Live From Consensus 2024 | Enabling Fluid Identity and Asset Travel with Blockchain

All right, welcome back to the show. We are coming to 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 custody staking in settlement today. Bit Go supports over 800 bit coins and processes 20% of all Bitcoin transactions by value. Check them out over at Bit go.com. Um We have spoken to so many influential people over the last three days. Very excited to have our next guest. Um our next guest, Lamina, one co founder, Ceo Rebecca Barkin, Rebecca. So great to see you and Rebecca and I’ve only ever met on Zoom. So it’s the first time, you know, when you see someone and you’re like, they’re taller, they’re shorter, they just look different. I feel like this is that moment. There’s a, there’s a history there. Yeah, I mean, because you’ve been involved in immersive work for a long time too. I know I’ve only seen you in the metaverse. Yeah, it’s true. That’s true. Yeah, it’s nice to be here. Thanks. For having me. Of course, Rebecca for, I would love before we even get in like, I think you have such a fascinating history. Um So I know you’re here at consensus. We’re gonna talk about Lamina, but I would love you to give us like the 30 seconds of just how you got to this moment. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Um Thanks for asking. Yes. So I started my career in the entertainment business actually in uh music, right? When they were kind of going through this really difficult transition of trying to figure out what the value of IP is in a digital era. And then I went to film just in time for them to go through the very same thing. Um And it, it became really clear to me that where we were headed with entertainment, if you really valued IP you needed to understand because tech was like kind of in the driver’s seat at that point. And so I went, um I moved up to Silicon Valley and I took actually now that I think about it, it was a music, integrated music and uh hardware and software company. And then positional tracking, I just like kept going down the hole, positional tracking. And then I went to magically um where I led the studios there for four years and the development of uh A slate of A R applications um which was a really great learning about where everything was going spatial computing and uh immersive large scale location based. Uh And what were the things that were kind of holding us back when we shifted to enterprise? I led the redesign of the operating system for Magic Leap Two. And then I went to MS G sphere uh where we were working on. Uh you know, what kind of content and technical partnerships were needed to bring immersive at that scale to really make use of that tech in a way that resonated with people emotionally. Um And I was there when uh you know, Neil and I worked together at Magic League for years. So uh I was there, yeah, like we worked together on, on adapting some of his IP to like world scale augmented reality, you know, games. 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 uh which was his book at the time. And he’s like, you know, people keep asking me about the metaverse and what I think of Mark Zuckerberg’s version of the metaverse. And he said, you know, I figure I could keep traveling around the world talking about it and this, you know, what’s wrong with it or what I do differently or I could build the rails myself. And so he asked me to come do that with him and uh Peter Vane, the third co founder. Yeah. So Lamina one, so co-founded by Neil Stevenson and famed author of Snow Crash as, as well as many other books. I was lucky enough to interview Neil, um 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 head when he announced it was that he really wanted to create something that wasn’t the same as some of the other. Um L one and L twos that were coming out that were very financialized and really just focused on like, you know, just shilling tokens, maybe you could bring us up to speed. Like, is that still the vision today? Yeah, I mean, even more. So I think, you know, so what we wanted to do was improve upon creator economics. Um And we felt like the current sort of system for financing creative content, distributing it, uh monetizing it uh and connecting IP holders directly with their fans was just, it was just broken and that, that sort of IP licensing system and the studio system was a bit outdated. Um And so we felt like Blockchain was a critical underpinning even at magically if we talked about how Blockchain was a critical underpinning it open uh metaverse because really your identity needs to be able to travel fluidly with you and your assets through this like world of inter interconnected world of physical and digital experiences and really only Blockchain could do that. Um And then as A I comes online and becomes more and more important, there’s the like, how do you verify and how do you make sure that this is someone’s identity and this is you are protecting someone’s IP. So, you know, Neil has a long, long history himself as an IP holder. So really who better to be at the helm than someone who understands and protects aesthetic quality and narrative uh in the way that tech is developed and we had that same philosophy of magic leap. So we just kind of carried it forward. But what we realized really quickly was like, it’s not enough to just build a protocol, it’s not, it’s not enough to just build a layer one. And we felt like 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 to build out not only a protocol, but um the platform stack on top of it, there was no code that would connect IP holders directly with their fans. And we, we made the um we always thought avalanche had like a really great architecture to enable that because it can keep developers costs low and predictable. Um it protects performance and allows this like ecosystem of interoperability all the way at the core. And so we adopted that as our consensus layer and we really just put all of our energy and effort into building out the application layer stack and Rebecca, this has been a big week, right? You guys went live with your main net. So yeah, tell us about, you know, just the the the launch what that was like and then also how everyone from IP holders to like developers can build on top of the platform. Yeah, yeah. So um it was really exciting week for us for sure. Um Called two years like through the roughest market, I mean, metaverse and crypto were like toxic terms for like the last two years. But we really stuck to our guns. Um We did shift our focus a little bit just to say you don’t want to focus just on like VR or A R. So how do we build a platform that is welcoming to a much larger, broader set and we really decided to focus on trans media? So how do we just take an IP holder who has this uh kind of a broad trans media set of content and connect them directly with fans and make it easy for them as fans to co create with them? That was number one. And then the Tonos design. So we really just wanted to make sure that we were enabling a novel 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 huge event for us. A big milestone. I mean, we’re a small but very, very mighty team of nine. So we pulled that off over the last two years. And uh we had our main night go live on 517 and then just uh on the 28th at consensus two years today, um we uh announced public access to the beta platform. So really developers can go to Lama one.com and that domain is actually like entering our hub, which in the hub, you have a wallet, it’s like a very web two kind of log in process, super simple and streamlined and then you get in there and it’s very experience first, so you can explore other content creators. Um And then our creator studio allows people to actually upload and publish content uh to create like web based mini games where you can have co creation within permission uh sort of IP uh to build together. Um And so, you know, we have a unity SDK, we have an Unreal STK, we’re just trying to like embrace all the great tech that’s already out there, but weave it to get it together in a way that’s really uh simple for people to use and on board. So that is up and running people should go check it out. Uh We’re in our very early days. Uh So that’s what we, we say it’s beta uh on the public platform side, but the main net is live. So keep talking about interconnectedness and interoperability like it sounds like that’s a super important theme. How are you thinking that metaverse platforms like yours and others will coexist in the future? This is a really, really important question and I, I don’t think we, we necessarily have talked about it enough in the, in the right way in terms of what the blockers are. So interoperability can start with identity and assets to travel. But the reality is that like we could talk about mash up games all day long, we can talk about like, can I bring my sword and the the soccer game or whatever? But that fundamentally requires the creatives build in a totally different way. That’s a huge lift when you’re building a double sided kind of platform or, or market. Um So, you know, we decided to take a uh a bit bit of a different approach and we’ve been working with a lot of our partners that are really focused on standards, right? So the part of the challenge even at it magically was like, how do you, there was no easy way to port content because the metadata on the assets like as it would move from platform to platform with different processing, you know, capabilities and whatnot, didn’t maintain aesthetic quality. You’re talking about shader, you’re and these are things that artists really care about. So actually our friends at Future Verse um are building out a standard called UBF uh that can be used to dynamically detect the platform that you’re on and then enable transcoding for those assets where you take the metadata and all of those sort of credits, the the royalties, all that sort of thing that you’re supposed to take with it and allow it to travel uh from environment to environment while protecting aesthetic quality. So like I think when we took a step back and looked at where is interoperability actually at, it’s like we have all the technical infrastructure to enable it, but we don’t have the, the content is not there. The creators who make that content at a level of quality people care about are not there yet. So what are the basics? It’s identity and assets. Let’s just enable uh across avalanche and Lama to one’s ecosystem of content, those things to talk to each other really fluidly and let’s work with partners to actually implement standards. Let’s pick one rather than go sit on boards all the time and talk about it, you know, so we feel like that’s a big step forward and we’re always looking for that, but that, that is a really, really important part to encouraging uh real interoperability. Yeah, Rebecca. Thank you so much for joining us today. Um You guys have been a great partner for us here at consensus.