Asad J. Malik is an AR artist who spent a lot time making work for the HoloLens on the film festival circuit, and then started a AR Hologram company named Jadu creating volumetric captures of celebrities and musicians using the high-end Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studio at Metastage. He was losing some of his enthusiasm after doing 30-40 hologram projects and navigating egos the bureaucratic dynamics of working with musicians, and then he started experimenting with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. He was also searching for alternative business models beyond advertising or high-end, holograms as a service, and had aspirations for creating a world-scale, AR game and product that allowed him to experiment more with tapping into the affordances of AR beyond passively watching volumetric performances from famous people.
On September 16th, Jadu released 1,111 jetpack NFT wearables that earned them over $400,000 in initial sales and over $450,000 in secondary market commissions over the first couple of months with their 5% commission rate. On December 12th, Jadu released 6,666 NFT Hoverboards earning over $4.3 million dollars. These NFT wearables will be used within the context of their AR application that will allow users to connect one of the supported 3D NFT avatar collections, and then puppeteer these avatars from a third-person POV in an AR app as they fly around on their jetpacks and hoverboards. They’re aiming to create an entire “Mirrorverse” game and platform with a scavenger hunt of geocached NFTs that are easier to find and discover if you already own a jetpack or hoverboard.
Jadu's 1/1 Gold Jetpack just sold for 111 ETH ($400K)
The Mirroverse is upon us!https://t.co/35ONi2dp8t pic.twitter.com/u0dEPY8QeC
— JADU® (@Jadu_AR) October 7, 2021
Jadu was able to leverage the success of their jetpacks to raise a seed round of venture capital being announced today [Update: here’s Jadu’s announcement of a $7M seed round] to more fully make the pivot into exploring the “web3” potentials of shared ownership and decentralized finance that go beyond the existing web 2.0 business models. I share some of Malik’s optimism in the long-term potential of web3 to create new models of economic exchange while also simultaneously agreeing with some critics of the web3 branding as well as some of the larger ecological concerns around Proof of Work. Ada Rose Cannon is the co-chair of the W3C Immersive Web Groups, and I agree with aspects of her incisive criticism about the web3 branding when she says, “I get so pissed off every time I see Web 3.0, NFT assholes have co-opted the branding of the Web to imply so many untrue things about their cryptoshit tech and set themselves up as the successor to the Web platform all in a single move.”
Malik concurs that there are plenty of fair criticisms in this sentiment as the web3 term is often completely disconnected from the infrastructure aspirations of the W3C and the current open web. There’s still lots of gaps for how web3 would replace the existing web2 world wide web, which results in many hyperbolic statements that are still largely aspirational. Jadu’s application won’t be using any WebXR technologies, and will be focused on creating their Mirrorverse within the context of a 2D native phone application starting on iOS. So I am unclear as to what exactly web3 means just as the larger crypto and XR community has been overusing the buzz word of the “metaverse” to describe a wide range of 3D virtual world projects to 2D *.jpg NFT collections. Malik feels that web3 still describes the aspirations and intentions for what Jadu is aiming to create with their Mirrorverse in terms of creating an ecosystem of shared ownership where there’s 95% of the value being exchanged and owned by the community maintains while Jadu takes a 5% cut. This is a vast shift from the existing value exchange on the existing web that’s fueled by a lot of surveillance capitalism and advertising.
I’m sympathetic to the need and desire to experiment with new models that move beyond surveillance capitalism, and as Joseph Poon told me at the Decentralized Web Summit 2018 that it is hard to learn about new models of value exchange when looking at playing poker games with fake money. Because it’s difficult to simulate how the incentive structures will pragmatically play out in reality, then crypto projects have to “do it live” in order to really find out how people exchange value with each other. Is this is what is happening with NFTs? Or are they all just scams or multi-level marketing, pyramid schemes?
I suspect that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle where there are plenty of grifters and scams that you need to look out for, but there’s also plenty of earnest artists and companies experimenting with new models of decentralized economic exchange in the spirit of moving towards more equitable models platform cooperativism and decentralized autonomous organizations. Will Proof of Stake approaches address some of the the ecological concerns? Or is this the type of centralization scope creep of decentralized finance that Malik says that Bitcoin maximalists have been warning about?
If Jadu moves towards creating a DAO, then it won’t be making decisions about the lore, mythology, and underlying game mechanics of their Mirrorverse. Some of their challenges will be to find out to balance the new user experience of folks who don’t own one of their NFT wearables that start at a floor of 3.7 Ethereum (~$13645.74) for one of the 1,111 Jetpacks or a floor of 0.45 Etherum ($1659.62) for one of the 6,666 Hoverboards. They want to create a dynamic where one of the owners of their NFTs will gain some advantages within their game world and platform, but not to the degree that will alienate new users who don’t own any jetpacks or hoverboards.
Malik acknowledges the dynamics of compounding gains for crypto early adopters, and strives to find ways to create a compelling experience for users beyond their core early adopters and whales who are buying and selling their NFTs to create a recurring revenue stream that allows them to build out their independently driven AR platform. In order to compete with the AR platforms of Snapchat, Instagram, or TikTok, then it may turn out that jetpack and hoverboard NFTs will end up bootstrapping more grassroots innovation, shared ownership, and the gamification of AR by Jadu. Or we may be in a giant NFT bubble that bursts at any moment. Either way, it’ll be interesting to see where Jadu takes the future of their Mirrorverse and what type of interoperability they implement for how other avatars could use their object-oriented wearables across other cryptocurrency-based metaverse platforms like Decentraland, Somnium Space, Cryptovoxels, or The Sandbox.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So on today's episode, I have Asad J. Malik, who was working on Jadu Hologram, and they're doing a bit of a pivot away from doing holograms of celebrities and artists on their own app, and they're moving into creating a world-scale AR NFT platform and game with its own lore and mythology. and they're creating these NFT wearables, including jetpacks and hoverboards that would allow their avatars to be able to fly around at these different scenes. They're creating a whole application that is essentially when you have some of these different NFT wearables are able to give special powers to these different avatars. There's been a lot of discussion about NFTs. If you've been anywhere in technology, there's some grand debates around folks making these claims that this is going to revolutionize the way that we are having digital ownership and being able to put more power into the hands of the people. I myself have, I guess in the long term, more faith and hope that that's actually going to live into those promises of that decentralized finance. But at the same time, I think there's a lot of more short-term concerns around ecological impacts. But also, what is the real shift? And some of the different marketing terms around the metaverse and the Web3 and NFTs, these are all words that have a lot of meaning for different people. And it's almost like throwing yourself into the middle of a battle anytime you talk about any of these topics. Now, Asif J. Malik is an artist and creator. I've met him on the film festival circuit from Jester's Tale, which is a piece that I saw at Sundance in 2019. And it was a quite provocative piece that was looking at how we should be concerned around the future of artificial intelligence and the anthropomorphized ways that we project human characteristics on AI and the ways that those AIs could be using those social engineering aspects to be able to manipulate and control us in different ways. Ossed is a very deep thinker when it comes to a lot of these different technologies. I trust that there may be something deeper there with a lot of these approaches with the decentralized finance that is trying to create a new economic business model. I think he ran into a lot of different issues of trying to be an AR artist and doing these different projects and not really feeling inspired by creating holograms of celebrities, per se. I think there's that. But also, just seeing a lot of the excitement around NFTs, and then to try to actually create a business model that is going to work for this new medium, and to get away from a lot of the existing Web 2.0 business models. Now, there's a lot of discussions around to what degree is Web 3.0 going to actually live into the promises of the open web. It's kind of a branding term that is talking about a lot of these other aspects of the decentralized crypto infrastructure. I think there's still a lot of concerns around whether or not that's actually going to live into the promises that we hear from a lot of the cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Like I said, in the long-term, I'm optimistic about some of these things, but in the short-term, I guess I'm a little bit more skeptical. For anybody that's listening to this now or in the future and don't know the current price of Ethereum, Ethereum is selling for around $3,882 today. At the time of this recording on November 23, it was around $4,341. Then, the first launch of the JetPacks back on September 16 was around $3,500. When Asad's talking around $1 ETH, it's around $3,000 to $4,000. Then $111 ETH would be over $400,000 at the time when he was talking about some of those different items. These are different wearables that are selling for anywhere from $4,000 to $400,000. These would be able to give specific powers to the avatars. Anyway, it's kind of an interesting story of this pivot, and we kind of talk about the whole evolution and the intention for this mirror verse that they're going to start to be creating there at the Jadu hologram. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Wastelands of VR podcast. So this interview with Asad happened on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:04:12.054] Asad J Malik: My name is Asad J. Malik, and I have been very diligently focused on augmented reality for the last five years. A lot of my early work was at film festivals like Tribeca and Sundance, where we're doing a lot of headset-based augmented reality experiences, you know, with really the intention of imagining AR as a medium of the future and how stories could be told with it. A lot of our work wasn't very practical, but was just kind of trying to push, you know, what the possibilities were. And over the last two years, we've kind of taken an approach of building AR that is more accessible to wider audiences. So we've kind of shifted to mobile AR. And even more recently, or last six months or so, we have taken a very strong pivot towards Web3 or NFTs or the metaverse, whatever word you want to use to best describe the space. And essentially what we're building right now is we're building a world-scale AR NFT platform that is very much tied to our own world and lore that we're developing. And You know, we recently released our first major NFT collection called Jadu Jetpacks that a bunch of people have been purchasing. So that's the gist of it.
[00:05:21.955] Kent Bye: I've got an update from you from Edward Sachi's official being summit, where he had you on to be able to talk about your pivot into this web three NFT realm from doing a lot of virtual reality, mostly augmented reality projects. One thing that you said that was really striking is that you said that you made more from a 22nd sale of NFTs than you did of 40 previous projects that you had worked on from Jadu. And so maybe Before we go into the NFT world, just sort of catch me up into what you were doing there with Jadu holograms, what type of projects you're working on, and then how that kind of started to lead up to this pivot that you made earlier this year in 2021.
[00:06:01.470] Asad J Malik: So Kent, like we, as I said earlier, right, like our focus has been on AR and when it comes to AR, there are a lot of elements to it. Not only is it a new creative medium that you're working with and you're trying to think of how can you tell stories or how do people want to use this or what does augmenting reality accomplish in all kinds of manners, right? We spend a lot of time thinking about those things. And one of the other things we were constantly thinking about was how do you build business models that are native to this new medium that are not copy pasting models that have existed in the past, because clearly that's not going to work. So that's something we've been really looking for. And so far, no matter what project we've made, it never really made sense. you know, it's like, okay, you could do some LB installations or something, or, you know, just whatever we tried, like there wasn't a clear end goal to being able to form business models because where your money comes from really impacts what you make as well. You know, that's a really important factor. So we didn't want to make ads. We don't want to do any of that. Right. So with the NFT space, really what happened was that we were building a lot of holograms of various kinds of celebrities and influencers. And, you know, once again, like I don't care much about tech talk or the idea of like people making videos with celebrities. It's just like, nah, you know, I don't do that myself. So it doesn't come very naturally, but really we're coming from was, you know, how do we build something that Snapchat and Instagram cannot right now? And we build it in a manner that is affordable enough for us and other people will get to use it. So we started doing basically like 15 second volumetric performances with various celebrities. And, you know, we started to build a brand around that and started to reach an audience. And we ended up doing the hologram Lil Nas X, which obviously that song ended up being the number one song in the world and got us a lot of attention, you know, eyes. In fact, The app was top 30 on the app store briefly while that whole thing's happening. So we were starting to reach more people than one would have thought an AR app that is not Snapchat or Instagram could. But at the same time, you know, we were also like personally diving into NFTs. And I was starting to develop a lot of interest in that space personally. And the way that was happening was, you know, on one hand, I had spent a lot of time, I'd invested in a cryptocurrency called GRT, the graph protocol in December. And it was kind of one of those random things where a friend was like, Hey, come on, jump onto this coin. It's going to explode. And initially I was hesitant, but then I was like, okay, let's do it. I put a bunch of all my savings, practically like 10,000, $20,000 in it. And then it started going down. which I started losing a lot of money. At that point, I had two choices. Either I exit and lose a bunch of money or research more into the project and figure out why I should stay in. And when I researched the project, I was very impressed. I realized how sophisticated blockchain-based incentive systems can be and how you can build decentralized protocols that can accomplish things that otherwise only big companies would have been able to, while still rewarding stakeholders in various parts of the process. So it kind of really changed my perspective of crypto and it showed it crypto to me as this like really complex incentive system mechanism. And it ended up being great because I actually put more into GRT and eventually ended up doing quite well because I did believe in the project long-term. So coming from that, then what happened was that I directed a music video for Pussy Riot. That's the first and only video I've directed. That's the 2D video. I don't know if I will do it again. But, you know, I was good friends with Nadia. We'd worked with her on Jadu stuff. So, you know, I wanted to help them out a bit. And when we produced that project, you know, we were going to release it on YouTube and we ended up deciding that we were going to leave it as an NFT as well. It was a two week process, both of us, like really scratching our heads and reading a lot and trying to figure out whether this was a good move or not. And, you know, thinking of all the criticisms that NFTs were getting and they were starting to be quite hot at that moment. And we ended up doing viewing it ended up releasing the music video, both as an NFT and on YouTube and on YouTube, it made the customary $50 that a music video does. And as an NFT, it made half a million dollars, which once again, obviously is kind of an exceptional scenario. I don't think music videos since have sold for significant amounts like that. That was kind of the first music video on chain and probably the most expensive still sold. But that really put me into the ecosystem where slowly I started seeing NFTs as rather than just being. some art rich people are going to buy from you and you're going to be able to sell it to them to actually being like a mechanism of ownership and for an incentive system that ties you to some kind of community or some kind of idea. And at that point, a lot of my own personal money started going to NFTs. And at that point, I'm like, you know, this is definitely, we dove in and we were like, this is the Avenue we've been looking for. We wanted to build the AR platform of the future. And we want to compete with these like massive web two companies that just have so much cash. How do we do it? brand new avenue that we know better than anyone else does. So, you know, that's kind of how we landed here.
[00:11:03.466] Kent Bye: I guess one of the things that I immediately think of is say the proof of work and the ecological impact versus the proof of stake. And I'm just curious to hear your take on that because I guess the ecological impact for the existing Ethereum blockchain, which I think is a lot of the stuff that you've been working on, how you resolve those tensions between the type of energy that it takes on something like a proof of work algorithm rather than something that may be more ecologically sustainable.
[00:11:30.212] Asad J Malik: Mm-hmm. I think the proof of work, proof of stake argument, it's a pretty complex argument. I've had moments where, because on the surface, everyone just says, well, proof of stake clearly makes more sense. It's clearly more effective, uses less energy, gets the job done. There are a lot of Bitcoin maximalists that you would find in like cryptography forums online and whatnot that are very much like, no, a proof of stake is exactly the centralization we're trying to avoid. It's like a neoliberal kind of thing almost where you get the benefits of blockchain without actually diving into the decentralization of it. You know what I mean? So there are a lot of different views on this stuff. Personally, I have nothing against Proof-of-Stake. I think Proof-of-Stake is definitely the move right now. Obviously, us sticking to Ethereum right now is partially tied to the idea that Ethereum 2 is very much underway. And obviously, we understand that It's going to take a moment for all of that to be deployed. Ethereum is a pretty elaborate structure right now, but Ethereum in its current form just can't work. The current gas fees, all that kind of stuff, it's just operating on it is very hard. There are a lot of barriers to entry. Just from an adoption point of view, it's just impossible for it to actually function. So I think the proof of stake element is absolutely necessary. However, the criticism that someone could bring to us, which would be fair criticism is why don't we work on Tezos or Solana or something that they're effective blockchains that exist right now that are functioning rather than working on Ethereum, which is clearly more energy intensive. One of the things is that Currently, Ethereum really is where everything's happening. It is where the innovation is happening and where people are building a lot of these new things. And a lot of the side chains currently have just a bad reputation in the NFT space of having copycat projects on there. A lot of Solana stuff is basically just copy-pasted from Ethereum and whatnot. So at the end of the day, the innovation is currently taking place on the Ethereum blockchain. That is where the people that are pushing it on a day-to-day basis are. And as far as I'm concerned, first of all, a lot of the energy uses criticism around Ethereum. I do think we're exaggerated beyond like, you know, the kind of things we were seeing come up where Oh, one NFT takes the same amount of energy as the country of this for five years or something like that. Obviously, ridiculous amounts that don't really add up. I think the one big mistake that people make with Ethereum is that when you have an NFT transaction, you're not wasting any new energy. You're basically using the network. The network already has all the connections and the network is what's spending the energy. Now, a fair criticism would be, well, NFTs don't really seem like a worthwhile thing to be spending this really valuable energy consumption of the Ethereum network on. And I think that people just have this worldview of NFTs, that they're kind of these overpriced JPEGs or money laundering schemes. A lot of that is true, obviously. There's a lot of that in there as well. But I do think that this is a very significant shift right now. how things are created and how ownership over information is decided. And I think that we're really arriving right now at all the flaws that like the Web2 world has created over the last like two decades. And they're hitting some kind of an inflection point now where a lot of solutions are so obvious that it's just like impossible for someone like me to ignore them, you know?
[00:14:51.794] Kent Bye: Yeah, I also attended the Decentralized Web Summit put on by the Internet Archive back in 2018 and then the Decentralized Web Camp in 2019. A lot of folks that were there trying to figure out how to use these more decentralized technologies to be able to essentially replace the infrastructure of the centralized internet. And I see that there's been a big issue there in terms of like the incentive structures to actually have the economics of that, the economies of scale. When I did an interview with Vint Cerf, his argument is basically, well, the economies of scale make much more sense when you want to have the low latency and the persistence and all the different things that you want in a persistent and available and low latency internet, like you need to have that like centralized structure. And so the surveillance capitalism is the model that has been subsidizing and funding a lot of that from Google and all these other companies, as well as Facebook. And so we have this existing web two world that has this, and I have optimism that there's going to be, I guess, alternative models. I have this quote here from Ada Rose Cannon, who is one of the creators of the WebXR specifications. She's on the immersive web working group for the W3C. And so she's intimately involved with the web and her comment here, she says, I get so pissed off every time I see web 3.0 NFT assholes who have co-opted the branding of the web to imply so many untruths about their, what she calls crypto shit tech and set themselves up to be the successor to the web platform all in a single move. I'd be impressed if I wasn't so furious. So I think it's that question of like this branding of web three, people calling it web three, but yet how much is it actually going to be the successor to web two and web 2.0. And if you do think it is going to be a viable replacement to all of this infrastructure. And if this is a long-term project, that's going to be many decades because everything I've seen from the decentralized web has been people talking about it, but it not actually getting deployed. It's so much easier just to do the centralized version of things. So I kind of share the skepticism from Ada Rose Cannon that there's the adoption of a lot of the things that the web branding implies, which is accessible certain ways that it's made available to everybody. Accessibility is a huge issue with the W3C and I don't see that the same type of prioritization of accessibility and everything else. So I guess I'd just be curious to hear your reaction to the web 3 branding as this new version of the Metaverse and how viable that is in terms of What needs to happen in order to actually make it happen?
[00:17:14.947] Asad J Malik: So, you know, a few things, first of all, you know, once again, I think, I don't know if I'm qualified to respond to some of this criticism because I'm not an expert on web. You know what I mean? Like even in terms of AR and XR work, like I've actually not done much work in web XR. I've always talked to like native platforms and have found them to just be better at performance and. best at making the end product or the end AR experience, which is where my expertise lie in, which is the AR experience of it. So in terms of us using the Web3 branding, which once again, often a movement starts and then you have a bunch of terms that pop up and they mean a thing or they don't mean a thing. It's all up for criticism. Currently, there are three terms. There's NFTs, and there's the metaverse, and then there's Web3. And out of all these terms, from a conceptual level, Web3 has the closest implications to what I mean when I want to refer to whatever any of these three words basically mean. NFTs are way too tied to this one element of it. And maybe it is a pretty fundamental building block of this new thing we're talking about. But I do think it distracts. It becomes a buzzy thing on its own. And NFT does not really capture what we're trying to do. Metaverse, once again, I think at this point, obviously Facebook has also ruined it for everyone. But you know, even before that, the metaverse thing, once again, like kind of implies this whole use case for these things that doesn't exactly exist. And coming from the VR, AR world where, you know, we were just building experiences, obviously like looking at JPEGs that are worth a lot of money now being the metaverse, like obviously a lot of people that I know and myself included, we spend our time just like optimizing assets and trying to get Magic Leap to give us back to our access to load 16 gigs on their device that just came out. We come from that. So obviously seeing JPEGs be the metaverse isn't exactly the best for me either. The thing with the Web 3.0 idea is that with Web 2.0, from a narrative perspective, you have a clear evil, which is Web 2.0 that you're trying to disrupt. And that makes the narrative click a lot more for obviously investors, founders, communities, people. It just makes more sense than saying NFT or metaverse to me. So that's why we have started using Web 3.0 more and more to describe what we're building because the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 wasn't that significant either. Both of them were the worldwide web. It was the same protocol, www. Really, the difference was more cultural. It went from being this directory of information to being the social living space almost, right? Like that's kind of a way to encompass what happened from one point on to 2.0. So to me, when I say Web 3.0, really we're implying like a cultural move forward into a new form of the world being connected in which the connection is not happening because someone has set a platform where they're going to capture all the value and they're going to distribute the minimum amount of value they need to distribute to their participants to keep the network going. That's how Web2 works. That's how Uber works. You just need that exact threshold where the actual company providing platform can capture the maximum value and give the minimum viable to all the drivers or whatever. Whereas now the web three mindset is really supposed to, what it's saying is that instead of one centralized entity trying to capture all the value in a network, you let the network create value and you take a commission on the value that's created by the network, but you let the network actually own the value. And it's really like that kind of cultural next step to how networks should be organized that I think web three tries to encompass.
[00:21:04.958] Kent Bye: I think that makes sense. And I guess from my point of being a navigate for the open web and interoperability, and, you know, there's certainly a lot of, with any of these crypto technologies, they try to create protocols that are striving to be interoperable. I guess I agree with some of AdaRose Cannon's critique in terms of what we have with the web and using the branding of the web. And that the Web3 that I've seen so far is so far from actually living up to all those different aspects of really having that same type of interoperability of all the open standards and everything. It's sort of like a split from something that's different than what the W3C is even in charge of in some sense.
[00:21:39.422] Asad J Malik: I think it's a fair criticism, fair criticism for sure. I would not. I think the perspective she's coming from makes 100% sense to me.
[00:21:47.439] Kent Bye: So yeah, I guess when I went to the virtual being summit and I heard some of the different things that Edward Sachi was going into, like there was an example where he was in decentralized land and somebody owned an NFT. It was like the creator of crypto avatars and that NFT gave access to a specific. room within a Decentraland. And so it was able to give an experiential thing within a virtual world, which I think is probably my interest in terms of taking these different assets and say, what is the experiential thing that actually gets translated? And I feel like some of the wearables is also something that's been happening within CryptoVoxels as well as Decentraland, be able to have different wearables within your wallet and then use something like a VRM interoperable avatar to take it from world to world. So I think there's things that like the decentralized and the ownership are in a shift towards identity, people owning their identity, self-sovereign identity. There's decentralized identifiers and the wallet ends up being your login. And from there, you're able to have all these different assets. And from there, maybe you have access to an immersive experience that then you can start to do things with. And so I know that you started a collaboration with MeBits to be able to, I don't know if you were the exclusive partner with Laval Labs to be able to translate MeBits into 2D avatars, into 3D avatars, but maybe you could speak a little bit about your vision for how NFTs are going to be able to perhaps unlock different experiential aspects within whatever the metaverse ends up being.
[00:23:09.815] Asad J Malik: Sure. Yeah. So, you know, on one hand, I think, you know, I would like to clarify that we didn't actually collaborate with Larva Labs on bringing mebits to our platform. And that's probably the whole point, right? Like the permissionless nature of this basically entails that anyone who owns a mebit can connect their wallet and we have all the rights to give them functionality for that asset that they own. and they have all the rights to let us give them functionality for that asset. It doesn't require us to partner with the company that necessarily made it. Although Larva Labs does have some very interesting terms and service that they slap on top of everything else that does limit a lot of IP stuff. Other collections are more progressive and allow the user to have commercial rights often over assets that they own as well. So really what we're building right now is an augmented reality platform where the entry point is your avatar. And your avatar can be any of the avatars we support. And our intention is to support as many avatars as we can. We're not trying to be exclusive about it. Obviously, the only bottleneck right now is how many we can support as quickly, being the team we are and the resources that we have access to. But in theory, the point is that if someone goes out there and makes a collection of, let's say, a thousand avatars that are a specific aesthetic, and they form a community around this avatar where people want to embody this avatar. What are the reasons people want to embody this avatar? Maybe they like it aesthetically. Maybe they like the community that forms around it. Maybe the aesthetics of the community or the jokes of the community or the moral standards of the community or the relationship with the community, with the founding team, whatever, these are elements that allow this community to organize around these assets. And we, by supporting these assets, not just support the 3D models. Technically, we really support this community to be able to come in and engage with AR and their physical world in relation to their assets. That's kind of how we're thinking about it. So we've been working a lot on just integrating a lot of major 3D collections, and we have intentions of building avenues for even 2D collections to have access. you know, this isn't announced yet or anything, we haven't released any focused work on this yet, but like full intentions of building like more of a default Jadu avatar where you can plug in your wallet and it can change the face to be a CryptoPunk or something else where the body remains the same. So you can use the 3D asset and you have the image that really represents the collection you're a part of or the community you're a part of. And then that becomes your entry point into this world. So you already have a lot of basic functionality just tied to the avatar. You can do emotes or you can give it some like custom ability to go around the physical world and make content or videos or whatever. But then there's a deeper layer to it, which is when you purchase one of our assets to go with your avatar, that gives it now further functionality. So jetpacks let you fly, hoverboards let you move around really quickly. And then what we're really building over the next year is our own world. So our own kind of world scale game in which we have our own lore and our own mythology and community where these avatars and assets travel around different locations in the physical planet, collecting various assets that on themselves are NFTs as well. And that's really kind of our ambition right now.
[00:26:38.972] Kent Bye: I know that you launched the jetpacks on September 16th, 2021. You had a pre-sale and then it went live. You know, when it went live, it sold out in like 20 seconds. And so you sold at 1,111 different jetpacks, which my understanding is that it's sort of like a wearable where if you have different avatars, then you have Amoebit or some other avatars, you would add like a wearable to the jetpack and then when you are in maybe a augmented reality app, I don't know if that's a thing that you're also building, then you can start to animate, say, whatever the combination of your jetpack with Amoebit, and it starts to fly off. So you have these NFT avatars that are out there with all these profile pictures that are then getting translated into 3D models. So maybe take me back to the moment when you realized that you wanted to create a wearable and start to create this Jadu mirror-verse.
[00:27:27.150] Asad J Malik: There you go. So, you know, basically the way it happened was obviously I was pretty deep into the NFT space at that point. My mind was really like racing and trying to grasp it all. A lot was happening on a daily basis still is. And really I started getting the feeling where I was like, man, I want to do this. And we're currently doing these like holograms and stuff. And that's kind of what we raised the money for, like, You know, I was already like fantasizing building a different thing. And that's not really good when you're finding a company. Right. So you don't want to be incentivized to wrap this one up so you can get to the next one. And so I just told myself, like, look, this is the one, this is the one we're doing it, you know, like, let's do what we want to do at the end of the day. Let's do what the team wants to do, what we are excited about, what we want to use. That's really what matters. So let's not like hesitate at all. And we will deal with investors and other factors. And, you know, I'm sure we'll figure out a good way to do this. because we were just really deep in it. We were engaging, trading, you know, like really had a good sense of the community. And so it was really the day that I bought the me bit, which was really when they came out, I bought a me bit. And I was like, great 3d character because the meat bits are actually 3d. They come with 3d files and like, okay, 3d from Laura labs. This is definitely going to be a trend. More people are going to do it. It makes perfect sense. Now, what do you do with it? Where do you use it? And we had an app where you make videos with holograms and Holograms are way harder to deal with, the file sizes and the complicated SDKs you need installed and all the device issues you run into. And so this was very simple. This is just a 3D model, bringing it in, we're rigging it up. So we basically decided to bring it in and I was like, let's make it a playable avatar. Let's make it a humanoid character you can use around with the joystick. And We did it, and it was way better than I thought. Because the thing is, whenever we've built AR, as AR is often treated as a first-person experience, as it should be, I think it makes perfect sense. That's what all our experiences have been. You are the character. You don't need another character in the space. So it was kind of a counterintuitive move to try to have another character you're controlling, but it clicked and it felt tangible. It felt better. It was crashing into walls, climbing up stairs, you know, it's funny, it's fun. And when you record a video with it, it looks like someone's doing a thing where it's just from a first person perspective to a third person doesn't really like, it's not that interesting. So all those factors were like, okay, this is worthwhile. We can like do more with this and let's put this out. Let's allow me bit owners to bring in their assets while we keep the holograms and everything else. Let's do a quick experiment. So we started working on it and started taking longer than we thought, but also it started like becoming more and more ambitious. Like every week we were like, no, let's also do this. So, you know, the more we were diving into it and we've made a website, we posted it, we started to get some of the Amoeba community excited and we were like, yep, there's definitely demand for this. And, you know, also this was at a time when we were getting tired of kind of working with musicians a bit because they were slowing us down, right? Like musicians, you have to deal with publishing agreements and licensing agreements and monsters and egos. And every time we were like, we can be running, we know what we're doing. We could be building our product quick, unless we were just stopped by all these musicians who had all these needs all the time. So the idea of just working with virtual avatars that are more interactive and you can do more things with them, we were starting to find that appealing. Also, musicians and their audiences are fleeting. You know what I mean? Even the most hardcore fans are excited about an activation, but they're not your fans at the end of the day. So we were starting to feel the need that we need to build our own thing and we need our own audience. So this was arriving at the perfect time. And so Jetpacks initially were like, okay, what is an asset we can make from EBITS? It was pretty much that. And it was a half an hour call where a bunch of my team threw random ideas. And I was like, you know what? Jetpacks, let's do Jetpacks. And some of the team was like, well, I don't know. That doesn't sound great. I'm like, I think it makes sense. It's like a tangible enough item. It's not too magical. It does a thing. It flies. It's such an easy thing to sell as well. You can just be like, look, your avatars can fly. We are selling the power of flight. So we kind of framed it like that. And when we got closer and closer to jetpack release, we were getting more and more ambitious. And once again, the jetpacks were working really well in AR. We were starting to like, whoa, this is... You can take it way further than you thought. You could be maneuvering it when it's way further, like it's actual gameplay at that point, which we kind of stumbled upon, I suppose, in this scenario, right? Because it felt way more solid and tangible than any other AR gameplay I'd seen before as someone who's been in the industry for all this time. So those factors, we were like, you know what, the jetpacks should work on other avatars too, and they should work in sandbox as well. started becoming more and more elaborate. And then we released them. And when we released them, I thought they're going to sell out. I was targeting them to sell out in 10 minutes. That was my goal. I was like, if they sell out in 10 minutes, we have a great story. You have a good community. Everything's good. But I was worried before the release. I was worried. I thought it would take a few hours. And You know, it literally was, I went to the minting website and I tried to mint some for myself to see if the contract works. And I went to the discord to announce the minting. And when I went back, my test transaction had failed because we had sold out before I could even test the contract. it sold out so quickly. And then after market value, I remember thinking that maybe one day a jetpack will be a need. It was like, I remember thinking that before the release, maybe we will get to that point one day in like six, seven months after we built a lot of the platform. And Literally on day one, we saw one ETH sale. And I still have the message that I posted in the Discord announcing, we just had a one ETH secondary market sale and everyone freaked out. And everyone's like, the floor is going to get to one ETH one day. And literally end of that week, our floor was like two or three ETH. and the most expensive jetpack had sold for 111 ETH. So it just became such a bigger thing because it clicked for people. People were like, wait, this shows us what this metaverse thing is. It's way more tangible for us to see why NFTs are a new thing with this versus a JPEG of an animal. So when it clicked so much, we had to double down on jetpacks and are going into the next steps that we're going into now.
[00:33:49.402] Kent Bye: But when I log into Decentraland, it's asking for like a MetaMask wallet. And I bought one of the Neons from Sutu on the Tezos. So it's like an avatar. And I just wanted to, after the virtual being summoned, I was like, you know, I want to buy one of these NFTs. And that had come out recently and it looked like really cool. And I trust Sutu as an immersive 3D artist to be able to create like some amazing virtual reality and augmented reality. assets with it. And I just wanted to track it from the inside and not just be an outside critic, but also kind of get the experience. And there was this feeling after I had bought it, like, I was like, oh, now that I own this, do I want to start to contribute to the overall feeling of this community and start to add things into it? So maybe you can walk through the steps that you have in terms of, you know, now that you have these jet packs, And do you have an app that's also the Jadu app to be able to do these augmented reality overlays and like, how do people hook it up and how do they take something that is from the, either their blockchain, either a browser wallet extension or something that's their app. How do they hook up what they already have with their NFTs into your augmented reality app or whatever you're creating with your mirror verse for Jadu?
[00:34:56.267] Asad J Malik: So the process right now is pretty straightforward. We don't have this app publicly available yet. We have it as a test flight built in our discord. So you can find the link in the discord. It's not even the most obvious place in the discord. It's like kind of a channel down there called links. You go there and there is the test flight link. And, you know, we're not out public with it right now because also I think it's in a very awkward growth stage right now where it's half what it used to be and half what it's trying to be. And, you know, I think we're right now in the process of launching Hoverboards and then getting to a point where the app then really becomes what it needs to be now. But already on the app, what you can do is you can download it, you can connect your wallet, and by connecting your wallet, you get access to your assets that are supported within our platform. So, you know, if you own Amoebit, for, you know, soon cyber Kongs and there are a bunch of other NFT collections that we're supporting. Some of them are supported already. Some of them we're building support for. So me bits were the hardest ones because we didn't have a formal collaboration with larva labs or anything. So really the process involved someone downloading a Vox file from a website, uploading it to our website. It goes to our backend. We run like a batch convert on it, convert it into a separate model, auto rig it on runtime. Then the user gets a notification saying their Miibet is ready, and then they connect their wallet to Miibet. So it's definitely the most bulky way of doing this stuff that will ever exist, in my opinion, because from now on, it's going to get more and more streamlined. Every other collection we're working with, we have a relationship with our team. We form a relationship, we get into some kind of a partnership in which they give us access to their files. And now the process is as simple as this. You go to the app, connect your wallet, your file is there. We already have it. The moment you connect it, we link it to you. And then you bring it in, you can start to use it. So that's kind of how it is right now. And if you own a jetpack, then you can also bring in the jetpack to your space. And then we do this kind of AR that I like to think of as object oriented, where instead of every single thing being compartmentalized as a filter or one thing, Every item is a thing on its own and each object is kind of an app. So the Jetpack is an application that the avatar uses to fly and the avatar might use various other applications in combination with the Jetpack or without the Jetpack. And that's kind of how we're building the platform. So yeah, that's kind of the gist of it. And you know, like, so right now there's not that much you can do with it, but people play with their jetpacks, kids play with their parents, jetpacks, like we've run some competitions where people record videos. If you're in our discord, I would encourage you to actually see the video channel. you will find some very elaborately produced videos or jetpacks. There are multiple songs that have been produced. In fact, there's a song that was produced by one of our community members that ended up winning Grammy. Not that song, but the community member won a Grammy for a different song. The sense of community is really real as well. You know, like, they're people that are in our discord on a regular basis. I know people's usernames and I know when I see one that I know and I've spoken to a bunch of them. If something goes wrong, if people are upset about a decision, I often call people myself and I talk them through it. So we have a really hands-on approach with our community. Obviously, it's going to become harder as it grows. It's already starting to be harder. We have over 15,000 members and There's often a lot of activity, but that's the community we formed around JetPacks and that's what they're doing with JetPacks right now. We hope to 5X this community with the release of Hoverboards later this month, later in December. And then obviously next year when we enter the world scale game, then there's just so much more for the community to do and talk about and tanks for them to kind of engage with and play with. So that's kind of really how we're thinking.
[00:38:40.270] Kent Bye: Okay. So 15,000 members in the discord, I saw that you had released 1,111 jetpacks and there was like 700 owners and you're going to be releasing 5,555 hoverboards here, I guess, on December 12th. So if everybody in your discord community, if they even tried to buy one, they couldn't because they're. Not even enough there. So you have like anywhere from let's say seven to 6,000 people that are going to be a part of this community. Are those the only people that could actually do anything on your app that you would have to actually own things? Or what happens to people if they don't own anything like a jetpack? Can they still be involved? What can they do in the community?
[00:39:15.687] Asad J Malik: So there are a few things. First of all, you don't even need to have a wallet right now to have something to do in the app. So we have a public library of assets, which is basically owners of specific avatars that decide to make their avatars publicly available. At that point, they're giving up the exclusivity of being able to use it, but they are still publicly on it. They're just getting to advertise it a bit more and more people get to use it. So it's a decision we're letting our users have right now. You can't do that with Jetpacks right now because Jetpacks are more specific in-game asset that is going to give you more access to things and whatnot as we go into next year and we have more plans with it. But if you don't have a wallet, you can go to the app and still be able to download some avatars and play with it. And if you do have a wallet and another avatar and not jetpacks, you can still go and play with avatar. You just won't have a jetpack or hoverboard to use with it. So the community of jetpack and hoverboard holders is definitely smaller, but that is also by design. We're growing at a rate that we think we can grow, number one. you know, going into next year, hoverboards and jetpacks are going to be a key part of building our world in which, you know, we're very actively exploring things such as, you know, letting newcomers come in and be able to rent, let's say a jetpack or hoverboard from an existing holder in order to use within the game, but not just to like play and record a cool video, but because Owning a jetpack and hoverboard provides you further access in the game to other assets that you can find more easily. And by renting a hoverboard, you basically have the same chance of finding these assets as people that were early enough to purchase jetpack and hoverboards. You might be priced out of them at that point. So it's a very fine balance. We don't want to lead to some weird digital feudalism. That's why we're not selling land or anything, which a lot of other AR companies are doing. Our emphasis is you want to build this so that there is some compounding value for existing holders. Because at the end of the day, we treat them as stakeholders. They're part of the community. They're there early. They put their money on the line to sit and wait and go through these cycles with us. And just like any stakeholder, they get rewarded in certain dividends. But at the same time, we do it so that there are enough avenues for newcomers to also succeed because you can't build a system that's always just benefiting the early adopters. that's more of like how Bitcoin is, right? Like it's at the end of the day, people that came in early will forever be the most compounding value, you know, versus here you get to build systems that allow newcomers to also have various opportunities at finding as much success as a person that has been there from the start. And, you know, I think that's really what allows these things to be able to develop and move, you know, having opportunity for newcomers.
[00:41:58.037] Kent Bye: As you talk about all these things that you're building in your world, I don't know if it's called the Jadu mirror verse, or if it has a name yet, does it have a name for what this world is called?
[00:42:05.460] Asad J Malik: No, we're, we're calling it the mirror verse. And really the mirror verse comes from parsley. It was like, okay, we don't want to call it. Meta anything. Also, it's supposed to be different from meta, right? Like the whole point is that this is kind of the intersection of the matter where it's in the physical world. That's how we want to think of it. So obviously I'm sure you're familiar with the mirror world, right? That was like Kevin Kelly had a mirror world article once in wire a couple of years ago, and obviously the term has come up before, but I think mirror world doesn't capture the crypto aspect of this. Mirror world captures more of the digital twin of the world and things of that nature. So the verse tries to capture some of the crypto based incentive systems. So mirror verse is how we're dealing with our AR world. So mirror versus to AR, what meta versus to VR is kind of how we think of it.
[00:42:54.011] Kent Bye: Okay. And it sounded like a little bit of almost like geocaching or actually kind of an ingress, like you go to specific locations to maybe find stuff. And then I know at the Virtual Bing Summit, there was some talk about Axie Infinity, which is actually implementing different aspects of play to earn. So things that you can do within the app to actually earn or mentor, discover different cryptocurrency exchanges. So are you planning to do some type of play to earn or what's the sort of the discovery mechanism? Is it like a geocaching game or what is it that you can rent jetpacks to be able to help discover things? So what's that?
[00:43:28.083] Asad J Malik: basically the way we're thinking of this game is first of all, just take a stab at, I suppose it's just, I think product design is overrated. I think we've hit a certain saturation on this model of like, you know, a thousand engineers in San Francisco setting an optimizing button. I think game design is way more interesting and way more the possibilities of what can happen. There are way more far-reaching and who has game design right now? All these AAA studios have game design. These big tech companies don't actually have that. They're trying to now get that. So we're taking a very game-oriented approach. But instead of building a perfect game loop, like a Battle Royale or some kind of perfect game that then you have seasons on and you replace the skins in the map and give some incremental updates. We're thinking of this as an ever-evolving world and game that gets more complex every round. We think of Hoverboards and Death Packs as season zero, where our earliest players are equipping themselves with these assets to participate in the next season. And next year is season one where the first Jadu assets start being dropped on the physical planet that need to be found where people have to go travel to find the thing. So yes, very much like Pokemon go or Ingress where it's geolocation based, you have certain hotspots where you have some chance of finding certain assets. What assets can you find? What rarity do they have? What use in the game do they have? All depends on an algorithm that we are going to be working on in which, you know, we're taking into account a bunch of factors and Whether you're on a hoverboard or jetpack does also influence what other assets you're able to find. So on one hand, it structures it like that, where geolocation and map-based AR is key. But at the same time, it has way more AR gameplay. That's one of the things that we want. That's something that I think Pokemon Go also shied away from a lot. And when they did implement it, they saw usage fall. So they made it a very novelty-oriented thing. we are feeling really good about our actual AR elements, right? Like when people are actually in AR, playing with characters, or flying in a jetpack, or whatever words. I think that's a thing that the world hasn't yet seen on scale yet, you know? So that's something we really think that we are well-possessed to accomplish, and we're really emphasizing. And yeah, so season one is really going to revolve around kind of finding all these assets. And at this point we can release way more assets than a thousand jetpacks or 5,000 hoverboards, right? You could have a hundred thousand assets in the world that are found over the course of a year where people are traveling to far off locations. And there are only a thousand left now and they're the most remote ones. And there's one at the K2 base camp and someone takes that expedition and goes and finally gets it and goes on the secondary market. And now it has all this value because it captures not just the value of the asset, but the journey it took to actually get it and all the eyes that were on it as it happened. And so we're really thinking of it like this world scale persistent, the whole community's playing and participating. And the idea then becomes that when you get to season two, all the assets that were found in season one now have a purpose just like jetpacks and hoverboards have a purpose in season one. So it becomes this ever evolving scenario where we have a deeper layer of complexity each round and each season. Each season has new ways to introduce this to more players. We could deploy a mechanic where all the assets that were found in season one can be shared with two of your closest friends in season two. And now you onboard two other people that participate in getting more things. And you know what I mean? So really the end goal for us is the same end goal as it is for Snapchat or Instagram or HoloLens or Magically. It is to build the AR platform, right? This is our approach. Instead of making filters or doing enterprise AR work, we're building this kind of communal incentive system-oriented world-scale AR platform. And that's really how we're treating it.
[00:47:17.529] Kent Bye: I'm curious if you want to add any, like, what was the investor's reaction to all this pivot? And, you know, if you have, you know, any other news there.
[00:47:25.991] Asad J Malik: Sure. Sure. Basically, you know, so from our existing investors, right. First of all, our existing investors so far, I'd been very conservative with what money we take in before jetpacks. Like we had not taken a big check from anyone or the biggest check we had taken was like 300,000 or something like that. And, you know, we'd raised $2 million from very much like, I don't think I can call it friends and family because, you know, it's not like I've known these people forever, but, you know, some of them were these like Pakistani investors that I connected with after I was added to the first 30 on the 30 list, someone found me and I talked to some people. you know, they were like, wow, like young, like Pakistani founder, like doing interesting things in tech, like we want to support this. And, you know, I built a good relationship. So there, some money was coming from that. And then some of the money was coming from like one of my computer science professors in college. And one of my like fellow board members said, I had at Bennington College where I was also on the board. So, you know, it was a lot of people that were just interested in my success and it wasn't about this specific product necessarily, they were just more interested in my career and believed that I would have a good trajectory the next couple years. But really after jetpacks was when we were like, okay, we're going to now like really raise around because, you know, coming from both my parents are teachers. Whenever a company raises like $65 million without a product, I have historically died inside a bit, but you know, we're definitely like with jetpacks. I was like, we're, this is real stuff. We're hitting something brand new here. Like people are trying to grasp what this is. Companies are raising rounds left and right. That just started three months ago. And, you know, so we went ahead and we, try to raise money. It ended up being very easy. In fact, a lot of my last two months were spent telling no to people and saying, we don't have space in the round. We need to take the minimum tech possible, all that kind of stuff, because there's so much interest in this space. And I think seeing a company like us that isn't just a new company that has just popped up because they saw money in NFTs. We've been trying to make a thing happen for years. And finally, it's actually clicking because of this new model. We are primed to do well in this space. So I felt confident about our own value proposition. That's the first thing you need to do. And when we could start communicating that to investors, everyone got it. And we had an overwhelming response of everyone we talked to introduced us to five other people. And we just Before we knew it, we were very oversubscribed. We're saying no to more money than we're taking as part of this round. So it's been a really good round. And I suppose I can say the people that are in it, because this is probably airing after we announce it, but we have General Catalyst leading the round. GC is a very consumer-like partner that we're working with. Nico is a very consumer-oriented VC and was one of the first checks on Snapchat. And so then we have Coinbase and Liontree and a bunch of crypto funds. Then we have a bunch of more entertainment-oriented funds as well participating. We have Snoop Dogg participating and like Sound Ventures, which is Ashton Kutcher and Gaia Siri fun as well. And so it's a good round. It's all like good names, both in crypto and media and tech and consumer. And, you know, we're very well structured and like very well positioned now to go and take our next steps. And, you know, already we've been pushing for hiring the best people. This is like, we feel strongly that we can be a category leader when it comes to anything NFT, Web3 or AR related. And for that really, we need the best investors. We think we got them and we need now the best people. Obviously, we have a very experienced team already. And since this round, we knew that this was even happening. We've made hires from Activision Blizzard and Sony and have been doubling down on that. And I think over the next year we'll probably be hiring 50 people. And yeah, it's a very exciting time to just go and build the stuff that I've been thinking of for years now.
[00:51:24.470] Kent Bye: So my perception of the overall crypto-based virtual world, say Decentraland or CryptoVox, those are so many in space. I compare those to say the direct experiences that I have in something like VRChat or RecRoom or to some extent AltSpace where there's meetings and gatherings. And there seems to be more concurrent users, more activity, more action, more experience-based stuff within these social worlds that aren't crypto-based. In the crypto-based worlds, have some stuff, but it's more static. And it's, there was the Metaverse Festival and Decentraland and there's different events, but I'd say the actual direct experience of some of these worlds feels like it's a little bit more based upon the crypto speculation of buying and selling different plots of land. There was just a plot of land that sold for like over $2 million within Decentraland. But the ownership there, the theory would be that the people would be able to create something that would increase the value. Although my perception is that there's a big disconnect between what is happening with these crypto assets that are being sold being completely disconnected from whatever value may or may not be there from an experiential perspective, especially. So it seems like almost more driven by the zeitgeist of the hype of whatever people feel like they have demand over. And so I'm curious, as you are now managing this community, like how you avoid people just having kind of the day trader just to get in there and get out and flip. I mean, that's part of the ecosystem. But if you really want people to either be a committed owner to either hold or to actually contribute their time and energy into building stuff, how do you actually shift away from something that maybe people are acquiring and flipping crypto assets and more of a day trader mindset into something that's actually a community member that's producing or collaborating or increasing the value of the assets with whatever labor that they're putting into the ecosystem.
[00:53:05.284] Asad J Malik: Yeah, I think it's a sensitive balance. And I think your criticism for those companies is also totally fair. And I think crypto just has this tendency of just compounding value where you make a coin and then you have to buy a coin to buy this other thing. And now the coin goes up every time you buy the coin and that your coin's going up and you're buying another thing that's going up on top of that. It's just like, there's a lot of this that inflates value in these crazy manners. And only time will tell how that settles down. From the community perspective, so far we have done a few things right. First of all, we started with a small supply and allowed to form a basic culture. When you have mob mentality form in your server and your spaces, it's hard to maneuver that. I think often collections start with the 10,000 tank collection, you don't really have enough control over that big of a community to really give it any culture. So we did a good job by starting off small, allowing people to come to our town halls and communicate with each other and form a baseline culture that hopefully now these active participants can help carry over as we have more people come on board. The other thing we did was, we have actively spent a lot of time on whitelisting or allowing for pre-sale lists to happen for our drops. This is what we did with Jetpacks. This is what we will be doing with Hoverwords as well, where we set up certain barriers to entry into this whitelist and we make the drop very whitelist heavy. So you buy more things in the whitelist than the public sale. And what that allows us to do is number one, you get rid of random people just being like, Oh, some popular mint is happening. Let me go and just like buy some stuff. And we've limited the NFTs. We sell maximum one jetpack per wallet for our price pre-sale list. And we're going to do the same with hoverboards. You can just get maximum one. And what that does is now you don't have a bunch to flip, right? Like often what happens is a bot or a whale goes and buys like 50, and then it's just like flipping them all over the place. And that's kind of, With this, we give you one and we tell you, look, you just have one, hold on to it because it's going to go up in value or you're going to participate in the ecosystem over time or whatever that end goal is. So that's been really helpful to us. As you were saying, we have 1,100 assets and we have over 700 unique holders, which is a huge proportion of unique holders for any collection. In fact, maybe we should go and double check my facts on this, but I think it might be of any collection, honestly. you don't see these kinds of numbers. It's like 700 of them are unique holders out of this big of a collection. It's not happening automatically. We worked towards that happening. And I think that allows these people to actually be participants. They hold one jetpack, they want to hold it forever. So many people come to me, they're like, this is going to go to my kids. You know what I mean? So we'll see how all that goes over time. But that's been a big factor in helping us kind of form a sensible community that is invested in the long-term growth of what we're building and wants to participate and isn't down for quick profit. In fact, I mean, obviously there's a threshold at which you kind of need to take profit, I suppose. Like for example, someone who was an active community member ended up getting the gold jetpack, which was our one-off one jetpacks. that they got an offer for $150,000 on it, and they rejected that offer. And they're supposedly a college student. I obviously can't confirm because everyone's anonymous, but they rejected that offer. And then they got another offer for $400,000 that they finally did end up taking. But once again, it goes to show that people have conviction in the project and want to participate for the long term. Having said that, trading and flipping and whatnot at the end of the day is also kind of encouraged in most platforms because that's when you make commission, which I understand often it's good for a project that it's price falls and rises again, because that's where all the trading happens and that's when you make the commission. So, you know, like that's also a factor to kind of keep in mind, but yeah, for the most part, you know, our, most of our secondary volume trading really happened in the first like month or so, obviously it still happens. And they're often catalysts that kind of lead to it. But yeah, that's my response.
[00:57:11.986] Kent Bye: So for smart contracts, you can add a commission. So what's the commission rate on these jet packs for Jadu?
[00:57:18.572] Asad J Malik: Jetpacks, we take 5% of every jetpack sale in the secondary trading market. So there've been over $9 million worth of secondary trading that has happened so far over the last two months. So primary sale, we made $400,000 and then secondary market, we made $450,000. So, you know, we have made almost a million dollars the last two months. purely off Jetpacks and it's just been two months since they came out. And Hoverboard is the primary sale. If everything goes successfully, should be $3 million primary sale. And then obviously should have a bigger secondary market than Jetpacks because there are more items and they're going to be lower priced items. So there's going to be more ability to trade them frequent and often. So, you know, like for a pre-seed company, like we are actually like making revenue, you know what I mean? Like decent revenue, even compared to a lot of other blockchain companies that are raising very significant multi hundred million valuation rounds. We are actually making way more in actual stuff traded.
[00:58:18.250] Kent Bye: Wow. Yeah. So when you look at the open web and the challenges around the business model, then this sounds like a, at least a alternative path for how to fund a lot of this creative work that you're doing to be able to have this kind of trading and the ownership. I think there's a pivot there that I think is intriguing. My concern is that there's so many barriers and that. the tech oligarchy that we have now is just replaced by a crypto oligarchy, meaning that people who get in early have a disproportionate amount of wealth, you know, that it's not as equitable in terms of getting access to these different technologies for people that, you know, just even buying a jet pack or, you know, hoverboard, they're just never going to be able to afford something like that because it's just overpriced from what they can do.
[00:58:55.754] Asad J Malik: I would just say that when you get this gamified, you have some variables to play with. With crypto, you don't. When you have Bitcoin, it's Bitcoin. You're not going to be messing with its supply or anything. That's the whole thing that gives it value is that it's this rigid thing. Versus with the game world, it's different. You can prioritize an asset. You can deprioritize an asset. You can do all these things that affect value more actively. And us as a gaming company now that's trying to build this world, we are actually prioritized to build in a manner that does allow newcomers to succeed, because that's really the only way you grow and you continue to develop. If we compound value for early rollers forever, we are literally like plateauing our growth significantly by doing that. So that's just a factor to consider. I do think that over time, as we like balance it out and create opportunities for newcomers, The old people will have compounded a lot anyway. It's just like the way the world currently works is where CEOs get paid, you know, 300 times their average employee, things like that. The gap doesn't have to be that huge between early people and newcomers. You can like have smaller gaps and like build out avenues. So we're just like, in order for us to succeed the most, we need avenues for newcomers to succeed at any given moment.
[01:00:09.938] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Well, I guess just a final questions here is what do you think the ultimate potential of all these immersive technologies, the mirror verse augmented reality and all the web three defy cryptocurrency NFT, all of those things coming together and what they might be able to enable.
[01:00:28.689] Asad J Malik: I think at the end of the day, you know, it's really, you know, on one hand you have new ways of forming identity that previously were very much decided by where you were living or what religion you were born into or what nationality you were engaged with. A lot of those factors were like the primary factors defining our identity. Obviously the internet has changed that significantly, but I do think this stuff changes it even more because it like makes these other identities way more tangible and approachable. So I really think that the vision that Meta is putting out of, oh, you want to work, you go to Facebook workplace, you want to play, you go to Facebook horizon. And you know, you want to, while you're working, you use your work avatar and then while you're playing, you use your fantasy. That's not how we think of it. I think that's very much the cultural continuation of where things are right now. What we think will happen in the future is more of you will have various identities and they will be like these like forms of self actualization or, you know, envisioning your creative mind and embodying it in ways that you most desire. And you will use them to socialize, to work, to play, and all of that will be a mush. It won't be such compartmentalized different things that you do with your time. And in doing so, you will have relationships with other people that you connect with on those levels. And a lot of these companies and IPs and stories that we often engage with would not be coming from big studios, would not be coming from big centralized elements. It'll be more niche. People will be able to do their own crazy things. there would be avenues of funding and making those things successful more so than they are now, more so than a Kickstarter page. And obviously with us more like the AR stuff, the most powerful thing about AR is that it tangibly interfaces with the physical planet. The whole metaverse stuff is great, but the incentive systems, obviously they can play with the money you have or the community you form, but this plays with the actual tangible physical planet. where you can affect like border laws. You can affect like people mobilizing around things. You can have people form incentive systems and like physical locations to like achieve a goal. And at that point it just starts to unlock like a very different type of communal power that I think is just very interesting to explore. And I think the right way to explore it is with a community owned platform where people have access to these assets and have some kind of governance say in it rather than it all coming from a centralized company.
[01:02:56.499] Kent Bye: Scott, are you going to have a Dow?
[01:02:59.300] Asad J Malik: So, you know, we're very actively going to be exploring that as this round closes and we kind of take the next steps. You know, will Jadu itself be a DAO? Probably not. Will Jadu have another entity inside Jadu that possibly is operating as a DAO? That's way more likely. And also, you know, we do treat our holders as like stakeholders to a certain extent, obviously not a hundred percent. They're also our players. So you don't want to like, have a vote on every decision you make for the game world, because that kind of ruins the surprise and the narrative, the actual game, like you want by holding asset, you're trusting the team to give you an experience. So, you know, there's like a fine line between that, but bottom line is if people don't like what we're doing, they can always sell their tokens, which is going to once again, like affect us negatively. So, you know, there is that element to it, but will Jadu have its own token and things like that? It's very likely, you know, the way things are moving, how are we going to next year and build a full world? I think a Java token is pretty imminent.
[01:03:56.767] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader web three metaverse XR community or crypto communities?
[01:04:04.141] Asad J Malik: Um, I think that things can just get very polarizing. I really think that what the NFT space has right now, there are a lot of resources. There's actual money. There are people willing to spend money. There are people willing to build new things. People want to see new things happening. They're tired of the old things. There's all this sentiment and the kind of crypto NFT space and people in the XR space should use that. because they have the skills, they have the ability, they have the experience, they've been working on this stuff forever. They can bring that and find like very strong positions in this new space rather than going and getting funding from like Oculus or like getting funded from BBC or Verizon or You know what I mean? Like that's how that whole space is operated. And then it's way less interesting, way less interesting. People can actually come and implement their actual ideas and what they want to build. And they will find real support here instead of going to these big companies that are purely going to use them for some 5G activation.
[01:05:04.633] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I definitely see the branding shift from web two to web three. I understand the surveillance capitalism and all the, I guess the ills of how the advertising has been driving a lot of this. And I, I have optimism that there's going to be these new models that have different incentive structures to actually have community have ownership and just create different dynamics to be able to fund different efforts that maybe have more of a patronage model for people where they feel like they're able to contribute to a coin and maybe they have some value, but it's not totally driven by being surveilled. Uh, which I think is what we have now. And I'm a fan of that, but I'm also, I see there's a lot of gaps and a lot of things that still need to be figured out. I hope that there's enough of the entire community to figure that out and that can really live into all of those other aspects of the web that we have with the web branding into web three. But yeah, I just really curious to be able to unpack what you're doing. And like you said, there's very polarized issues where people that will get very visceral reactions for anything to do with the cryptocurrencies or technologies. I have hope, but I'm also skeptical and. when I hear more stories like yourself, I have a little bit more optimism. But again, I think as things to play out with all these other things of being in right relationship with the earth and ecology and everything else, and just making sure that we're not recreating existing power dynamics that are amplified because of the people that are involved with the cryptocurrency. So I guess those are my concerns. But overall, I'm just glad that you had the opportunity to be able to take the time and share a little bit of your vision where the Jadu universe is going to go and what it may take in terms of lessons for other people to be able to either engage in the community or not. So Asad, thank you so much for taking the time to be able to join me today and unpack it all.
[01:06:38.414] Asad J Malik: Thank you so much, Ken. Lovely as always.
[01:06:41.435] Kent Bye: So that was Asad J. Malik. He's a co-founder and CEO of Jadu Hologram. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, So despite my skepticism overall around using Web3 as a branding term, I mean, I don't know if the metaverse or NFTs are any better than the types of intentions for what Asit is trying to create. But I think there's an intention that is somewhat aspirational, I'd say. There's a lot of visions for what the Web3 is going to live into, and I don't see that they're quite living into all the different promises of what the existing web is giving or even what the Web3 is going to provide. What I see is happening right now is that there's a lot of different types of experiments where we look at it and it may look like a toy or something that isn't really all that compelling. Buying a hoverboard or a jetpack is cool on some level, but on the other hand, is it worth anywhere from $4,000 to $400,000? I certainly don't think I would pay that much for some of these things. But there's a bit of the process of trying to cultivate a community and this paradigm shift from having just one of the main owners take the majority of the different value that's being created and have the value that's shared amongst the people who are the owners of those digital assets. I think that is quite a different Shift and trying to think about how we relate to these different web communities And if you are sharing ownership, then it does to me imply that you would have some sort of decentralized autonomous organization I asked if they're going to have a Dow it seems like they want to still maintain some of that centralized control because they are having quite a lot of elements of the story that they're trying to release but also the lore and the mythology and the gameplay and they don't want to like ruin the surprise of that and have it up to the Community to decide because I think there's certain aspects of game design They're much more approaching this from a game design perspective which is that you are really focusing on the experience and iterating and Trying to create the best experience just like there's different seasons and fortnight they're taking that same metaphor and trying to apply that into their approach here and I start to iterate and slowly build out this lore of this world that they're creating. Now, I think there's been a lot of critique around NFTs from the context within games, because the main complaint is that most of these different types of applications of NFTs within the tightly bound context of a game could be just as well handled within a database. The whole question is the different assets that you're creating. To what degree are they going to be applicable outside of your game and outside of your experience? I think they actually have something that is kind of compelling in the sense of these jetpacks and hoverboards. If they are able to get integrations into these other crypto-based virtual worlds, like, say, Decentraland or CryptoVoxels or somebody in space, Sandbox, able to bring in those wearables so that when you log in with your wallet, it's able to automatically bring in these different wearables and you're able to have special superpowers within these different virtual worlds. And Asad is saying that this is kind of like an object-oriented approach to thinking about how some of these different assets are going to be able to enable you to do actions and new capabilities within these virtual worlds. So there's an interesting experiential element, I think, that is, like I said, starting off with kind of like a toy. But the deeper principles here are trying to create this shared ownership, but also find ways to have this interoperability. There isn't a lot of really good reasons for a lot of these existing closed-wall gardens to start to experiment with interoperability. profitability in any meaningful way. I mean, a lot of the avatars within Rec Room, as an example, it wouldn't make sense to export your really expensive Rec Room avatar into another context, because in that context, it may not mean as much. And then, when you start to import outside assets into these existing ecosystems with Meaning around the different clothes then you start to disrupt the existing flow of what those avatar representations even mean Vrchast probably the most interoperable when it comes to you know bringing in some of these different avatar representations you get the most diversity of all the different avatar representations of all the different social platforms and And so there's VRM, where you can import things into VRChat, but not so much an emphasis of being able to, say, be in VRChat and be able to hop over into, say, Rec Room or another virtual world, and then still somehow carry over your virtual avatar representation. That would be something that would be around your identity to be able to have that interoperability. So there is something about interoperability that I think is having more interesting experimentations that are happening within the crypto-based worlds. When I think about things into the future, having this concept of platform cooperatism, where you have shared ownership within whatever is happening, like the workers taking control of actually controlling their destiny for where things go in the future. Things like the decentralized autonomous organizations are kind of providing the mechanism for that. But again, this is a situation where it does seem like there's still going to be a little bit of that centralized control. They're probably going to have some sort of special JADU token maybe have a side chain to be able to publish their own NFTs. Now, to the degree to which that these NFTs that are found within the game, are they going to carry any value outside of that? There's Axie Infinity, which is the play to earn. This would be a little bit more of sounds like a world scale game where you're going out and doing these scavenger hunts to try to find these tokens. And when you find the tokens, then what? I mean, it's almost like you found something. Then are you going to resell it? I think that's sort of the idea that you'd be collecting things that would be somehow Having a resale value now That's a question of whether or not these different items that you're collecting within the context of the game are going to be worth anything to People outside of that context of that game. They've already been doing different collaborations with like Lewis Hamilton and Snoop Dogg and Grimes So in the previous work from Jado hologram, they've been able to collaborate with lots of different artists And so they've certainly been able to help get the word out about all these different things they're able to sell out of all the I've recorded this a couple of weeks before they released it on December 12th because they hadn't made the announcement for the financing that I talked about with them and I wanted to wait until the embargo lifted for them to be able to talk about raising funds. It sounds like it was pretty easy for them to raise funds. The second round of the hoverboards, it made around $4 million or so. and all the different aftermarkets, they're going to continue to make 5% on top of all the different exchanges. There is a desire to create these items that people are wanting to either buy or resell or flip in different ways. Every time that happens, they're getting some percentage cut of that. For the first JetPacks, they sold around $400,000, and then around $450,000 of aftermarket over a couple of months. They have these revenue streams. It was really striking to me to hear when Asad told Edward Saatchi at the Virtual Bing Summit that they had done 40 AR projects or so and that they had made more money within 20 seconds of selling these NFTs than they had from all these other various projects, which is pretty astounding to think about the different effort and overhead and all the work they had to do to create those experiences and at the same time to be able to create a me bits kind of like a minecraft aesthetic type of avatar and to be able to puppeteer it within an augmented reality experience that that was certainly a lot easier to do than a fully volumetric capture that is lots of different polygon counts. It's very complicated to be able to really move it around control in a way that just doing a rigged avatar was so much easier for them and they're creating different interactions and games. I haven't been able to play any of those games to see how compelling those are. And my concern was like, well, do you have to own some of these things to be able to actually play the game? That does seem like, you know, there's the games where it's like pay to win, where you pay more money and then you get Enough of an advantage where it doesn't create quite a balanced game and those tend to be pretty frowned upon and so I'm not quite sure how they're going to work with those balances where you're able to have the hover pack and the jet pack and As you're going through a game you get some special powers and benefits But is it gonna make it not as fun for other people who don't have those special powers? Also was saying that maybe you could start to rent the hover boards and jet packs from other people and so it feels like this kind of really weird future that I'm not on the front lines of diving headfirst and doing these things like renting a virtual hoverboard to be able to find a NFT within a geocached world-scale AR NFT platform game so I think we'll see how they continue to develop. I really trust certain aspects of the artistry of AASD and whether or not these things continue to work out. They've certainly been able to have enough of exchange to be able to fund these projects. I think there's a lot of vision for where this is going to go and a lot of experiments, frankly. I don't think anybody's really quite figured it out. But I do think that we are searching for alternative models from, say, surveillance capitalism or ad-based revenue streams. If they're able to create value within these different non fungible tokens that have enough exchange Then then maybe they get enough revenue stream to be able to fund something that is continuing to build on that in some fashion So anyway, it's a brave new world and yeah, just the different web 3 technologies I don't know I think doctor different people and I think there's Trying to rally people around this aspiration for what they were trying to live into and like I said it is still at this point pretty aspirational and there's a lot of gaps to match the hyperbolic rhetoric with the actuality. I think, for me, the big difference is going to be the values, the underlying values that are trying to really cultivate something that is trying to be a little bit more equitable or trying to really make a deeper shift into things and not just create an opportunity for an oligarchy centered in your own financial self-interest and maximizing your own wealth regardless of any relational connection to the world around you. I think that's where the ecological issue comes in, as well. There's a lot of promise in Ethereum 2.0 of shifting over into something that's a little bit more ecologically sustainable with the proof-of-stake shift over. There are certainly sidechains that are doing that. The argument is that all the biggest action is happening there on Ethereum, but at the same time, is the potential ecological impact a representation of how it's not really being in the right relationship with the world around us? Is this something that we're causing more harm than it is the benefits that we're going to get out of these new potential economic paradigms? It's a little bit of a moral dilemma. So anyway, those are just some of the different aspects that I'm looking at some of those different things. So anyway, that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list of support a podcast and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash was VR. Thanks for listening.
