Crucial First Steps Required to Decentralize the Metaverse with Bayan Towfiq - Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP29

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Riemenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I'm a future tech strategist and I think about how emerging technologies change organizations and society.

This podcast is part of my new.

Book called Step into the how the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion Dollar Social Economy. The book is available as an ebook, hard copy and audiobook. As part of this book I did nearly 100 in depth interviews with the stakeholders involved in creating the open Metaverse, the investors, the developers, the artists, the collectors, etc. And I've turned a selection of these interviews into this podcast as I think that these conversations are too valuable to leave them on my computer. In this interview I interviewed Bayan Taufik. Bayan is the co founder and CEO of Subspace, which is building a global private network for real time applications and the new working from home reality as well as the Metaverse. Subspace routes traffic over the world's most highly available ultra low latency global private networks with a simple configuration change. During the interview we discussed the technical challenges challenges of building an open Metaverse and what we need to bring hyper realistic volumetric data to VR and AR devices all around the world. We covered in network applications and why they are crucial for the Metaverse as well as what the role of blockchain is. Enjoy the conversation.

Let's start with what people think the Metaverse is. A lot of people talk about a virtual world with a social aspect to it, where people can interact and so on. And I think actually the Metaverse is a lot more meta than most people think. It's not just going to be a VR world like Facebook is pitching. A lot of people don't even want that particular experience. The Metaverse is a new iteration of the Internet and that iteration of the Internet will support persistent online virtual environments, interactivity and so on, among other things. And so the Metaverse is not a place, so to say even a virtual place. It's something that takes all of your meta, your personality, the history of a place or a thing, the feeling of something, and allows it to be controlled and experienced in new interactive ways so that people can create these new worlds in this live real time infrastructure and tooling that allows us to interact with all the meta, everyone and everything has. So I'm curious how different that is than what other people have shared as to what they think the Metaverse will be.

First of all, it's very much how I look at the Metaverse because I completely agree, the Metaverse is definitely not all what Zuckerberg is saying, or it's definitely not all virtual reality. For me, the Metaverse is also, for one thing, for example, enterprise digital twins. It's really the convergence of the physical and the virtual world in the broadest sense possible. And yes, social interaction, social games are part of the Metaverse, but they are not the Metaverse. And for me, there's also only one metaverse. There are not multiple metaverses because there's also only one Internet. And you will have spaces or environments or virtual worlds or experiences. And these experiences can be completely virtual or can also be augmented or anything in between. And it's interesting because part of the people that I've spoken to really focus come from that, you know, the Metaverse. There are multiple metaverses, and we are building a metaverse, and it's a social game environment. And yes, that is a virtual environment. And it's very interesting. But yeah, it's only one part of the Metaverse. That's how I look at it.

If we look at just gaming, for example, back to the days of single player console gaming, the original Nintendo, the Metaverse, to me, is much more akin to the console than it is to Mario, the game that runs on top of it. The game is like these new worlds that people will create, but the Metaverse is this platform that underpins it all in and of itself. It's not interesting. It's not something that people can interact with. It's not something that people really understand that the general populace will understand, but it will enable new types of interactions.

I guess it's the same thing as, like the Internet, you know, yes, you interact with the Internet, but you're actually interacting with the website, with a particular website, where you can do whatever the website came up with. That's right.

And most people have no idea how the Internet works. If there's, I don't know, 40, 60,000 different networks around the world that are kind of decentralized and loosely federated and how the fiber optics and switching and optical transmission equipment, all of that comes together. That's why the first thing I said is the Metaverse is a new iteration of the Internet. And that iteration of the Internet needs to support new things. Let me get very tangible about this too, just from a technical perspective. But the Internet was designed with some very specific criteria in mind. The Internet was launched about 40 years ago. That's a little older than me. And people don't realize why it's even called Internet. It literally means between networks. It's the copper wires, the fiber, the protocols that connect these tens of thousands of networks together. And the principles it was built with were twofold resilience and decentralization. The problem is that everything we imagine in the future, and much of what we're trying to do now, relies on real time synchronous, global communications, gaming, remote work, sports betting, etc. Those things don't really work well on the Internet today. And everything we plan to do in the future, like these Metaverse type applications, definitely are unsuitable on the Internet because network performance, not just download speeds, are the criteria for success. And so we have these axiomatic things in the design of the Internet that are kind of arbitrary, like client server, the client server model, that everything has to be computed on a client or a server rather than in the transmission path. And if you look at that, it makes sense for emails, it makes sense for web, but it doesn't make sense for interactivity, where from a security perspective, firewalls, load balancers, even things like notarization of packets, timestamping, something at the edge so that you can create a rich experience, things like deformable terrain or shared objects like a soccer ball that two people can kick at the same time over distance. You can't do client server or peer to peer. You need to have hybrid communication models, something to make it authoritative and something to pass the data as quickly as possible. So the network has to become an active participant, it has to become intelligent, and it has to. Also my belief is that the metaverse has to be backwards compatible with existing Internet. People aren't going to get a Metaverse connection alongside their Internet connection at home. But really the way to think of the Metaverse is that it is something that maybe in the future the power users of it will buy a Metaverse connection to their house instead of an Internet connection.

That's an interesting one. It makes sense because it would require a significantly higher bandwidth latency, low latency, et cetera.

And also you're calling on the network to do things that it doesn't traditionally do, whether that's the mixing of audio or transcoding or notarization of packets, or these new hybrid communication models, or having having denial of service protection in the transmission path, having firewalling and load balancing in the transmission path, things that are required because you're trying to maximize network performance. But you need security still, you need intelligence, you need these other things that today can only be done with hairpinning on the Internet have to go through A client. So, you know, with subspace, what we're doing really is in four phases. The first phase is delivering stability for existing applications on the Internet. The second is low latency infrastructure. The third is more reliability and redundancy for mission critical applications. And the first three of those you can kind of think of as delivering the performance of private networks to every Internet connected device. And the fourth is in network applications that I think really become the underpinning of the Metaverse. I think of the Metaverse as a new iteration of Internet where applications are run in the transmission path and create the building blocks for all of these other things. The same way consoles and game engines and so on have made games possible. And so just to get back to that example of an Internet connection versus a Metaverse connection, because the Internet is already widespread, we have worked hard to develop technology that will make our parallel Internet backwards compatible with the existing Internet. But at some point, when the network effect, where you reach a critical mass on this parallel Internet and you have real demand for Metaverse, people will buy Metaverse connections. There is no doubt in my mind that people will buy it. It's not just going to be something that that is here or there. Any serious gamer is going to buy it for gaming Metaverse stuff. Any serious business user is going to buy it for business Metaverse, you know, applications, but it's going to be a real thing.

Yeah, I think that seems sounds very logical to me. So what's your perspective then? You know, a lot of people that I've spoken to also, you know, key to the Metaverse is it needs to be decentralized, it needs to be blockchain, et cetera. What role blockchain will play here?

Let me break that apart into two questions. One is, one is it needs to be decentralized, it needs to be blockchain, and so on. I think both of those are actually slightly separate questions. I don't think the Metaverse needs to be anything. Being dogmatic about things doesn't mean that reality is going to be shaped in a certain way. Things happen because there are certain market demands and needs and pain that has to be solved. The Metaverse, in my opinion, is going to be an evolution of what we currently use in terms of the current Internet because of the pain that exists for applications today. You know, one small example of it outside of gaming and all of that is live streaming. Live streaming has moved to one minute delay between broadcasts and viewers to now a demand for almost instantaneous live streams that the Internet really doesn't support. Well, the whole market is moving in that direction. I've talked to executives and founders of a lot of the top live streaming companies, and this is what they're telling me. It's their number one problem. They're investing in technology and their customers are asking for it, and it's coming whether they like it or not, whether it works well or not. And so when we talk about an open metaverse, a single metaverse, I think that will happen naturally, because in order for these networks to be valuable, they have to be backwards compatible. They have to tie into existence existing infrastructure, they have to tie into existing data centers, applications, everything else. And so everybody who is contributing to this metaverse is going to be forced to make it interoperable. And interoperability makes it open, and that openness and multitude of players that contribute makes it decentralized. Now, looking at blockchain, blockchain is a pretty interesting thing. I actually think the most interesting is bitcoin followed by Ethereum. But the reason I say bitcoin is the most interesting blockchain is the whole value of blockchain is the decentralization aspect of it. And you have the most decentralization and compute power behind the bitcoin network compared to anything else. And so in terms of how well a blockchain is doing, Bitcoin is the best example, the most valuable example of a blockchain because of the most compute.

Power on the network, the most compute.

Power, the most decentralization, everything else. I kind of scoff at anyone who says, oh, you know, I don't believe in bitcoin, but I think there's really something behind blockchain technology because you don't. They just don't get it. Like, the value of blockchain is that it's distributed, is that it's scalable, and then you can tie things into it, you can build layers on top of bitcoin. And Ethereum is a close second because it's also very distributed and you can do things with it. But the value of it is the decentralization, it is the network effect. The same way that the value behind a huge social network like Instagram or Facebook or Twitter is that it has all the users. It's not the code of Twitter that makes it valuable, it's the network of Twitter that makes it valuable. It's the same thing with bitcoin. What makes it interesting is that you have a lot of users and a lot of compute power behind it.

Yeah.

So will distributed ledger technology have some role? I think yes, but the Metaverse isn't going to be created because of distributed ledgers. The Metaverse, as this new iteration of the Internet will be created regardless of. And I think it'll create opportunities for blockchain, bitcoin, Ethereum and things that are built on top of these blockchains to be introduced into the Metaverse. There's some stuff that seems almost inevitable, like popular NFTs being something that you can use in some virtual environment or things like that. But none of that really drives the possibility of the metaverse existing. And I think it's no more interesting than what we've seen in the past with these types of things, whether it's what's happening on OpenSea today or what happened in the real world, not in the virtual world, but in the real world with like Beanie Babies. I think what's more interesting about it than Beanie Babies is that you have potentially more reach and you have some more social community things that can be created within some of these worlds in the Metaverse. But it will be something specific to the worlds in the metaverse, and it could be just as true in a non metaverse application in an existing game as it can in the Metaverse. So I think the Metaverse will create more opportunity for these social, interactive, real time experiences and that will make it possible to create those things. But I think blockchain and metaverse are tangential to one another. I do not think that it's blockchain creating metaverse or vice versa. It just doesn't make any sense in terms of. If you subscribe to the belief that innovation happens because of pain and need, then it's impossible for blockchain to be what creates Metaverse or for them to be on parallel tracks. It's something that must be orthogonal.

That's a very interesting perspective and one that I not necessarily disagree with because I think it's. If you think about it, what's interesting about the blockchain is the proof of ownership of digital assets similar like Bitcoin, but then with whatever, you know that we sell JPEGs for 69 million. I think that's nonsense. But I think the fact that you can prove that this dress, or this avatar, or this house or this whatever you can think of, or this digital twin is yours, whether yours means you as a person or you as a company. I think that is really, really interesting. And the more that I think about it, I think that's sort of the main role almost it will play because from a computer bandwidth or latency perspective, we are Decades away of an Internet or a Metaverse run on individual nodes, so to say almost.

Yeah, I was involved with Bitcoin starting in early 2011. I put 80% of my money into Bitcoin. So it was the very early days of crypto. I was in day one of the Ethereum ico. I've kind of been in that community for a long time. But a lot of the hype within it as it relates to Metaverse I just don't believe because I don't see the pain that exists and solutions in search of a problem never really pan out. Yeah, I think there is innovation that will come about there and there is real pain in something. Digital ownership of assets, being able to show things off to people, all of that is a valuable thing, but it's orthogonal to the concept of Metaverse.

Yeah. So if we just then have a look at what many people think that the Metaverse is, you know, virtual reality, immersive space. Personally, I think VR is, as I mentioned earlier, component of the Metaverse, the same as augmented reality. And I actually think that augmented reality will be much bigger than virtual reality. What are your thoughts around VR and AR and XR for that matter, in the coming decade and what can we expect also from, from an sort of an infrastructure perspective of what's required to make this a seamless experience?

I'll answer the AR VRXR question quickly, but then I'll talk about what I think the range of applications is here. I think from a technical perspective, just limitations. Ar, VR are incredibly latency sensitive. Edge Compute won't solve the problem because that only will work for cache content. Some things just have to travel halfway across the world. You know, if I'm talking to you or interacting with another human being that is physically located somewhere else, that data has to go from where I'm sitting to where that person is sitting, regardless of computer caching or anything else. And depending on what you're doing remotely, whether it's the rendering or the interaction or some other aspect, the latency demands are much greater than most existing interactive applications on the Internet. So there are technical challenges that have to be solved. And then of course, within the hardware and everything else, which I'm not an expert in, but just from a usability perspective and immersion perspective, there's challenges. But I think the question about ar, VR and all of that, is it really some Metaverse are kind of the wrong questions to ask because. And I think this is one area where a game analogy initially kind of makes sense. Within the Metaverse, there Will be worlds as varied as types of games. You have interactive text based games, you have 2D scrollers, you have 3D games, you have card games. You have all kinds of different things in the game world. And you can think of AR and VR as being just one genre of that. I think even graphical stuff is one genre of a world that can exist in the metaverse. I think you can have worlds that have no graphics in the metaverse. This interesting perspective, like the metaverse, allows for these rich interactions and creators are going to create all kinds of interesting experiences with it. But some of those worlds may be just as accessible to someone who's blind as someone who is who is seeing.

Yeah, that's so true. I think. Yeah, it's an interesting perspective. I guess it requires some imagination to come up with what that would look like.

We have no way to anticipate it. Let me just describe what's happened with Internet infrastructure over the last 20 years and I think it'll just show how difficult it is for us to imagine what will come of it. When the Internet was first being put together, it was seen as something that would be used to be able to communicate in the event of a nuclear attack. I mean, this is before the commercialization of it started. When the web started, it was seen as something that could provide a virtual presence for businesses. But the commercial exploitation of even the web took several years. And probably one of the most successful early companies was ebay. The problem that ebay had was the Internet was so slow you couldn't even load images. That created an opportunity for Akamai and later other content delivery networks, CDNs to create storage and caching infrastructure. That storage and caching infrastructure was what you might think of as a new iteration of the Internet. It helped make E commerce possible as an entire industry. But I think the most interesting part of that was that it actually made streaming possible. ITunes, YouTube, Netflix. Those types of applications hadn't even been considered before CDNs and you couldn't have predicted them on the Internet. Like trying to jump to those from early web or even early ebay days was a huge leap. Fast forward to AWS and Amazon seeing the opportunity to serve Netflix and Zynga and Salesforce. As they were scaling, they saw just the problem that they were solving, Similar to CDNS was letting customers avoid upfront IT infrastructure costs and scale to meet fluctuating demand, get their applications up and running more quickly. That ultimately led to tens of thousands of software service companies who were able to launch because they didn't have to invest and build out data centers before they could get, with funding that they may not have had or whatever, they could experiment. Yeah, I think this shift to the metaverse is this third shift. So CDNs democratize storage and caching, the cloud democratized compute. And there's still iterations of that and edge compute and everything. But the third iteration, which is the iteration of the Metaverse, is actually doing the same thing that they did, but for a global network and creating a new kind of Internet that supports it. And so even though today we see applications in gaming and sports betting and telemedicine, remote work and call centers and all that kind of stuff, the biggest applications are going to be things that we can't foresee. The same way that CDNs didn't foresee streaming and Cloud didn't foresee SaaS.

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess we really have no idea what's coming in the years to come from that perspective.

I think that's right. But what we can do to, I think have a really thoughtful thought exercise around it, for lack of a better term, is to think about what restrictions there may be. Like the same thing about virtual worlds. Why can't you have a world in the Metaverse that has no graphics? Like, people don't talk about that. They talk about ar, VR, everything else, and all this visual sensory kind of overload. I think you will have worlds in the Metaverse that don't have it. Why can't you have a world in the Metaverse that isn't human to human, but is primarily the interaction of machines?

Yeah.

And we start to remove these constraints, we can, I think we realize that we really don't know what's possible. And the opportunity is much bigger and much more interesting than just a virtual world for us to have fun and play and work in.

Yeah, I think that's already what I noticed, that the Metaverse will be much more than, as you say correctly, just games. For me, the enterprise metaverse, and then not so much the meetings as Meta shows it, but also in the digital twins of interacting with an oil rig, for example, would be. Would be part of that and that would have a completely different UX from that perspective than the central end type of interaction.

I would say the way I've kind of tried to think about what will be possible on the Internet is to think about everything that happens on in the metaverse is to think about everything that today happens on the Internet as a starting point, and think that those interactions are all going to move to a more advanced network of Communication and interaction. And what do you see on the Internet? You see everything from servers communicating to databases to all kinds of stuff. Like I think they're going to be metaverse database companies that create new kinds of databases that are metaverse specific.

Yeah. From that perspective we are literally at the start of the incident again.

Exactly. It is back to the start of the Internet 100%. With now the big shift being, I think two things. One is that the principles behind this network are not resilience and decentralization, but they are now real time interactivity. And in network applications where applications run in the transmission, if you look at it that way, it becomes this huge ocean of possibility. Yeah.

Just to get my creativity going, what kind of examples do you foresee for like this in network application that you're referring to?

Let's talk about some maybe not so sexy things that aren't possible on the Internet today. As examples of what I think, let's just call it this. What I think the metaverse will change and then we can kind of expand to things that are more cutting edge and then we can talk about just like future looking applications in kind of three stages.

Yeah.

The first and simplest is firewalls and load balancers. Today you have to run a firewall in your office or your home or your data center. It's part of the client server model. And what that means is that everything has to either hairpin through that or your firewall has this localized impact. And load balancers are in some ways even more problematic. Let's say you have servers and a whole bunch of different data centers or multi cloud. Wherever you run that load balancer, everything is going through it and it hairpins and causes quality issues and so on. Whereas if you were designing the Internet from scratch or creating this metaverse, you would make firewalls and load balancers part of your network. The transmission path itself along the means of communication would take care of those things for you.

Yeah.

That's an example of breaking the client server model. Looking just a little further out at interactive voice and video. There's mixing of audio, there's transcoding to meet different bandwidth and quality needs. There is even lawful intercept to comply with the wiretap statutes of various countries. And at the end of the day, data is going over physical equipment that sits on sovereign land. And every country has their own wiretap statutes. From the United States to China, there are wiretap laws that have to be complied with. And today all of this happens again in centralized places in data centers where you have the compute and you have the infrastructure set up and everything else rather than in the network. And you can think of why in the network would be much more valuable. If you're trying to connect two end users together who are both in their own networks and they can't communicate peer to peer, let's say there's a NAT problem, network address translation problem, they have their own router in front of them blocking that communication. Today you have to go to a data center and relay it, adding a lot of delay and also losing security and things like that. Whereas if the network was able to kind of facilitate that relay and also handle the compliance and the mixing and recording and transcoding and these other things in the network itself, you could create much richer applications that could meet maybe the latency needs that AR and VR meet. And I say AR and VR not because AR and VR are the core of the metaverse, in my opinion, but just that there are these fundamental things that preclude innovation from happening. And then if you go on and look a little bit further, a shared object, like a soccer ball in a game, the two people are trying to kick at the same time. If there's even a few milliseconds of delay, the trajectory of that ball can change. And so you have to have the network involved in the communication model notarizing the packet so people know when someone pulled the trigger rather than when the packet hit the server. Have the network mark that, have the network split the data and copy it and send it multiple directions so that it can't be forged. It's authoritative, you know. So what this means for future applications is that we can have much more interactive, real time experiences. It's meaningful for human to human, for gaming, for business, but also for machine to machine type stuff. But I think we'll start to almost everything that today we think of as being done on the cloud. Aws, Google, gcp, Azure are these huge suites of tons of different tools and the scaffolding that you can build your kind of tech business on top of the things that will remain in those data centers that will remain in the cloud are things that require heavy compute and heavy storage. Other than that, you'll start to see the network take over. Databases will be part of the network, security will be part of the network, interactivity, presence, identity will all be part of the network. And those things, when you start to combine them together, I think will be the difference between an Internet that is just dumb pipes that let people communicate to a metaverse where you have this rich Interaction within the communication network itself.

Fascinating. I think it's. I guess that shows almost that the metaverse would almost be not so much as a content creator challenge because the content will be created, but it will be really an infrastructure challenge to ensure that this in network application will actually be possible for the content creators to do whatever they are good at.

I think so. The same way that, you know, you had MySpace and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and everything else come up. The problem wasn't a content challenge with those. You will have different social networks and different worlds. I think you can talk about these worlds to a great extent as being social networks that will be created on a new Internet.

Yeah.

The problem will not be that people will come up with it. And what the initial iteration looks like is very different than the final. The initial iteration of Facebook is different than what it is today. The initial iteration of LinkedIn is different than what it is today in terms of how people interact with it, the utility of it, the business use cases and things like that. But without the infrastructure, it doesn't matter how many good ideas people have.

Yeah, you need. You need to have the infrastructure.

That's right. It won't come to life.

Yeah. Wow. Very interesting, Rayon, your insights, and I've taken way more time now than we had scheduled for this, but I really appreciate your insight because I think it's. I think it sort of complements all the ideas that I've heard so far already and all the insights that I've heard so far. So I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Great. Thank you.

Have a great day. Bye. Bye.

And that wraps up the conversation with Bayern Tauvik. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is that a fully decentralized Metaverse is still decades away and that we first need to focus on delivering hyper realistic, immersive content to devices around the world before we can even start to think of doing this decentralized. That is why in my new book, Step into the Metaverse, I call this the need for the Hybrid Web, or as Jack Dorsey calls it, Web 5.0. He must have read my book, I think, when he coined that term, because a hybrid web uses decentralized computing technologies to deliver the content and decentralized infrastructure to ensure the full control and ownership of our data, digital assets and identity. If you enjoyed the conversation, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform so you'll be notified when any of the other interviews will become available. Thank you. And see you in the metaverse.