The Possibilities of a Human-centric Metaverse with Jimi Daodu - Step into the Metaverse Podcast: EP09

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Vermenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I am 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 Jimmy Daudu. Jimmy is the founder of Vault Hill, an extended reality blockchain based metaverse designed to make you feel more human. Jimmy has a strong focus on the open metaverse and is passionate about building a human centric metaverse. Prior to Vault Hill, he led a number of successful transformation and digital change programs. During the interview, we discussed the open metaverse and the importance of blockchain for the immersive Internet. We also discussed self sovereign identities, the importance of data ownership, and what role decentralized Autonomous organizations or DAOs will play in the metaverse. Enjoy the conversation.

Maybe can you first start with telling a little bit about Vault Hill, what it is, what you're trying to build.

So what we're building is a metaverse that's different to every other metaverses out there. And why we see it's different is because we're focusing on it being human centric. And we're focusing and building a metaverse designed to make you feel more human. Going away from that dystopian futuristic style of, hey, you know, doom and gloom. I'm in a VR headset. Ready player one. You know, I'm in my bed for two weeks and I'm just in my, in my world. No, what we're trying to do at Vault Hill is bring real life experiences into the metaverse so you can enhance the human experience. And this is our development plan. Again, just like how you'd build a city or an off plan, estate or development. We've divided the first island into seven districts and each of those districts are themed the Human Experience. So you have things like vitality as a district, community as a district, romance as a district, creativity as a district. So we're starting this year with latter part of this year we're launching Virtual Land for sale as NFTs in the Vitality and Play district. And in the Vitality district we have two customers now. So we're working with a fitness company in Hong Kong to bring VR for mindfulness and AR for exercises into the metaverse, into our Metaverse on virtual Land. And we're working with a couple of entertainers and fashion houses, up and coming brands for play, you know, to look at digital fashion and wearables and then get them into our virtual world in terms of virtual land, spin up a, a gallery for them. So what we're also doing in the background in our Metaverse is building a no code builder tool. So yourself, Mark, you can come in with a VR headset or do it on web where you can spin up an easy building. Nothing fancy, but if you now want the Burj al Arab and floating on water, you want the shard on top of it, then come to us, we'll charge you a fee for that.

Very good.

Yeah, so that's what we're building at Volatile and we're taking that positioning of human centric to bring in emotions, empathy into what we're building rather than gamey gaming gamey like you know, the likes of Sandbox, you know, Decentraland and all of that and you know, just taking a different spin to it to attract more businesses and consumers as well into what we're doing.

Okay, well that's very interesting. So it's not so much a game as it's more like a world where you can do stuff.

Exactly, exactly. So for example, the Today Fit app we're doing, while it's a subscription based for their customers, what, what we've agreed with them is the mindfulness. It could be a 30 minute session where their customers pay 250 Hong Kong dollars. But in the volatile Metaverse we'll simulate, we'll build up a studio for them and anyone can walk in and do a five minutes mindfulness in terms of what they have. Same with Play, you know, the digital fashion wearables we're working with, you know, people could try some on. There are going to be some free ones that you could wear and then there are some that you'd buy as NFT and you know, you could customize them to your taste. So out of all of the brands or every brand we're working with, there's going to be a free experience for users that come in. So on a Friday night, Mark, you can say hey, you know, your wife, your girlfriend, if you have one, let's go on A date and romance and you simulate yourself into a romance district and you're in, you know, Hakkasan, you know, the restaurant, and just experiencing what it feels like to be in that restaurant, albeit you're not eating, you know, but you're, you're right there and you know, having the ambience and experience of being with a loved one in that district.

Okay, well, that sounds very interesting. It's indeed different than the sandbox or decentraland where you just, you, you're running around and then. Yeah, that's about it.

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

When do you plan to do your nft, your land sale?

So we plan on doing that on the 13th to the 17th of December. I was just looking at timelines again because we've had to move it by a week. So we're doing that and we're partnering with htc. For every land you buy, you get the new vive flow. So again, positioning it a bit differently, you know, all this other guys, the metaverse, you buy land and that's it, you know, people, just a lot of people land bank their land, you know, to keep it price appreciate and you know, that's it. But for us, we want to aid adoption. You know, we want to come into the space and say, hey, you know, we're selling land, but you're getting a device. And you know, in the next three to four months, we're going to build a space where you could actually, you know, virtually immerse yourself in it and experience, you know, so if you're a business owner, could buy a piece of land just like how you have a website, you could build your virtual office as well and get people to experience your products and services.

Wow, that's really cool. I haven't heard that before. So congrats on that.

Thank you.

Can you explain to me what does the metaverse mean for you?

So there's a lot of definitions about a web metaverse and every other person nowadays is using the word very loosely. And I feel like for me, and first of all, it's a number of things, right? It's a virtual shared space, right, where you could immerse yourself. A metaverse should have the ability to be immersive. It's not just Web 2.0. You click on browse no. And then it has to have the functionality of being decentralized. Web 3.0, the ability to own your own data, control your data and all of that stuff. So that is a simple definition, a decentralized, you know, virtual shared space where, you know, folks can come in and, you know, have a good time, experience things and, you know, feel better than they do today.

Yeah. And so you mentioned one of the characteristics, it should be decentralized. What are some of the other characteristics of the Metaverse?

Interoperability. So the ability to move, you know, your avatars, your assets from one metaverse to the other. So if you look at an example of Tesla, when they started off, their charging ports were just for Tesla cars. And I think last month they just opened it up to more electric cars, I think. I'm not sure. I know I saw that in the news somewhere.

I think so. Yeah, I read them as well.

Yeah. So it's the same thing, you know, if I have an avatar, you know, with a digital Rolex or, you know, a Nike, you know, wearable, I shouldn't just be limited in the virtual world of volatile. I should be able to go to sandbox with that. I should be able to go to the central line with that and still look cool. So I think, you know, operability is one. Another thing is around the creator economy, there should always be a marketplace as well to trade goods and services and all of that. So I think those are the other characteristics of a Metaverse that one should have in their space.

Yeah. So, and you already briefly talked, touched upon web 3.0. What are some of the mistakes we made in web 2.0 that we should really avoid when building web 3.0, web 3.0, and what are the key characteristics of web 3 that we should bring towards the Metaverse?

So I'd say some of the mistakes is data ownership and data privacy. Right. The ability to own your data. So all of this, cookies, all of this, you know, big companies sell our data. You know, we click on this website and you're tracking everything. And, you know, before you know it, you get your email address and you're spamming with products. You know, I'm on my iPhone and I'm talking about, you know, a Ferrari. And next thing, okay, Ferraris don't do ads, but I'm talking about a bicycle. And next thing I see on Instagram, a bicycle pops up and I'm like, hold on, guys, what's going on here? So I think those are the kind of challenges that make people wary of all of those things. And I think if we start to look at data privacy, data identity, data sovereignty, moving forward in web 3.0 and in terms of accessibility, the fact that you're able to connect the wallet to any platform automatically in a safe and secure manner to Enable, you know, purchases and, you know, all of this stuff. And again, for me it's, it's also looking at it from, you know, a content creation perspective. You know, how do you start to make images virtually and in 3D, for example, how do you start to enhance experiences of how we do things today on the web? You know, what is that next level in terms of portability as well that we need to do? So I think those are the kind of mistakes that we should look to avoid and characteristics we should put in web 3.0. And that's exactly what we're doing at Volatile as well.

Yeah. It also shows, I think, that there's a long way to go. You know, if you look at what Zuckerberg is doing. Yeah, obviously he said all the right things.

Yeah.

But I think nobody trusts him that he will do the right thing, which is he's there just for. To make tons of money and not to care about the user, which I think is a problem.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we've seen this over the line and a lot of the time is always trust, trust, trust. And you know, when they announced taking the first four letters of what everyone feels like is, is the new world, everyone's like, what's wrong with this guy? Like, really great marketing strategy.

But hey, yeah, I don't like him at all. I find him a very horrible person who is a threat to democracy. But I have a very strong opinion about that. So you already mentioned data ownership is crucial, needs to be decentralized. What about identity? Yes, identity needs to be decentralized. Then we talk about the self sovereign identity. How are we going to build that for the metaverse? Because there are some challenges to an SSI as well.

Yeah. So let's take a step back and look at identity. Right. So I'm Jimmy Daldu. If I go into Sandbox, you know, or let me take a step back. If I go into Decentraland, I probably have an ID with a username, but also have my ID connected to my wallet. But I could put Mark there and I could collect to a different wallet and no one knows it's me. Right. And you talked about trust earlier and this is a fundamental and important thing when it comes to identity. How do you know that the person you're interacting with in the metaverse is not a serial killer? You know, how do you ensure that it's safe? How do you ensure that it's protected? And you know, my colleague and I, Nick, were in Barcelona two weeks ago with an avatar company where we're looking to pivot to photorealistic avatars and you know, they're also doing some things around, you know, self sovereign identities where they're working with a couple of PhD students in the University of Catalonia and the European Union to look at how we look at identities and bring that into avatars and Metaverse. So take for example the bank. You have an account with a bank, you've given them your passport, your proof of address and all of that. So if the bank says, hey, Mark leaves here nine out of ten times, Mark lives here. So it's a trusted source. So now imagine taking a unique code from the bank, putting that on a blockchain, decentralizing it and creating a hash. Right now that hash again is like a wallet, but we know that hash is connected to your account, to the bank in terms of your data and it's verified and then taking that hash and then plugging it into an API for any Metaverse or Metaverse database to say, hey, this hash you have a Twitter verified tick. Because we've connected your hash to the bank and obviously it's decentralized as anonymous. So we don't know its mark, but we know this, whoever has this hash is verified. So Mark and then create his avatar and then have that tick on it to say hey, if Mark's working around, you know, he is Mark, he is identified. So again, those are the kind of things we're looking to work on within the next nine to 12 months to aid the space. Because it's not just create an experience, right? It's looking at the underlying technology. To your point, Web two to Web three, what are those differences? And everyone keeps talking about data ownership, data privacy, self sovereign identity. So for us it's very key to look at how we also solve some innovation challenges with what we're building. You know, everyone building a Metaverse is a pioneer in this space. You know, no one knows what good looks like. You know, there isn't a playbook for Web 3.0, you know, so everyone's building, hoping, hey, this gets traction, we innovate it, we get a pool of developers and users, we constantly keep innovating. It's coming back to answer your question, you know, it's looking at how we start to use those clever technologies to prove self sovereign identity, keep people safe in the metaverse and you know, ensure that, you know, transactions going on are safe and secure and tying back to identities of verified people, for example. It's going to take time. It's not an immediate and instant, you know code that you put in. There's going to be a lot of journeys, especially legal and regulatory, but it's something we know it needs to be done and we're working on it at the moment.

Yeah, I think I completely agree with you. Identity is absolutely crucial and it's also very challenging on how to solve this. But identity is only one part, of course, and the other part is reputation. How are we going to use reputation and how can we ensure that, you know, I know that you are Jimmy, but I know that I can trust you because you have a good. I can see your reputation somehow. How do you think that will work?

So I wouldn't put my hand up and say, hey, I know the answer to this, right? Because it's something we tried testing out with our product film whereby, you know, as you. So if you look at YouTube, for example, you know, you, you upload videos, you get like, you start to get a rating scores or actually Uber, you know, you go into an Uber car, you know, there's a rating system, you know, bookways, drivers and riders, right? So we started looking at something similar to that where as a user you go into community, you exchange ideas or you have experience and you're able to rate both ways in terms of, oh, okay, the service was good, you know, the experience was good both ways. But we haven't really nailed what that looks like. So for us it's still work in progress. So what I'll say to answer your question is look at similar strategies of like Uber, for example, a rating system both ways. So that way it's not a one way trust system, you know, it's a two way trust system in terms of how you build that governance model in it. And you could also throw in a dow in looking at how you look at ratings and trust and all of that. But for us it's still something we need to look into. We've been, we focused on building a foundation and technical blocks and you know, the partnerships, the markets in that we're like, hey, this is on the backlog, but we'll iterate. It's a good question.

I think you mentioned an interesting point. Dio the dao. How would daos work in that regard in safeguarding reputation? Do you have any ideas on that?

So it's a number of things, right? Because your DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization and various projects out there use various parameters to constitute a dao. It could be like decentraland voting powers. The more mana you have, the more influence you have, basically. So for us, it's, we've looked at bringing the dao in in three phases. So phase one, we still own the building and you know how volatile works in the first year. So we start to bring that in. Then phase two is a semi instituted dao where we have a half dao, but we still have control of majority of it. But the Dow has a level of control of what we can build, how we build, because we're building our metaverse on four islands over four years. So it's going to evolve based on technology, regulatory stuff and all of that. And the last year for us is handing all of that out to the community at the dao to say, hey, it's now a dao project, it's now a community driven project. You know, any proposals need to come to the dao. So I think, you know, those are the kind of characteristics of functionalities that we'll start to see. You know, various projects have various daos, you know, Defi has that, there is Gamify have their various daos in terms of how they govern players, users and all of that. But us, we need to put proper thinking into this, to look at how we use the dao as a governance mechanism around compliance, around security, around safety, and put those parameters in within the next 18 to 24 months.

Yeah, that is a massive challenge. I think that you set yourself there, but something that's very important and the problem for of course with avatars is that imposters can, you know, I can create a Jimmy avatar and then I act as if I am you. So obviously if you have the identity and reputation in place then that could help. But this happens all the time on web 2.0 as well. People all the time impersonate famous people to get you to send it to Bitcoin. So how is this going to pan out in the metaverse and how can we stop this kind of thing from happening?

So it's a challenging one, right? Cybercriminals will always find a loophole in every and anything. Covid started loads of billions of dollars siphoned in cyber criminals. You know, just like how we're thinking of innovating, they're thinking of malicious ways of counter innovating. You know, again it's, it's like that with everything, you know, mobile phone, when we went from modems to, you know, cell phones and gsm, again same thing. You know, the malicious folks evolved the way, you know, the scam, you know, evolved the way they distrust people. So it's always going to be a Facet of every new innovation. But I think the important thing to highlight is how you look at spinning up funds around research and development to future proof the space and not just doing that by yourself, but working with a group of like minded projects or companies to understand, hey, you know, how do we look at compliance in this space, how do we look at trust, how do we look at eroding malicious activity? You know, there's a company out in the UK called sipsafe and they work with companies around cybersecurity and all of this stuff and it's, it's trying to bring those guys into the blockchain because your traditional security system, cyber and your blockchain system, two different. Right? The blockchain, everything is recorded. Right. You know, so you can still forge a transaction and you know, put it on a blockchain, but you need to dig deeper into understanding what is real and what is not real. You know, so I feel while we've not cracked that or while we're still thinking about it, you know, the likes of Coinbase, Binance, heavily investing on security and you know, cybersecurity, data security and all of that, I think it's always going to be a continuous effort and always, you know, publishing things around, you know, safeguarding how you log in, safeguarding how you use your avatar, where you go to and all of that digital trail that you know coming out from this as well.

Yeah, because otherwise, I guess, you know, anything can be hacked and the metaverse can also be hacked and will be hacked. So we need to find safeguards. Indeed. So just shifting it a little bit, we know that the well known metaverse spaces, Roblox, Fortnite, Decentraland Sandbox, you're building a new one. What are some of the other less well known spaces, sort of your competitors?

I'd say yes, there are a couple. Right. So the somium space starting to put VR capabilities in their metaverse. There is net VRK or network. Not pronouncing it well, but it's Net vrk. Yeah, the certain way you pronounce it that sounds like network, but that's it. You have Victoria VR, you have Crick, you have a lot of stuff, you know, and for me, I keep saying competition is healthy. You know, for someone to spin a business model to build something like this, it takes guts, you know, so while each of us are just lean for market share, it's a great initiative. You know, we're pioneering this space. We're giving people multiple flavors of how they can enhance the experience in Whatever way, if you're into gaming, you know, hey, there's a metaverse for you if you need to help and fitness, you know, hey, come to Voltaire. You know, if you're looking for different real world use cases, you know, come to Volatile, you know, so again it's that blend of complementing each other in the various things we're building.

Yeah, well that's, that's good. So you say, you mentioned business model. So what kind of different business models can we expect in the Metaverse?

So there are a lot, right, depending on various folks. I'll talk specifically about Volatile and our business model. So we have six business models across four product lines. And the four product lines are your Metaverse, which is, you know, your shared space that brings in brands into here. We create a no code builder tool where you know, the business model for us there is the selling of land, right as an nft. Another business model for us is advertising. So in one of our biggest plots of land, which is exclusive, there's a courtyard that houses a billboard, right? So Volatile charges X for advertising, but if you own all eight, that forms the exclusive plot, you as the owner, you get the rights to the billboard. So you could charge anyone any price for your billboard. So it's a creator economy. We're looking at how it trickles down to people that have assets in our Metaverse. The second for us product line is the NFT marketplace where bringing in, you know, NFT art, you know, not just from all around the world, but also wearables. You know, the virtual land itself is an NFT and looking at all any other type of digital assets and combined, you know, working with other crypto projects like you know, Boston Protocol and the likes. And for us it's looking at the transaction fees. We compare that to what is out there and you know, prepare to go into charging less than half fee than what every other folks charge out there to bring in users. And then the third for us is avatars. Like we talked about, you know, creating more photorealistic avatar and tying that to, you know, digital identities and self serving identities, but underlining that the business model there is wearable. So your avatar is like a mannequin, you know, you have a lot of brands and you know, fashion warehouses that you know, want to jump on that. And you have underrepresented brands, you know, in Africa and in Asia that you know, no one knows about and you know, the Metaverse could be an opportunity for them to come. And so wearables for us is another business model and the last is XR consultant. So this can be on chain and off chain. So, you know, Mark, wherever you're working or, you know, wherever you've worked, you know, in a leadership team meeting, we could come in and simulate a treasure hunt as a productivity activity for your leadership team. You know, bring some headsets, you know, work with you guys to spin up what that looks like and, you know, simulate an hour session that can be used across the organization in terms of team building and increasing productivity. So those are our product lines and those are business models within it. So we've looked at this, you know, strategically and understood what are those things we could do to not just enhance the human experience, but also make a business out of it and keep itself sustaining as well.

Yeah, very good. And do you also offer your users like a Play to Earn business model?

So we are looking at that by H2 next year. Right? So we're looking at Play to earn, work to earn and learn to earn. Because our model is focused on, you know, improving how you work, how you play, and how you, you know, you learn. So we're looking at, you know, Play to earn is big. You know, Axie, you know, soulchicks, all of those guys are tapping into it. So for us, it's as we build this, you know, apart from staking, how do we incentivize our customers? And, you know, I'd say 84% of our token allocation, which is a huge part of our token, is for reward pool. So it's all of this incentives that we've known that, hey, we're going to do, but we just need time and the right team to just start structuring and executing and doing. So. Yes, those are initiatives and models that would look to definitely keep attracting users into our space.

Yeah, very good. I think that we'll see more of these innovations that I think are fantastic because it allows people to earn new ways to earn a living. So if we have like a Web 3.0, we have unlimited decentralized storage, decentralized bandwidth, decentralized computers. How will that affect the Metaverse?

It's a number of things, right? And we're looking at this, you know, currently, because in our play district, part of our objective is to set up an event for 100,000 people. Now imagine 100,000 avatars, 100,000 movements, 100,000 locations across the world. You're talking about bandwidth, you're talking about computing space, you're talking about architecture. Hey, I did that. And, you know, they did the Travis Scott concerts and Fortnite and it was a great experience. But you know, I know a couple of people experienced intermittent, you know, latency during the event. So what we're doing is looking at how we build our infrastructure layer of the Metaverse to scale up to that type of event. So we're currently collaborating with a number and having conversations with a number of folks that has RP1 in Los Angeles. So they're building a client side server where you run on 33 servers and you could host a million people in avatars in an event, which is awesome.

Yeah.

You also have Hayden in the UK that is doing something similar around computing, cloud computing. So for us is looking at all of this architecture and starting to build that up, but from a decentralized perspective. You know, if we're looking at, you know, we built our smart contracts using Ethereum, which is compatible with any layer two Ethereum virtual machine and you know, layer two solution. So, you know, likes of Polygon, immutable X and all of that. So what we're now trying to do is work through proof of concepts around, okay, we're building this, let's test this security model and infrastructure model out. Let's look at storage. So we're looking, you know, at ipfs, which is your interplanetary file storage system. We'll also look at the filecoin and you know, how we start to tap into that decentralized storage. So again we give our users trust to say, hey, your data is right here. It's decentralized. You know, it's not a governing authority that looks after this and all of that. So we're trying to piece all of this together to actually start to deliver this and we'll start to see a lot of this in Q1 next year.

Nice, that's very good to hear because I think we need that decentralized web. We want to create a decentralized metaverse.

So Absolutely.

That's good to hear. So I. Well, thank you so much Jimmy for your, for your time and your insights. Yep, yep, absolutely, yeah, I'd love to meet up once I'm in London one day at the moment, the other end of the world. But the world is a small place.

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. No, but, no, no, Dr. Mark, this has been great.

And that wraps up the conversation with Jimmy Daudu. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, that is the important role human centric design will play in the Metaverse as well as how important self sovereign identity and reputation is for a fully functioning metaverse. Which is why in my new book, Step into the Metaverse, I discuss in detail the role of identity and reputation in an open metaverse. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform so you will be notified when any of the other interviews will become available. Thank you and see you in the Metaverse.