Get ready for Neal Stephenson’s open metaverse as Lamina1 unveils Avalanche Web3 plans

Neal Stephenson has unveiled the plans of his Lamina1 blockchain company for an open metaverse in partnership with the Avalanche chain.

Now as breathless as that sounds, it doesn’t mean Stephenson’s virtual world of Snow Crash — the 1992 novel in which he coined the term “metaverse” — is coming soon. But this launch of Lamina1’s Layer 1 blockchain on Avalanche is a necessary part of the infrastructure.

Over the past year or so, Lamina1 has been building a solution for empowering metaverse content creation and development. And today it has announced the launch of a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain on Avalanche.

You might think that this is a bit late, as the buzz around the word “metaverse” has come and gone. But Stephenson likes that expectations have been lowered and the discussion can focus on real technology.

The platform aims to create an interoperable ecosystem of open metaverse tools and experiences using Avalanche’s powerful consensus and core technology. Stephenson and Avalanche executive John Nahas said in an interview with GamesBeat that they see eye-to-eye on the need for an open metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds inspired by sci-fi novels like Snow Crash. And rather than build everything itself, Stephenson said Lamina1 is relying on Avalanche’s technology, which is focused on enabling blockchain networks for other companies in an open environment.

Founded by Stephenson, crypto pioneer Peter Vessenes, and immersive entertainment executive Rebecca Barkin, Lamina1 seeks to foster an open, decentralized, and creator-friendly metaverse.

“We founded Lamina1 because we would like to see the Metaverse develop in a way that’s open, decentralized, and welcoming for creators,” said Stephenson. “In order to have a Metaverse that millions of people visit and use, we’ll need experiences there that people enjoy having. That starts with building creator support into the system from the ground up. We’ve found a partner that’s aligned with that vision and that has the engineering heft to realize it.”

The team believes that in order to attract millions of users, the metaverse must provide enjoyable experiences and support creators from the ground up. Their partnership with Avalanche aligns with this vision and leverages Avalanche’s engineering capabilities.

Lamina1 has already made significant progress, with nearly 50,000 participants engaging in its Testnet and Betanet phases. These early stages have laid the foundation for key features such as decentralized asset storage solutions, user-friendly world-builder tools, game engine and web SDKs, consumer-grade user experience, and a simple world server for multiplayer experiences. The platform also employs unique subnet architectures for identity, assets, and creator experiences. For anyone paying attention, it was obvious from these tests that Lamina1 was going to go with Avalanche, Stephenson said.

Avalanche, known for its blazing transaction speeds, customizability, and scalable architecture, has gained rapid traction in the blockchain space. Its Subnet model offers composability and options for blockchain networks and builders, making it an ideal base for optimizing and scaling any blockchain, including the metaverse-specific infrastructure developed by Lamina1.

In the coming months, Ava Labs and Lamina1 will collaborate to bring a creator-first platform to the Avalanche network and ecosystem. This integration will facilitate the seamless onboarding of metaverse creators and developers, enabling them to build on-chain apps and spaces.

The partnership aims to expand Avalanche’s existing creator ecosystem across various domains, including indie gaming, music, film, fashion, art, and tastemaker experiences. Ava Labs will provide technical and other support to Lamina1, leveraging its expertise in Consensus layer scalability, speed, and reliability.

“Since day one, Peter, Neal, and I have had tremendous respect for Avalanche and the team at Ava Labs –– not just their core technology, but their business acumen, their focus on building long term value, and their first-class developer support, which is a critical aspect of onboarding new content creators and keeping them,” said Barkin, CEO of Lamina1, in a statement. “With our expertise in consumer design and content development, and their commitment to scale, speed, reliability at the Consensus layer, we’re aiming for great acceleration. Together, we can empower creators to lay down the steppingstones to an interconnected and open metaverse.”

To stay updated on LAMINA1’s progress on Avalanche, interested parties can join the LAMINA1 and Avalanche Discord communities.

“The partnership between Lamina1 and Ava Labs is a major step forward in building the open metaverse,” said Navas. “Lamina1’s vision of a creator-first metaverse aligns perfectly with our commitment to providing developers and users with the tools and infrastructure they need to build the next generation of Web3 applications. We are excited to collaborate with Lamina1 to bring this vision to life and to empower creators to build the metaverse they want to see.”

Stephenson sprang into action to help create the open metaverse after watching walled gardens like Meta announce their interest in building the metaverse. He cofounded Lamina1 in June 2022, and this announcement is the first sign of the progress the company has made in creating infrastructure.

Tech details

Lamina1 uses a high-speed Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm, customized to support the needs of content creators –– providing provenance for creatorship and enabling attributive and behavioral characteristics of an object to be minted, customized, and composed on-chain.

Lamina1 chose to start with Avalanche, a robust generalized blockchain that delivers the industry’s most scalable and environmentally efficient chain for managing digital assets to date. This starting point provides Lamina1 with a flexible architecture and an extendable platform to support our goals in data storage, interoperability, integration incentives, carbon-negative operation, messaging, privacy, high-scale payments and identity.

For existing L1 builders and creators, the Betanet and Beta-testing will continue as usual on the Lamina1 Hub in the lead-up to the transition and the eventual Mainnet launch. The Lamina1 blockchain built to empower open metaverse content creation will continue its development. And the company remains laser-focused on supporting and delivering an interoperable ecosystem of open metaverse tools and experiences using blockchain as its underlying infrastructure.

The company said the community and validators may have questions about what this means for them, and Lamina1 will address them in an upcoming AMA with the Avalanche team hosted on Discord in the coming weeks.

Lamina1 will have an interoperable ecosystem built on Avalanche consensus. It will have specialized subnets for premium creator features such as identity, assets and storage. The aim is to have fluid digital identity unified across platforms, intuitive tools for creators of all kinds to build cross-platform experiences, game engine and web SDKs & editor plug-ins for developers, and a consumer-grade user experience, interface and design.

Avalanche and Ava Labs

Ava Labs simplifies the deployment of high-performance Web3 solutions, focusing on innovations within the Avalanche ecosystem. The company was founded by Cornell computer scientists in collaboration with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders. Their goal is to redefine the way people build and utilize open, permissionless networks, ultimately redefining value creation in the Web3 space.

Avalanche is a smart contracts platform that offers infinite scalability, finalizing transactions in less than one second. With its novel consensus protocol, Subnet infrastructure, and HyperSDK toolkit, Avalanche enables Web3 developers to easily launch powerful custom blockchain solutions. It provides a versatile and eco-friendly blockchain designed for Web3 developers to build anything they desire in any way they choose.

Navas noted that Avalanche’s architecture is green. A new report out yesterday from the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute said that the Avalanche Network, its 1,000-plus validators, billions of dollars transacted so far uses only 44 U.S. households’ worth of carbon.

“Relative to other proof of stake networks, we are the second most green and that’s because the first doesn’t have any transactions or activity on it,” Navas said.

Lamina1 origins

“This all started in late 2021 with the metaverse” announcement from Mark Zuckerberg that his company Meta would try to build the metaverse, Stephenson said. “To me, it seemed like an opportunity to actually try make something happen in the world. And I’ve always been telling the same story the whole way along. If there’s going to be a metaverse that millions of people visit, there have to be experiences there that people enjoy having, which seems too obvious to even say.”

He echoed the notion that game developers have the skills to build the metaverse.

“If you’re a creator, it’s hard to get support, it’s hard to get financing. It’s hard to make a living. And so most of the people who have the skill set needed to create metaverse experiences are currently employed in the game industry,” he said. “Some of them are gainfully and happily employed, some of them are miserable, and some of them are struggling. Regardless, if there’s not a value proposition for them, and an easy path for them, they’re gonna keep on doing what they’re doing or not try to turn their skills toward the metaverse.”

He said you have to pay attention to the infrastructure to enable those people to do their work.

“And once you’ve kind of got that sorted out, then we get to the fun part,” Stephenson said. “What we’ve been working on is infrastructure that would enable creators to have some hope of actually running a business in the metaverse without having to go through a lot of pain.”

He said the existing blockchain games and blockchain platforms are difficult to use and they’re also difficult for users to understand.

“The users don’t care about how the money works. They don’t have an ideological stake in blockchain or any of that. They just want to have fun. So what we what we figured out very early is that we wanted to work with Avalanche. There are a bunch of reasons for that. Some of them are more technical, some of them are more cultural. But that has just become clearer and clearer over time for various reasons. And just over the course of the last few months, we moved to formalize that relationship in this deal.”

Stephenson acknowledged the company got off to a late start and announced itself “just at the onset of the crypto winter.”

“On balance, that made things really interesting and complicated for us in the last year,” he said. “On balance, I think it’s better. In early 2022, it might have been easy to raise a lot of money fast. It would have felt good. I’m not sure if it would have been good. Instead, what we ended up with was a very lean fundraising environment. And so the company is very lean, it’s very scrappy, focuses your attention.”

He said that Barkin has “been magnificent in navigating that and making the right decisions. And overall, I think that we’re a stronger company for it.”

Partnering with Avalanche

He said that Avalanche has done some much with its best-of-breed engineering platform. The more Lamian1 looked, the more it decided not to reinvent the wheel. So it decided to work with Avalanche, which weather the crypto winter storms well and that “confirmed in our minds that it was a stable platform,” Stephenson said.

Navas said that from Avalanche’s perspective, it was good to talk with the Lamina1 team from its inception. He noted the early hype for the metaverse didn’t result in any real products or teams building things of tremendous value and had the ability to stick around.

“So anything that’s worth building and building right is going to take time,” Navas said. “And I believe that delivering something that is going to be worthwhile to creators and to our creator economy — to really utilize what a metaverse can be, as opposed to the hype that came and already left — is the ultimate goal for me.”

The goal is to create an open metaverse that is based on the creator economy, bringing in creators and using them in the right way and letting them benefit from the technology, Navas said.

“If anything, it might be the best time because you’re actually able to build without the hype and speculation and the noise,” Navas said. “It matters because artists and creators care about being working on a sustainable technology. The technology of the future has to be sustainable. Nobody wants to sit there and wait for a transaction. It happens in less than a second on Avalanche.”

Navas also said that being on Avalanche also opens up a larger ecosystem to work with other enterprises and brands that are on the same ecosystem. There are a number of companies that have been attracted to Avalanche because it lets them create their own custom blockchain, or Layer 1, instead of a Layer 2 or side chain. And it ultimately means less engineering work for each project.

“Our engineers love the way it works,” Stephenson said. “We can trust this to work, and it gives us the freedom to do the things we want to do.”

What comes next

Casey Halter, head of content at Lamina1, said the company will be launching some NFTs next week and do a demo of a playable metaverse experience soon.

“We’re working really hard in the background to start engaging some of our early access partners as well as some filmmakers, game creators, musicians from across our ecosystem to start launching spaces on Lamina1,” Halter said. “Weve spent a lot of time over the last year really working on the chain, the underlying infrastructure, the SDKs, the creator tools that empower open metaverse creation. But this fall is when those spaces are actually starting to come to the Lamina1 Hub and we’re going to start to test them on our BetaNet with 50,000 open metaverse, builders.”

She said the community is excited because it feels like the metaverse is like starting to come to life and then announcing this partnership with Avalanche will help solidify Lamina1’s reputation. There are validators already validating blockchain transactions.

“So yeah, it’s about to get real,” Halter said.

Stephenson said there is a whole network of people who are committed to the open metaverse. Asked why blockchain is essential for the open metaverse, Stephenson said, “When we have credit cards, so you can do whatever you want. My top-level answer is that if you look at the capabilities of blockchain in general, and you look at what I think we need to build a decentralized, open metaverse, there’s a lot of overlap between those two things. It would feel silly to advocate for a decentralized open metaverse and then say, ‘But we’re not going to use decentralized technologies, decentralized payment systems.’”

Navas said that the whole point of the metaverse is to have it be decentralized so no single party controls it. It would be more like a public permissionless technology, like Avalanche, he said.

“I think the metaverse introduces the ability for a digital identity. With digital identity, there needs to be the ability to have the transfer of value, right? I mean, at the end of the day, Web3 as a whole is the value transfer layer of the internet. Ultimately, you’re going to want to be able to transfer value, centralized nature, from person to person, from personal project, or whatever it may be in the metaverse without having standard payment processes.”

The killer app?

Asked how we get from here to millions or billions of users, Stephenson said, “I don’t know. But the point is not to have a top-down master plan. No plan like that survives contact with reality. So I’m a bottoms up guy. We start the capabilities and the support, infrastructure. And then people are going to show up. I’ve got my own project that I would like to build. I hope that happens, I hope it succeeds. But if we make everything hinged on the success of any one particular project by one person, then that doesn’t seem like a very robust plan.”

Stephenson added, “So what I hope to see is surprises. I hope to see people showing up with all kinds of stuff that I never would have thought of. And that is surprising and delightful to me.”

As for the NFTs coming soon, Halter said the only way to get them is to play a game or the first experience that debuts. There won’t be initial auctions to the highest bidder — which was what led so many early blockchain projects to be labeled as scams.

“We’re much more interested in interoperable assets and equipable stuff,” Halter said. “For a non Web3 gamer, it will feel like just normal game play.”

Stephenson also said that there will be user-friendly onboarding for the Web3 users, as it has been too intimidating and confusing in the past.