Live from consensus 2024 | Enabling Fluid Identity and Asset Movement with Blockchain | video

Well, welcome back to the show. We’re joining you live from the Coin Desk podcast studio presented by Bit Go. Actually, it’s our TV studio, not a podcast studio um founded in 2013 with the first institutional-grade Bitcoin wallet Bit Go is the gold standard in custodial staking liquidating today. Bit Go supports over 800 bit coins and processes 20% of all Bitcoin transactions by value. Check them out on Bit go.com. Um We’ve talked to so many influential people over the last three days. We’re very excited to have our next guest. Um our next guest, Lamina, a co-founder, Ceo Rebecca Barkin, Rebecca. It’s great to see you and Rebecca and I have just met on Zoom. So it’s the first time, you know, when you see someone and you’re like, he’s taller, he’s shorter, he just looks different. I feel like this is that moment. There’s a, there’s a story there. Yeah, I mean, because you’ve been involved in immersive work for a long time as well. I know I’ve only seen you in the metaverse. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah, it’s nice to be here. Thank you. For having me. Sure, Rebecca for, I’d love to before we even get started, I think you have such a fascinating story. Um So I know you’re here at consensus. We’re going to talk about Lamina, but I’d love for you to tell us the 30 seconds of how you got to this moment. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Um Thanks for asking. Yeah. So I started my career in entertainment actually in music, right? When they were going through this really difficult transition of trying to figure out what the value of intellectual property is in the digital age. And then I went to film just in time for them to be going through the exact same thing. Um, it became really clear to me where we were going with entertainment, if you really valued intellectual property you had to figure out because technology was kind of in the driver’s seat at that point. And so I went, um moved to Silicon Valley and took actually now that I think about it, it was a music, integrated music and uh hardware and software. And then positional tracking, I kept going down the hole, positional tracking. And then I magically went um where I led studios there for four years and developing uh a series of AR applications um which was really a big learning curve on where everything was going spatial processing and uh large-scale location-based immersion. Um And what were the things that were holding us back when we moved up the enterprise? I led the operating system redesign for Magic Leap Two. And then I went to MS G sphere uh where we were working. Um, you know, what kind of content and technical partnerships were needed to bring immersion to that scale to really use that technology in a way that emotionally resonated with people. Um, I was there when, um, you know, Neil and I worked together on Magic League for years. So, um, I was there, yeah, like we worked together, to adapt some of its IP to world-scale augmented reality, you know, gaming. Yeah. And so he called me when I was at Sphere and he said, hey, you know, I’m on tour for Termination Shock right now and, um, that was his book at the time. And he’s like, you know, people keep asking me about the metaverse and what I think about Mark Zuckerberg’s version of the metaverse. And he said, you know, I guess I could just keep traveling around the world talking about it and this, you know, what’s wrong with it or what I’m doing differently or I could build the tracks myself. And so he asked me to go do that with him and uh Peter Vane, the third co-founder. Yeah. So Lamina one, so co-founded by Neil Stevenson and famous author of Snow Crash, as well as a lot of other books. I was fortunate enough to interview Neil, uh two years ago here at consensus. And I think that was when they first announced Lamina one. Very exciting. But one of the things that stuck in my mind when he announced it was that he really wanted to create something that wasn’t like some of the others. Um L one and L two that were coming out that were very financialized and really just focused on, you know, just token sales, maybe you could fill us in. Like, is that still the vision today? Yeah, I mean, even more so. So I think, you know, so what we wanted to do was improve the creator economy. Um, we felt like the current system of funding creative content, distributing it, monetizing it, and directly connecting IP owners with their fans was just broken and that, that kind of IP licensing system and the studio system was a little bit outdated. Um, so we felt like Blockchain was a fundamental foundation even if magically if we talked about how Blockchain was a fundamental foundation for opening up a metaverse because really your identity needs to be able to travel seamlessly with you and your assets across this world of interconnected physical and digital experiences and really only Blockchain could do that. Um, so as AI gets more and more mainstream, there’s kind of, how do you verify and how do you make sure that this is someone’s identity and that you’re protecting someone’s IP. So, you know, Neil has a long, long history of being an IP owner. So who better than someone who understands and protects the aesthetic quality and the storytelling, uh, in how technology is developed and we had the same philosophy of the magic leap? So we just kind of took it forward. But what we realized very quickly was that you can’t just create a protocol, you can’t just, you can’t just create a layer one. And we thought that a lot of what needed to be unlocked was actually at the application layer versus the consensus layer. And so we really focused our time and energy on how do we create not just a protocol, but the platform stack on top, there was no code that would connect IP owners directly with their fans. And we, we built the um, we always thought that Avalanche had a really cool architecture to enable that because it can keep developer costs low and predictable. Um, protect performance and enable this kind of interoperability ecosystem all the way through. And so we adopted that as our consensus layer and really put all of our energy and effort into building the application layer stack and Rebecca, this has been a big week, right? You guys went live with your mainnet. So yeah, tell us about, you know, just the launch what that was like and then also how everyone from IP holders to developers can build on the platform. Yeah, yeah. So um it’s been a really exciting week for us, for sure. Um Called two years as through the toughest market, I mean, metaverse and cryptocurrency were toxic terms for the last couple of years. But we’ve really stuck to our guns. Um We’ve shifted our focus a little bit just to say you don’t want to just focus on VR or A R. So how do we build a platform that’s welcoming to a much broader and broader set and we really decided to focus on trans media? So how do we take an IP holder that has this kind of broad set of trans media content and connect it directly to fans and make it easy for them as fans to create together? That was number one. And then the design of Tonos. So we just wanted to make sure that we enabled a new kind of economic design that encouraged creative reinvestment. So this week or actually on May 17th, we had our TGE which was like a, a huge event for us. A huge milestone. I mean, we’re a small but very, very powerful team of nine. So we’ve been doing that for the last two years. And uh we had our main night live on 517 and then just uh on the 28th at the two-year consensus today, uh we uh announced public access to the beta platform. So developers can go to Lama one.com and that domain is like coming into our hub, where you have a wallet, it’s like a very web two login process, super simple and streamlined and then you go in there and it’s very experience first so you can explore other content creators. Uh And then our creation studio allows people to actually upload and publish content uh to create web based mini games where you can have a co-creation within permission uh some sort of IP uh to build together. Uh And so, you know, we have a unity SDK, we have an Unreal STK, we’re just trying to embrace all the great technology that’s already out there, but weave it together to bring it together in a way that’s really uh simple for people to use and onboard. So it’s up and running, people should go check it out. Uh We’re in our early days. Uh So that’s what we, let’s say it’s beta uh on the public platform side, but the mainnet is live. So you keep talking about interconnectivity and interoperability like it sounds like a super important topic. How do you think metaverse platforms like yours and others will coexist in the future? That’s a really, really important question and I, I don’t think we, we’ve necessarily talked about it enough in the, in the right way in terms of what the obstacles are. So interoperability can start with identity and assets to travel. But the reality is we could talk about mash up games all day, we can talk about like, can I bring my sword and football game or whatever? But that basically requires creators to build in a completely different way. That’s a huge advantage when you’re building a two-sided platform or marketplace. So, you know, we decided to take a little bit of a different approach and we’ve been working with a lot of our partners who are really focused on standards, right? So part of the challenge, even magically, was like, how do you, there was no easy way to move content because the metadata on the assets, like if you were moving from one platform to another with different processing, you know, capabilities and whatnot, it didn’t maintain the aesthetic quality. You’re talking about shaders, you’re and these are things that artists really care about. So actually our friends at Future Verse um are developing a standard called UBF uh that can be used to dynamically detect what platform you’re on and then enable transcoding for those assets where you take the metadata and all those kinds of credits, the royalties, all that kind of stuff that you’d have to carry with you and allow it to travel uh from one environment to another while protecting the aesthetic quality. So I think when we took a step back and looked at where the interoperability actually is, it’s like we have all the technical infrastructure to enable it, but we don’t have, the content isn’t there. The creators that are making that content at a level of quality that people care about aren’t there yet. So what are the foundations? It’s identity and assets. We just allow uh through avalanche and Lama to their own content ecosystem, those things to communicate with each other really seamlessly and work with partners to actually implement the standards. Let’s pick one rather than go sit on boards all the time and talk about it, you know, so we think that’s a great step forward and we’re always looking for that, but this, this is a really, really important part of encouraging uh true interoperability. Yeah, Rebecca. Thank you so much for being with us today. Um, you guys have been a great partner for us here at consensus.

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