New Project Aims to Enable Building the Open Metaverse From the Ground Up

LONDON, January 6, 2022 (Newswire.com) - There are at least two versions of the Metaverse currently emerging, one dominated by closed platforms like Facebook/Meta and the other built on open protocols around blockchains. A new project, The Open Metaverse, launched on January 1st this year with a drop of 10,000 text base NFTs. Founded by NFT artist and developer AlwaysGood.ai it seeks to empower individual holders of the NFTs to build The Open Metaverse from the ground up, using the NFTs as the individually owned resources.

The Open Metaverse project consists of 10,000 alphanumeric NFTs of randomised resources generated and stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The NFTs are free to mint (+ gas) and can be used to build The Open Metaverse. Holders are free to build whatever they want - these are fundamental building blocks and come with a full CCO licence.

Additional graphic NFTs mapping worlds, environments and buildings will be made available free (+gas) to The Open Metaverse NFT holders in the first half of 2022.

Extract from interview with founder AlwaysGood.ai:

"1. The Open Metaverse - there is a lot to unpack here. Give us more details about the concept of this project and your overall vision.

My starting point is the realization that 'The Metaverse' is already here. Not in the sense of a full-blown photorealistic, 3D, persistent virtual world, but certainly the seeds of a shared digital space built on shared open source protocols, open infrastructure and with its own economy. As I say on our website:

'The Open Metaverse itself already exists. The main rail is the Ethereum blockchain. NFTs are the building blocks and the property rights layer. The communication system is Twitter. Crypto and DeFi are the financial system. DAOs are the beginnings of decentralised governance. It is open decentralised, interoperable and persistent. Onto this framework, the community of developers and users are building ever more advanced features and the worlds of gaming and VR are converging onto it.'

A key influence on this project was The Loot Project - text NFTs of Loot for an RPG game generated on chain and left up to the community to develop. When I saw it my very first thought was 'this is genius, but why limit it to a game?' Not everyone wants to wander around the metaverse with a sword and a cloak of invisibility! I thought, since the contract was open source, one could build on the method, but change the seed words to resources that would be open to anyone to build whatever world they wanted. Thus, The Open Metaverse was born.

Actually, originally I named the project 'Meta'. But then Facebook made their announcement, so I felt I had to change it. I am opposed to Facebook / Google / Microsoft dominating the metaverse and using it to continue their extractive practices - that could be a real dystopia. So I named it in opposition to Meta, The Open Metaverse. I was surprised and delighted that I was able to register the ENS name TheOpenMetaverse.eth and the DNS name TheOpenMetaverse.net - so that sealed it. It just shows how early we are."

Minting Website: https://the-open-metaverse.herokuapp.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ommane
Discord: https://discord.gg/q82ktqRR
OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/the-open-metaverse

Source: The Open Metaverse NFT project