Category: Blockchain-Based Virtual Worlds

This category is for all the new cryptocurrency- and blockchain-based social VR spaces and virtual worlds (Decentraland, The Deep, Ethernia, Mark Space, Somnium Space, Staramba Spaces, Terra Virtua, VIBEHub, Virtual Universe, etc.)

UPDATED! Cryptoland: What the F#$%?!??

See also: Cryptoland and the Streisand Effect: the Craziness Continues

Somebody just dropped the following YouTube video on me via Twitter, and I am legit OBSESSED with how jaw-droppingly so-bad-it’s-almost-good it is, so I have rushed to share it with my readers:

(UPDATE: This YouTube promotional video was taken down, but you can watch the cartoon part of it on YouTube and Twitter.)

Is this a parody? Somebody, please tell me this is a parody! This is INSANE. Is this a joke? Is this performance art?

Here’s the website for this bizarre project. More details later as I find them!

Right now I am watching this YouTube video and I. AM. DECEASED. I just howled with laughter at the BitConnect references in the cartoon! But I cannot seriously believe that a company would spend so much money on a 3D animated cartoon to promote a real project.

Checking out the website now…oh, and they also have a Twitter. I know how I’ll be spending the rest of my evening! 😉

UPDATE 8:46 p.m.: here’s a YouTube video from November 2029 which aims to give a bit of an overview of what this crazy-sounding project is all about:

UPDATE 9:05 p.m: Molly White (whose tweet first alerted me to the very existence of this project) has posted an absolutely epic thread on Twitter, which you must read all the way through to the end! She lambastes the video I posted up top, and even digs a little bit into the pasts of the mysterious cofounders of this project. After doing her research, Molly is inclined to believe that the project is real:

And some of the comments are GOLD:

And one intrepid soul actually found the sales listing for the island in Fiji they apparently are in talks to buy, but I can’t find that particular tweet (argh!!!). I’ll keep looking for it.

UPDATE 9:19 p.m.: O.K., I cannot find that blasted tweet again (I should have bookmarked it!), BUT I did find the actual sales listing for the Fijian island, which is called Nananu-i-Cake, which is indeed the same shape as the island in the cartoon portion of the video:

(By the way, there are plenty of pictures of this island in the real estate listing. Feel free to noodle around.)

The asking price is a cool US$12 million dollars…they’re gonna have to sell a LOT of Cryptolanders NFTs to be able to afford that! This whole project is just bonkers to me. Things are getting very weird in crypto-land (in general) and it looks like Cryptoland (the project) is going to be among the weirdest of them all!

P.S. Apparently, there will be a metaverse aspect to Cryptoland as well, a virtual version of the Fijian island, where avatars can gather, high-five each other, and shout “To the moooon!!!” 🙄

Image from the Cryptoland website

Also, Molly runs a cool website called Web3 Is Going Just Great (subtitled “…and is definitely not an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already-smoldering planet.”), where she compiles stories of various follies, crimes, and misdeeds occurring within the blockchain gaming, cryptocurrency, DeFi (decentralized finance), NFTs, and metaverse communities. Check it out!

UPDATE Jan. 7th, 2022: I spent about a day in the Cryptoland Discord server, where I saw people who raised questions and criticisms with this project treated with disdain and roundly attacked, before I decided to leave. Molly reported that she had been blocked by whoever runs the Cryptoland Twitter account.

And I learned that anybody who tries to post the link to the real estate listing, which I talked about above, on the Cryptoland Discord server is blocked from doing so. Apparently, they don’t want anybody to know that the island is still for sale. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if some billionaire bought it out from under them? It would be ironic if they were outbid for Nananu-i-Cake island by another crypto investor.

And, early this morning, the official Cryptoland Twitter account sent out the following message:

Dear Cryptolanders,

We have been victims of what seems to be a planned attacked [sic] to harass, vilify, and twist our work.

We condemn all the false information and false accusations being spread about Cryptoland and invite those who are truly interested, to make [sic] their own research and politely ask us if they want to know anything about this amazing project,

Much love,

Cryptoland team.

Notice the blue bar across the bottom of this tweet (see image above)? It means that only people specifically mentioned using the @ symbol (i.e. nobody) can reply. So much giving people the opportunity to “politely ask” questions. Communication is a two-way street, sweetheart.

Between the interactions I witnessed yesterday on the Cryptoland Discord, and this tweet, their strategy moving forward is clear: demonize the critics, and rally the Cryptolanders (and yes, this is what they call themselves) to attack anyone who has the slightest criticism of this truly hare-brained scheme with its cringeworthy promotion.

Buckle up, folks: this one is going to be an EPIC carnival ride. Bring popcorn! 😉

I leave you with a couple of YouTube videos made a month ago by the first person who actually purchased land in this project, a crypto promoter named Kyle Chassé. Kyle says he spent the equivalent of over one million U.S. dollars (160 ETH) to be the first King Cryptolander (and yes, that’s the official term for them, too). They even refer to him in the first video as “the King of Kings.” 🙄

SECOND UPDATE Jan. 7th, 2022: Oh my God, this just keeps getting better and better…as you might have guessed from the blank screen at the top of this blogpost, the people behind the Cryptoland project took down their video from YouTube. And, not only that, they are trying to remove every trace of their laughable, cringeworthy video from the internet, even going so far as to issue copyright takedown notices to people like Molly:

I immediately messaged Molly to warn her that, if she got three copyright strikes against her, that her YouTube channel would be permanently taken down. I also could not resist sharing this meme with her:

I get the feeling that the beleaguered Cryptoland team are going to learn all about something called the Streisand Effect: once something is publicly available on the internet, you can never really get rid of it completely, and even worse, people will start posting copies of it everywhere just to spite you—especially if you make yourself known as somebody who doesn’t want the item in question to be seen, ever again! Good luck, guys; you’re gonna need it.

P.S. The original video still exists if you use the Wayback Machine to see an earlier version of the YouTube page. Also, copies of this gloriously bad promotional video (plus an extended, uncut version of that cringeworthy 3D cartoon!) are already rapidly proliferating on places like PeerTube, which is a decentralized network of inter-connected small video hosters, each created, moderated and maintained independently by various administrators, scattered all across the globe. (Good luck filing a copyright strike against them, guys. Genie’s out of the bottle, and you won’t be able to stuff it back in.)

And no, I’m not going to provide links; you should know how to find things like this yourself. 😉

That’s in addition to the blistering commentary articles like this and this…

…and commentary videos like these from KiraTV and Callum Upton (two guys who routinely eviscerate crypto projects like Earth2 for breakfast every day):

KiraTV did some more research and posted a scathing follow-up video to his first one (he was banned by the official Cryptoland account on Twitter, as well):

And one of the things that KiraTV discusses in his latest video (and which Molly uncovered as well) is this little bombshell: it turns out that the cartoon used a seagull which they didn’t have permission to use! (Yes, the creator of that seagull also got blocked on Twitter when she brought up that fact! Sensing a trend here?)

So, yeah, go pop some more popcorn, folks; I have a feeling this show is just getting started. 😉

Heaven Land: A Brief Introduction (and a Rant!)

Heaven Land doesn’t exist yet, so this is an artistic interpretation —and that’s exactly the problem.

Heaven Land is yet another blockchain-based virtual world project, which describes itself as follows:

Heaven Land is a place in the Earth’s Orbit where everyone can live – it’s open, social, persistent and provides users with tools to interact, experience, improve and monetize their property. The virtual economy backbone is Solana blockchain; a backbone for content storage is decentralized IPFS. Welcome to Heaven Land, [the] metaverse for everyone…

Heaven Land is a futuristic city, distributed platform, shared virtual world, building and monetization platform, a place to spend good time, meet your friends and much more. Possibilities are endless, [and] all of them meet in a single place – Heaven Land.

—Heaven Land white paper

It’s meant to be a futuristic, space-age version of an O’Neill cylinder, from what I can gather, with 38 individual clusters of parcels of virtual land. There will be a limited number of different races of avatars, including humans, Maritans, and zombies (?!). It all sounds very nice and lovely.

Now, for the rant…

I’m getting rather sick and tired of blockchain-based virtual worlds (and yes, the metaverse platforms incorporating blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs are the majority of the guilty culprits here), who are using images and videos relying on “artistic interpretation” to promote their projects! These media range from the fanciful to the misleading, giving investors the sizzle—without any evidence of actual steak.

And Heaven Land is, unfortunately, the perfect example of this. Here are two videos on their YouTube channel:

Keep in mind that this is a project which, at the moment, consists of nothing but a slick website and a white paper! (Oh, and they also have an “Ambassador” program, where I assume you can volunteer to promote the as-yet-nonexistent platform to your fellow crypto bros.) 🙄

There is no way in hell that the final product is going to look like this! These videos remind me of nothing so much as that popular and completely misleading promotional video for Decentraland, published during their ICO when they were trying to entice crypto investors, and well before there was any actual platform:

I mean, c’mon…the actual Decentraland looks nothing like this disjointed collection of “artistic interpretations” (not to mention that DCL doesn’t support users in virtual reality headsets, and likely won’t for quite some time). And in the case of Heaven Land, unlike Decentraland, they haven’t even launched their cryptocurrency yet!

Which proves my point: these kinds of promotional videos are misleading, and lead to inflated expectations by investors, which are eventually dashed when they come up against cruel, hard reality.

Here’s an idea for the fine people of Heaven Land: why not, you know, actually BUILD something, and then market it? I’m kinda fed up with these fairytales.

Even worse, in my books, is the fact that there is ZERO information about the company, its physical office location, or its executive team on the website. There is one small paragraph in its white paper, stating:

Our core team comprises 15 people and grows every week. We have blockchain specialists, artists, architects, game developers, programmers, IT infrastructure specialists, community managers, and marketing specialists. Next to individuals, we build colaborations [sic] with established projects in a part of the technology needed to make the Metaverse reality.

So you really have no idea who you are dealing with at present, who is building this wonderful space-age virtual world project. Would you invest with such limited information?

If, after my rant, you still want to explore (mentally!) Heaven Land, you can visit their website, join their Discord server, or follow them on Twitter (where they have been doing a lot of advertising; after seeing ads for Heaven Land an overwhelming number of times in my Twitter feed, I finally got so fed up that I blocked them—something I have never had to do before for any metaverse platform!).

I will duly add Heaven Land to my popular, comprehensive and ever-growing list of social VR and virtual worlds—but (as always) I warn: do your homework before investing a penny in any blockchain/crypto virtual world project, and don’t be swayed by artistic interpretations!

Metafluencers, Metapreneurs, Metaclans and Metahuts: A First Look at Metafluence

Yes, you too, from the comfort of your bedroom, in your sweats and slippers, can be a METAFLUENCER! 🙄 (image source: CoinTelegraph)

The metaverse news is falling fast and furious lately, but first…another one of Auntie Ryan’s patented snarky, bitchy, and sarcastic editorial blogposts! (Priorities, people!)

As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, I have gone down some pretty weird and obscure rabbit-holes lately. Among them, I have developed a recent fascination with toxic influencer culture: those men and women who become popular on social media, but sooner or later cause controversies, scandals, and scams, in some cases incinerating their “influencer” status and losing millions of followers.

(If you’re interested in this topic, I can recommend two YouTube channels to watch: Smokey Glow and Cruel World Happy Mind, both of which provide excellent summaries and commentary on what’s going down in the world of problematic influencers. They’re my current guilty pleasure!)

Well, I guess it was time that somebody linked the words “influencer” and “metaverse” to create that hybrid monster: the metafluencer!

My target today is a truly cringeworthy article from CoinTelegraph, first brought to my attention on Twitter by Tony Vitillo (a.k.a. SkarredGhost), an Italian man whose blog, The Ghost Howls, often has virtual reality product reviews and weekly news round-ups about the VR/AR/MR/XR industry and the metaverse. Here’s the tweet:

Now, this is not the first time I have taken CoinTelegraph to task for their reporting (here’s the first time, if you’re interested, complete with a mind-bogglingly tone-deaf illustration). But this time, they’ve truly outdone themselves!

The article starts off reasonably enough:

As it is currently positioned, the metaverse will hold the potential to give creators a whole new aspect of interaction and communication as they gain new opportunities to work with other creators and reach new audiences. For creators, the question now becomes not if they will shift to the metaverse, but when will they do so. After all, nobody wants to be the business still figuring out Instagram Reels while the world moves on to the metaverse.

But it turns out that Metafluence is actually the name of a proposed metaverse platform for influencers! Check this part out:

A city where influencers rule

The Metafluence platform is currently being incubated by the venture capital firm specializing in blockchain technology, Master Ventures. This engagement is set to continue over the next two years and is among a number of other partnerships the team has under their belt.

With a shared goal, the name Metafluence will come to represent the name of a single city in the metaverse, one that social media influencers will control. The city itself will comprise influencer homes, also known as Metahuts, which can be customized based on the influencers’ choice. Custom spaces will provide an added opportunity for influencers to better monetize their audience and continue engaging closer with brands.

Additionally, these huts can act as a storefront for influencers to share their digital artwork and other NFTs, providing new monetization and engagement opportunities. Influencers may also choose to come together in Metaclans as they collaborate for maximized reach and other strategic collaborations or participate in public and private virtual events.

Metafluence? Metaclans? METAHUTS?!?? Excuse me while I metavomit… 🤮

And, lo and behold, like so many blockchain-based metaverse projects that are essentially just a white paper at this point, there’s a Metafluence website!

WE ARE CREATING THE FIRST METAPRENEURS

We are on a mission to convert Social Media Influencers into Metaverse entrepreneurs through our influence-to-earn platform by enhancing their relations with audiences and brands. Our solutions for influencers automatically address advertiser and audience challenges, enabling brands to organically grow and thrive in web 3.0.

Metapreneurs? Yet another Frankenstein meta-buzzword??!? Oy gevalt!

There’s also the requisite Discord and Telegram channels (oh, why is Telegram so popular for these kinds of blockchain/crypto projects?). Oh, yes, I forgot to mention: there’s also a cryptocurrency called $METO, along with a bunch of promised future features (including decor and upgrades for your Metahut!):

Some potential use cases for the $METO cryptocurrency

O.K., I am officially metaover this metaproject with all its unnecessary metabuzzwords, jumping on the metabandwagon. I’m not even going to bother including it in my list of social VR and virtual worlds because (as far as I can tell) it’s essentially vapourware at this point in its existence. Meh. If they actually do launch something, maybe I’ll circle back and write about it more then. Until then, I will safely watch from the sidelines.

This project reminds me of nothing so much as the truly disastrous Staramba Spaces/MATERIA.ONE project, which at the time had brought aboard celebrity influencers like Paris Hilton and Hulk Hogan (you can read all my blogposts about that particular fiasco here). The people who invested in MATERIA.ONE never got anything back from their investments, so this is time for me to once again issue my standard warning for such projects:

Please, for the love of God, do EVERY. SINGLE. SCRAP. of your research before investing a penny in any blockchain/cryptocurrency/NFT project! Don’t be swayed by a white paper full of statistics, projections and promises, a Discord or Telegram full of cryptocurrency bros, and a slick-looking website! You will need to do YOUR OWN due diligence. Caveat emptor!

Thank you to Tony Vitillo for the heads up!

Mona: An Introduction

Image source: the Mona website

Mona is a brand-new blockchain-based metaverse platform, accessible via your web browser, which describes itself as follows:

Mona is seeding the open metaverse through the creation and use of beautiful, unique 3D Spaces.

We believe art is about the experience, and the experiences that will store the most value over time will be 3D, one-of-one, and dynamic which is why Mona Spaces are so unique…

Spaces are best viewed within Mona, but for the benefit of the builder, and holder, we are minting the files needed to move your Space elsewhere.

In short, you can take your Space with you. This is fundamental to the open metaverse. For now, you will need an experienced builder to port your Space to another metaverse world. Compatibility is dependent on capabilities of other worlds.

You can explore a directory of virtual spaces built in Mona from your web browser

The three core components of Mona are:

  • Spaces: “Mona Spaces are 3D environments that you can build and mint on the Etherium or Polygon blockchain. Spaces are designed to be composible [sic], social, and interactive and can hold and display other collectibles.”
  • Artifacts: “An Artifact is any unique digital asset placed within your Space. These can link out to other marketplaces. Some examples of Artifacts are a photo, video, or a 3D object. In the future, you will be able to remove or replace Artifacts in your Space.”
  • Portals: “A Portal connects two or more Spaces together. Portals allow for easy navigation between Spaces inside of Mona. Basically, a Portal is a hyperlink to another Space or other metaverse worlds like Decentraland or CryptoVoxels.”

Among the future features Mona plans to support are full custom avatar system integrations; multiplayer support for up to 100 concurrent users in a Space; an implementation of adjustable artist royalties; a set of builder tools; token-gated/ticketed events; and VR/AR support:

Our team has a deep backround in AR & VR, with previous work at Magic Leap and are names in a dozen patents. We understand the future is in the headset, and we are building towards that future.

Key members of the team at Mona (source: Mona website)

And the new platform seems quite willing to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to attracting content creators! Mona is hosting what they call a Renaissance build-a-thon, with an open call for architects, 3D artists, and game designers to craft virtual spaces, with over a quarter of a million dollars in the prize pot, and a top prize of US$35,000! More details can be found here on a special website.

I think this is a very savvy move by Mona, and one which many competitor metaverse platforms should strongly consider as a way to boost their adoption (Hellooo, Wookey-run Sansar?)

I mean, I have been saying this till I was blue in the face over the past four-and-a-half years I have been writing this blog: just making a social VR platform or virtual world, and then sticking it out there without any marketing or promotion or incentives, and just expecting content creators to somehow stumble across it on their own has demonstrably proven to be an abject failure in most cases (VRChat being a notable exception, and they have the livestreamers to thank for that). You can’t count on being in the right place at the right time; you need to sell yourself and your product!

All companies that hope to compete and succeed in the now-hypercompetitive metaverse marketplace should read this blogpost.

Here’s the timeline for Renaissance build-a-thon:

  • Jan. 1st | Announcement
  • Jan. 8th | Build Kickoff Event
  • Jan. 11th | Renaissance Q&A (Live on Twitter)
  • Jan. 12th | Build Brainstorm
  • Jan. 20th | Build Feedback Session
  • Jan. 27th | Submission Deadline (11:59pm Pacific Time)

If you’re curious about Mona and want to find out more, you can visit their website (you can learn more about the Renaissance build-a-thon event here), join their Discord server, check out their listings on OpenSea, or follow them on social media: Instagram or Twitter.

I will, of course, be adding Mona to my comprehensive list of social VR and virtual worlds (which, by the way, I will be reorganizing and recategorizing early this year).