will augment whatever we are doing. And there’s just life changing ways, right? So Chad GPT, it can actually do some nice coding, I would say chargeability is at the level of a junior developer. It has some bugs. It has some problems, but that’s what you need as opposed to write. The code has some subtypes and some serious. So the code is not very optimised. But the same principle can be applied to graphic design. It can be applied to video editing, it can be applied to multiple other things. Even in crypto. You can see a lot of companies you can see a lot of projects who are combining AI and crypto. So Metaverse is just another use case for AI. And I think AI will be game changing for meta versus quite soon. And imagine that when you combine AI and Metaverse, that’s going to be like just mind boggling. See, the basic premise of a meta verse is that you have humans who go there and interact with other humans. But if you read some really amazing sci fi novels, like, you know, all the metaverse books, you will see that there are some AI agents in there as well. So you will have humans and you’ll have AI agents, and these AI agents can maybe start creating things, they can start creating new items, they can start creating new experiences in the metaverse and that’s going to be really cool.
Chris Bruno 9:47
And then that’s when we end up with either the matrix or Skynet, right? That’s what that’s what we’re talking about
Alexis 9:52
there, believe it or not, but yesterday night, I showed the matrix to match my young wife because she’s never watched it. And I will be satisfied Ah pretty well, was pretty freaky to to say this. And I don’t know if you guys watch it recently. It’s it’s I mean, stunning movie for sure. But definitely be chilling.
Gaurang 10:12
You know, only autonomous agents are being created like that’s happening right now, you know? Yeah,
Chris Bruno 10:19
well actually so this is a really good point as well Garang. So I’m sure you saw recently the news of people like Elon Musk signing together and open letter saying we don’t understand what the impacts of open AI and what they’re currently doing in the chat GPT models. And they basically kind of asked everyone to slow down and to have a bit of a break right to have six months of pause before they try and release a new model. Now that was only I think two years ago, three weeks ago that that kind of letter came out. Since then, I believe Elon Musk has announced that he’s raising funds for a new startup to build his own AI, which I think is Cheeky as hell, right? You guys stopped working for six months, and I’ll build something at the same time. But what is your thoughts on that? Like, how quickly could this progression? And I’m not gonna say cause problems like The Matrix, but make people unemployed? Definitely. I can see this being a big thing quite quickly, right? Well, this
Alexis 11:07
this show is called like all about managers and all about the AI. What’s going on?
Chris Bruno 11:13
It’s gonna be a piece of it’s going to be a big piece of the advancement of the metaverse. I agree. I think AI is one of the things that’s going to make the metaverse it’s either going to make it or break it really. I mean, we’re looking for something that makes it a game changer.
Alexis 11:26
Now we will have to be integrated. You have to be integrated with with AI for sure. I mean, I will have a lot of saying into the metaverse, right. Yeah, so
Gaurang 11:35
one, one problem. In one of our earlier podcasts, Alexis, we had discussed one problem where most of the metaverse is right now are empty. So essentially, there’s very few people in there. There are not a lot of things that you can do in the metaverse. So I think if you actually add autonomous agents in there, it might not, you know, some Puritan people, they might not like this idea. But if you add some autonomous agents in there, it might just become a little interesting. So if you’re, if you’re in an area, if you’re in town, there’s no one there’s no activities happening. But if you have some autonomous agents, you can maybe go and fight with them, you can go and do some activities with them. That might just make it interesting. You know, so yeah,
Alexis 12:18
good segue. I wanted to ask you a bit of a tricky question. And not because I want to corner you, but I mean, you writing you a new, a new stat NFT standard, so you will definitely have an opinion on that one. Why, why meta versus Mt. Ma? why nobody’s interested? What’s happening there. You building you’re building the whole entire infrastructure to make the metaverse fun, and all the phonies slipped away. So what’s up with that?
Gaurang 12:47
Yeah, that actually, you just answered your own question, Alex. Moving on.
So far is that the websites are there? The apps are there, right? But the problem right now is with the content creation, so there’s not a lot of content out there. So you can go into the metaverse, you can be there, but there’s nothing for you to consume. Right. So if you go to like Facebook or Twitter or Tik Tok, for example, every second, you’re getting bombarded by like hundreds and 1000s of like videos and silly reels and all these things, right? But in the meta was, you just don’t have that. If you go to gaming, there’s like so many games out there, for example, CSGO is still being played, because there are players there who want to go and start killing each other, for example, but in the metaverse, you don’t have that you don’t have the content. You don’t have a critical mass right now. And I think that’s why it’s lagging in adoption. Once you get that, I think it will take off definitely and again the fiasco with the meta Facebook did not help last year right. So the brand image of meta versus is kind of tarnished right now. But I think it will, it will it will come back. So, yesterday I was talking with Edie. And you know, what we are discussing is if you look at the lifecycle of a new technology, adoption, matter, horses are in the disillusionment phase right now. So, you know, people people are thinking, Oh, it’s just a passing fad. It’s not going to take off but it will be there and it will it will become mainstream in the next five years.
Alexis 14:27
I tell you what, it will all it will all come together once porn goes to the metaverse
Chris Bruno 14:33
and this is why I’ve marked this podcast as not safe for children.
Alexis 14:38
Pornography was was just a word pornography. Pornography is what made internet so popular. I mean, who cared about internet before people could watch pornography? Like you try to do like some nice pornography on the metaverse. You’ll see people will be doing stuff.
Chris Bruno 14:54
Well, to be fair, it’s quite interesting actually, because that has been a subject for a lot of things including format for years, right? So it was long before the internet the conversation was actually what formats like in terms of DVD, DVD blu ray versus Do you remember laser discs? Yeah, that had their little time. And basically the porn industry was one of the big kind of shifters that went towards DVDs and bang, it happened. It moved very quickly. And actually, that’s happened quite a few times. And I think, and then except for the Internet, yeah, and the Internet sort of thing. And, again, these things, I think there’s a there’s a lot of momentum to still happen for the metaverse is but I get well Garang and Alexei, as you’ve said it as well. Currently, they’re just not fun. That’s the problem, right? It’s just not fun. If you go in there, the three of us go and walk around and we go well, what do we do now? Or the three of us can jump on a game of fortnight and have a great laugh, like, you know, playing with 100 other people should have
Alexis 15:48
a black T shirt meetup in one Metaverse, let’s see how many is happening? Let’s do let’s see how many people let’s see how many people have black tissues in at least three different meta versus using the five six or six NFT standard? Let’s see.
Chris Bruno 16:04
Well, wasn’t it wasn’t it Ready Player me like I think Ready Player One? Sorry. The film literally like the characters. The standard is a pair of jeans and a black T shirt. So we’re fine. We never have to buy digital assets. We’re okay black T shirt. I’m good to go.
Gaurang 16:19
Exactly. And I can wear that in multiple countries and multiple cities as well. No one is
Chris Bruno 16:25
definitely on the shortlist in Thailand for
Alexis 16:31
another question for you. Goron. Again, tricky question, not just just to make yourself extremely uncomfortable. What do you think? What is the nicest? The nicest Metaverse out there to? To develop on? What is the nicest one was the most fun? And answer answer from the answer with your developer hat on. And then with your you know, like user on?
Gaurang 16:55
Yeah, so without user perspective, I would say decentraland. Because you can use it right now. Sandbox is definitely great. And I love it. But you can’t use it. They’re not open yet. So they’re doing some public alpha again. And again. I don’t know when they’re going to open up or if they’re going to open up, but
Alexis 17:18
that’s okay.
Gaurang 17:27
Loud, but yeah, it’s just not open, so we can’t use it. So what are we going to do? So yeah, I think the top two options right now are like decentraland and voxels. But yeah, I think decentraland has more people using it. So if you build something in decentraland, there’s a chance that it might get used by other people, you know, and you have to spend less effort on marketing it for example.
Chris Bruno 17:51
I have a question for you guys. Because recently we saw the fortnight basically massive announcement, right? They’ve opened up their Unreal Engine, they’ve said to their community, go crazy, build whatever you want, have fun. You can monetize it. And if people buy it, we’ll give you 40% of the revenue that’s generated. For me, I’m looking at fortnight right now and going. This is a Metaverse because it doesn’t matter what sort of game you want to create or experience. It doesn’t even have to be a game. It can just be a wandering around in nature if you wanted it to be. This to me is a metaverse. Would you agree with that?
Gaurang 18:23
Yeah, so nuclear really. Matter was can be anything. It’s it’s not constrained to like something that is called metaverse. Metaverse is a concept I would say, right.
Chris Bruno 18:34
So how do we get these web three meta versus and I’m gonna start referring to them as web three metallosis. So the Sandbox is a decentraland and everybody else involved? How do we get them to start actually realising that the fun part is what makes fortnight have I think we talked about this Alexis last time, right? 400 million monthly active users or something crazy like that. I mean, we’re not talking about 1% in decentraland of the fortnight audience, we’re talking about 0.001% Maybe. And I think this is a massive thing, right? How do we get these web three? Metaverse is to start embracing this, right? We need it to be fun. It needs to be a game it needs to get people involved. And it needs to have that community around it. Otherwise, there’s just nothing there.
Gaurang 19:17
Yeah, no, absolutely. So just as an example, in decentraland, one of the most popular apps and like the places there is ice poker, which is a gambling game. So it has a lot of traction. It has a lot of people actually playing that poker. See, right now the problem with web three meta versus is that most people actually look at it for getting some tokens or you know, earning some money, really. So it’s not about it’s not about actually going and engaging and having fun. It’s about earning money somehow. And I think that’s a big problem. These meta verses need to pivot from there and they need to focus on the fun part they need to focus on the engagement. See, they’re trying to do partnerships with these big brands like Adidas, Nike, all these shoe brands, awesome, you know, singles and all these things. That’s good. You might have some concerts there. But I think gaming is one definite ly crucial aspect that needs to be in there. So you need to have some fun games, you need to have some fun experiences and where people can go and keep playing it again and again and again and again. And yeah, just find something to do that. I think that’s very important. Okay, well,
Alexis 20:28
let’s, let’s wait for the fun to to happen again. Now. Let’s talk a little bit about like, next moving trends. Okay, we spoke about AI. We spoke about like, all those meta versus that, you know, what they need to do in order to attract more people? How do you see maybe, you know, people creating? I’m talking about a trend, right? This is just like sort of brainstorming but I want to have your opinion on this. What do you think about people creating their own little meta versus like, you know, now you have aI supercharging you know, the ability for people to create their own little metaverse. For example, if tomorrow I want to create my little open Metaverse for everybody to come and join and have fun. And that will be a very, you know, not long lasting Metaverse, for example, like you know, he would last 10 days. And within this 10 days, people go completely insane in my in my metaverse. Do you think something like that could could could fly?
Gaurang 21:23
No, that’s that’s a great question. And let me just dive a little deeper into this on the technical side, right. So there are two aspects to this. The first aspect is the tech side, the infrastructure the infra So creating that infra itself. So when you’re talking about creating a Metaverse so there are two aspects. One is creating the infra itself. So something like fortnight, something like sandbox, something like decentraland, where you have a system where you have a platform where people can come and create their experiences. And the second aspect there is creating something where people will come and do something. So let’s say, Alexis, you want to do your own Metaverse, I don’t think it makes sense, or I don’t think it’s possible to do or do matter was or a new protocol on a new platform where easy is such a haste a lot of time, it takes a lot of time, it will take you at least two to three years to make make something good, make something that is robust. And that’s something that millions of people can use. But I think the best way to go right now is to use something that already exists like fortnight, or like decentraland, go there, buy some land. In San Blas, you can buy some amazing land, and very cheap with great experience. Yeah, very few at the moment. And you can build a great experience there. And that’s something that you’re talking about, right? So you can buy at land, you can build that experience for 10 days, you can bring it down, you can build something new on the same land. And I think that’s something that will, that will create a lot of engagement. So there’s no point in creating a new platform, no point in creating a new protocol. You can do it, obviously. But you need massive investment for that millions of dollars and multiple years.
Chris Bruno 23:00
Talking of multiple years, millions of dollars and everything else. Did you see the other side? Trip to?
Gaurang 23:07
No, I haven’t Victoria, how are you? Okay,
Chris Bruno 23:11
we’ll leave it there, then if you haven’t seen anything from it, then I won’t ask you any questions. I’m just intrigued because I think this is another one of those moments. Yeah, I think that’s another one of those moments where we’re talking about bringing lots of people together and stuff. And I think that’s one of the interesting ones to watch for now. But again, like you said, not like decentraland That’s actually open and you can do stuff. It’s very much a closed beta at the moment or closed alpha depending on which way you want to talk about it. So that’s a different conversation. I think we’re going to wrap up really swept simply with one last question. And I think I already know because I think you actually answered it in part in in in amongst these other questions. But for you Gaurang you don’t see this as being one Metaverse to rule them all, do you,
Gaurang 23:48
Lord? Oh, no, not at all. Not at all. Yeah, so Alexis wants to do a meta was every 10 days. I’m saying we won’t. Maybe we won’t get there. But there will be dozens of metal verses out there. And that’s why we are creating the standard here sci fi 606 to create interoperability between those standards. There won’t be one metaverse. But we want you to have one item that can be used across those metals is as simple as that.
Chris Bruno 24:15
The effects point. Garang thank you so much for your time today. It’s been absolutely fantastic to talk about this. And again, we’re going to leave some links down below to the ERC 5606 So people can find out more. And again, if you are working on a project or anything else and you want to look at how you can use multiverse and FTS to help your project. Simply have a look in the show notes. You’ll find a way to get in contact with Gaurang directly and be able to talk to him in more detail. Greg, thank you so much, Alexis, thank you again for joining us and thank you. Thank you,
Alexis 24:43
Chris. See you guys. Bye now.
Gaurang 24:46
Thank you guys.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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