Enter the DexGrid
To see the original article published by DexGrid, go here. This was cross-posted with their permission.
As the world has witnessed a tremendous growth in the blockchain space, we are now at the stage where this growth should matter to everyone. While some may see it as “price goes up” or news headlines like “advice from a crypto millionaire”, we feel it is the right time to regroup and discuss why it is a much more important topic to understand.
This new technology is disrupting the traditional world and what it means for people in general is fascinating! So many opportunities emerging and making social and economic interactions better for humans.
At the same time, energy resiliency has been challenged with worsening climate change conditions. The misalignment has been growing and communities are paying the price.
After years of research on both the blockchain technology and how we can improve energy related ecosystems, we figured out the best way for communities to access resilient electricity and tap into these amazing opportunities, all from their DexGrid wallet.
We are very excited and humbled to be at the forefront of this new world. This paper is about connecting our readers to this new, amazing reality.
Context of this paper?
As the co-founder of DexGrid, my personal belief is directly aligned with its business mission, which is that every human being should be given a fair chance in life.
That level playing field starts with access to the fundamental needs that are water and electricity, enabling communities to tap into all social and economic opportunities.
In certain regions like Puerto Rico, our home, electricity is not reliable nor is it widely accessible. We are making it reliable and accessible through a decentralized energy alternative where local anchors (businesses and manufacturers for instance) distribute and sell their electricity to their neighbors.
For these communities to thrive, existing opportunities must be made available to all, fairly. These valuable opportunities exist and are being fully integrated into the dexgrided experience.
Our background in the energy and financial fields have been complemented with years of research and exposure to the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. This digital universe sits today on three trillion dollars valuation and has been growing exponentially.
Even though it is commonly referred to as Web3, the concept of the Metaverse adds context to it. Not the Zuckerberg Metaverse but rather in its expanded form of all digital things, specifically social and economic things.
In this paper, I will define and expand on this important concept, from its historical background into its future perspective.
Some people call it the “digital fluidity.”
What is it exactly? Why is it important? How will it emerge? How does it relate to the real world? And most importantly, what’s DexGrid’s role in this whole thing?
THE METAVERSE EMERGES
For the sake of this paper, the term “Metaverse” is used in its broader digital context of social and economic things enabled by the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), existing on the largest network, Ethereum.
As the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible-Token (NFT) mania grows in interest, so has the conversation around the metaverse.
The metaverse will be an orchestration of many different layers and technologies, but it will fall upon a single shared source-of-truth that all components of the metaverse will abide by. This shared truth layer must be credibly neutral for all parties to adopt it.
Objects, both fungible and non-fungible, will make up the metaverse and all those objects must know that all other objects exist. From this foundation, we can create a ledger of all objects in the known metaverse, as well as their shared history of interactions and stories.
Understanding the metaverse requires stripping it into its component parts, and then recomposing it into a single narrative of what it is.
Ethereum facilitates the creation of infinite different digital ecosystems, enabling an entire universe of untapped economic and social opportunities.
DexGrid reveals them as fully integrated into human’s most basic needs, water, and electricity.
This renaissance will unfold by more closely aligning the market value of assets with our human values.
BUILDING THE METAVERSE FROM THE BOTTOM UP
The metaverse is a new organizing body for the digital age. But we have seen this before! Prior to defining the metaverse, we need to define the iterations that have come before it and take a closer look at the Nation State.
A Nation-State is a unified body of incentives and desires (think military force, expanding empire, …), using people inside of it (think consumption, taxes, …) to achieve those desires and enforcing penalties (think police, legal system, …) onto those who do not follow the rules of the established system.
The Nation-State is one central registry of everything inside its domain that is worth registering. Nation-States like order and need it to function and thus employ systems of order to account for all the things which it has power over.
FROM THE UNIVERSE OF A TRADITIONAL NATION-STATE
We have many ordering phenomena define our lives by the desires of Nation-States:
Social Security number: 123–45–6789
Physical address: 1234 Taylor Ave N, Unit #56
Telephone number: (123) 456–7890
Business EIN number: 123–45–6789
Bank account number: 123456789
Healthcare insurance number: 123456789
The serialization of the people and entities inside of a Nation-State helps a state become aware of what composes it. Once a Nation-State accounts for everything it controls, it can also begin to tax everything.
It goes much further than just serializing people and their businesses.
The current orderly Nation-State structure we have is built upon previous attempts to account for the value of the land that tax collectors manage. Traditionally, land would be evaluated and measured on its ability to produce yield on its crops, and the Nation-State would employ surveyors to properly access the value of land, based on the value of the crops that the land could yield. Good, fertile land would produce more therefore would be proportionally taxed more than arid land.
The Nation-State would go through strenuous efforts to ensure that it was accounting for all the value that it had dominion over, as knowing this would lead to high tax revenue for the State.
This is how wild, diverse forests would get turned into homogenous crops of one specific type of tree. Forests turned to grids of trees suitable to be farmed for lumber. Wild plains turned into orderly pastures with only one kind of crop. Chaotic, unsettled lands turned into grids of streets, all with numbers.
Nation-States need things to be orderly, numbered, and accounted for, to optimize their ability to coordinate resources. The central registry of a Nation-State needs to be aware of all valuable resources inside of what it has control over, so it can properly extract taxes and grow the State.
In contrast, nature needs to be wild and chaotic to survive and grow (the violent law of the strong versus the weak making the ecosystems stronger). Nation-states need to be orderly, numbered and accounted for to survive and grow (for instance, the Greek and Roman empires).
TO THE UNIVERSE OF A DIGITAL NATION-STATE
The crypto industry has recently bumped up against this Nation-State desire to label and subsequently tax everything. By its lack of oversight of property and ownership in the digital universe, the tax collecting ability of the US Treasury has not yet caught up with an economic system that it cannot control.
In addition, the ability of crypto to self-govern its protocol via code has resulted in several stablecoins, potentially competing with the supremacy of the US Dollar over dollarized countries.
This is why governments do not like crypto.
The Nation-State desire to account for everything is good for the health of the system as defined, but it comes at the cost of individual freedom, mostly in terms of privacy. Nation-States reducing all humans and their property down to a serialized number for tax collection purposes is inhumane and restrictive of freedom, and why there is always pushback (most often squashed by the government forces) against government overreach.
Why the need to share a social security number on almost all paperwork and risking it getting hacked? Why the need to show a drivers license, with our address, our license number and other confidential information just to prove that we are twenty-one or older?
That is because the Nation-State, in its traditional, governmental form, has no interest to protect the freedom and privacy of its members. At the very least, collecting all information on their members is way more important to them than protecting their members. This failure also applies to companies.
The Nation-State is built upon a central intelligence about the state of itself, as well as the world around it.
It is looking to “know” the world around it and extract its resources.
This concept explains the frequent oppression of indigenous cultures by Nation-States.
Nomads are difficult to tax because they cannot be found at one specific location. The resources they produce and consume are nebulous and difficult to trace because they are produced in a disorderly fashion. Nation-States do not know how to measure the value of the goods that are produced or consumed “in the wild”, in other words “the unaccounted for”.
Indigenous cultures inherently have not mixed well with Nation-States. Indigenous people operate closer in harmony with nature, whereas Nation-States want to consume nature’s disordered chaos and output ordered civilization (historically including religion). We have seen Nation-States confine and restrict indigenous cultures into smaller and smaller areas of land, as the desires of the Nation-State begin to capture and order the world around non-Nation-State cultures.
This has become a significant blemish upon the current social structure of the world, and one of the great sources of stress and inequality across global society.
If larger and more just human organizational structures are ever going to emerge, they must get rid of cultural bias over the legitimacy of identities or objects under their domain.
SEEING LIKE A PROTOCOL
Protocols, in the sense of crypto-economic systems, can manage significant amounts of responsibility previously held by the nation-states, while preserving the rights of the individual to maximally express their desires upon the world around them.
With growing communities, protocols have evolved into neo-Nations.
Ethereum is the largest, most developed and secured neo-Nation. More importantly, it is the most credibly neutral neo-Nation. And by far! No one controls it, and everyone secures it at the same time.
It is a Nation in the clouds, with bottom-up opt-in participation, rather than imposed top-down coercion.
While the mechanisms for participation are different, we see similar functions of Nation-States also facilitated by Ethereum.
Ethereum also likes things ordered and serialized. In fact, for anything to exist on Ethereum, it must comply with the laws of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Want to establish a settlement on Ethereum? You will need a confidential Ethereum address.
Want an identity on Ethereum? You will need an ENS name (think nico.eth as opposed to nico.com).
Want to deploy a token? You will need a contract address for the token.
Want to buy an NFT, for instance the digital representation of a form of art? Your specific Ethereum address will need to interact with a specific contract address, so that the EVM can know which part of the ledger to update.
Ethereum is a protocol for serializing objects into the metaverse. Smart contract information deployed to Ethereum initializes the state of NFTs.
To do all that and more, Ethereum does not need to employ land surveyors or have treasury departments. It does not need labor to understand the value of the resources inside its domain.
Ethereum knows, the public knows, however its individual members can maintain their privacy:
Known: Address location (confidential but publicly viewable), ETH amount and number of tokens owned (confidential but publicly viewable), value of tokens owned (publicly provable).
Since Ethereum is an internet protocol, it does not have the capacity nor the desire to audit its members or come knocking to collect taxes. One of the significant improvements of Ethereum as an organizational system is the cost-efficiencies in maintaining liveness of the ledger.
By removing its own material desires of maximal tax extraction, Ethereum collects only the minimum amount of tax revenue (e.g., transaction fees) needed to maintain and secure the system.
Taxes are paid in the form of transaction fee by the users of the protocol governing the Ethereum neo-Nation to those who incur public costs to secure it (think Proof-Of-Work or Proof-Of-Stake).
The higher the credible neutrality of a protocol is, the higher the security needs to be. Therefore, the higher the cost to secure it. This explains why Ethereum is considered expensive to use in its current state as the Layer 1. Everyone wants to use its block space!
This state has recently been evolving with the deployment of less expensive sub-layers, for instance, Layer 2, which are less neutral in their protocol but still benefit from the security of the Layer 1.
OBJECT PERMANENCE IN THE METAVERSE
Whatever the metaverse is, it will require object permanence.
Interactions of items existing in the metaverse shall behave like items in the real verse. Objects in the metaverse must collide/combine with other objects in the metaverse (think magnets). If they do not, are they even objects at all and is it even a universe? Quick reminder from earlier in the paper that objects are both fungible (mutually interchangeable, like money turned into a cup of coffee) and non-fungible (unique, cannot be replaced with something else).
To interact, metaversal objects must be aware of each other’s existence. In the digital world, this can only be achieved if all objects are known to a single source of truth of all the known items in the metaverse.
While Nation-States assign identification numbers to objects it discovers inside its domain, individuals assign numbers to the objects that they create on Ethereum (top down versus bottom up). The process of tokenization manifests the object into the metaverse and makes that object known to all the other objects in the same plane of existence.
This protocol enables a digital universe of things to be born and organically grow.
This is Ethereum’s role as a neo-nation; enable registration of all the objects and make them interact with each other.
Humans invented writing when they needed to make records of object-ownership in the real world, and this invention began the process of recorded history.
The metaverse is happening via a similar process. First, we create the universal ledger. Then we document the items that exist inside this universal ledger for the public (the world essentially) to view it and interact with it. Then, a digital civilization, the metaverse, will emerge around that single source of truth.
The universal ledger, Ethereum, is the underlying skeleton of the metaverse. Everything in the real verse has a digital signature integrated into the metaverse. Everything is an object in the metaverse.
In the metaverse, all combinations are enabled, streamlining all things like DeFi, NFTs, Identity and all the “Sensible objects” (things in the real verse that are perceptible by the senses).
For instance, a DexGrid user can use Energy Credits (fungible object) for both their electricity needs (sensible object) and their other activities outside of the DexGrid platform (universal) while at the same time earn more Energy Credits (regenerative) as a reward to use the platform.
They can also use their electricity wallet to borrow money for their needs. They can also digitalize their properties, art creations and all things from their real-verse into the metaverse, all through their trusted wallet.
We are just touching the tip of the iceberg. Many more opportunities will arise from this space.
The first shockwave happened in 2017 with the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) phenomena on Ethereum. Founders were able to raise capital for their projects, through the tokenization process, directly from the public as opposed to a specific list of accredited investors. The debate is still open today on how much and what kind of regulation is needed. However, its success was impressive. For comparison, in 2014, the amount raised through ICOs was approx. 0.024% of the amount raised through VC funding. End of 2017, this value rose to 13.39%.
Similarly, DeFi has grown to a $100 billion+ within a year since 2020 and is expected to reach $800 billion by the end of 2022.
Focusing solely on the digitalization of certain forms of art (some might be debatable…), the global NFT market grew from $338 million of sales volume in 2020 to an $11 billion marketplace in Q3 2021. The prediction is for $370 billion within a year.
On the breaking news front, Visa recently announced that they are gradually shifting their real verse operations to the metaverse. This means that Visa is setting itself up to enable its users worldwide to process their financial needs through Ethereum.
Facebook also recently broke news. Their initial proposal of a closed-end network based stablecoin, “Diem” backfired at them. There was too much Zuckerberg-control vibe around it. This week, they announced their partnership with Coinbase and Paxo instead, which is a stablecoin settled on the Ethereum network. There is no going around the credible neutral layer.
Infinite combinations of digitalized objects will result in a myriad of untapped opportunities for DexGrid’s users.
“Empowered by DexGrid” takes a whole different meaning.
HUMANS INTERACTING IN THE METAVERSE
Like all organizational systems that came before it, Ethereum is composed of people, commonly referred to as Layer 0 (Layer 1 being Ethereum as the neutral credible layer, Layer 2 being the faster and cheaper technology connected to the Layer 1 for scalability purposes).
But so far Ethereum has had difficulty in knowing who the individuals who compose it actually are.
The blockchain cannot easily serialize and store our human soul and identity. That is something exclusively in the spiritual and “meatspace” layer of the world, and always will be.
Nation-States do not care about the human spirit; it does not create value to them. They “account” us in their identification ledger and move on. Our Nation-State bestow our identity upon us for the simple fact of being born in this state (not even in some cases). Being born somewhere separates us as human beings, with some lucky and others left aside. Then, we are “identified” and forced to update our “identification” every few years so that the Nation-State registry can track us to better tax us.
In the metaverse, non-physical (digital) attributes can be used for identity.
Each Ethereum address is unique and is free for everyone. Addresses are self-custody wallets that are not capable of linking an address to a person. Only the individual holding the private key of an Ethereum address can use it to interact with this address and to custody digital objects. While addresses are confidential, they are publicly viewable on the DLT.
Currency and other fungible assets are designed to remove associations between owner and unit, meaning that a specific person or group does not own such digital units. Universal rules of ownership are encoded into the smart contract governing these digital values. This approach is fundamental to the credible neutrality of the universal settlement layer.
For instance, a digital currency is supposed to be a faceless apolitical public utility that holds no bias and accepts no information about the entities that use it.
Tokens on Ethereum come and go fluidly in and out of wallets. Since those wallets are not associated to any specific individual but rather to a specific set of private keys, once fungible tokens co-mingle with other tokens, they lose any sort of traceability. While the wallets can easily be traced on the public ledger, the tokens can become untraceable.
An individual can have multiple Ethereum wallets. If one of them holds a balance of tokens like ETH, UNI, AAVE, MKR, or any other Ethereum based token, it could sell all tokens to another wallet created by the same individual and rebuy them from another wallet, still owned by the same individual. Wallets do not have any link with each other, they are just addresses on Ethereum, non-differentiated, non-unique, created through the same rules of encrypted code.
A fair and open global financial system requires the inherent neutrality of Ethereum tokens. However, this fantastic attribute falls short of establishing what would be required to host a digital nation in the cloud.
This is where the power of Non-Fungible Tokens comes in.
NON-FUNGIBLE HUMAN IN THE CRYPTO ERA
In the metaverse, we choose how to express our identity.
Let us take the example of a Cryptokitty on Ethereum. A Cryptokitty has a serial number which, according to a specific type of smart-contract code, differentiates it from all the other Cryptokitties. If a Cryptokitty is associated to an owner, then its ownership is associated to a specific Ethereum address, unless sold via a publicly viewable market to another wallet, which is now its owner. However, it is not possible to privately send a specific Cryptokitty from a wallet to another wallet.
NFTs are not mutually interchangeable, hence not fungible. NFTs are, by definition, traceable to every Ethereum addresses they touch. Once it touches an address, this address, therefore whoever owns its private key, becomes the owner of this NFT. Using the Ethereum blockchain technology makes this ownership a verified and public proof of ownership.
Rather than the address itself, it is the objects that the address holds that Ethereum is concerned with.
All fungible tokens on Ethereum, like ETH for instance, abide by the ERC20 smart contract standards. These standards do not associate an identity to an Ethereum address. To the contrary, NFTs abide by ERC721 smart contract standards, with a direct association between the token and a wallet address.
As a real metaphysical being, people can transverse the meta-sphere and interact with the objects they come across in their travels.
NFTs are specific, and thus ownership over an NFT illustrates specific taste. Individuals choosing privacy over advertising will keep their NFTs-tied wallet address confidential. On the other hand, individuals may choose to advertise their taste by using an ENS name associated to their library of NFTs.
NFTs begin to form a shadow of identity behind the private keys that control them.
It is becoming trivially easy to understand the human behind an address when people add NFTs to their social media profile pictures. NFTs can be associated to all specific things of the real verse.
Need to vote? 1 age NFT + 1 party NFT + 1 nationality NFT.
Going to the nightclub? 1 age 21 NFT.
Traveling to another country? 1 nationality NFT
ENS names do the same trick. In fact, ENS is making great strides with adding an identity layer to the ENS name itself, beyond just a human-readable name appended to an Ethereum address.
ENS addresses are NFTs too, and they contribute their own unique layer of identity on Ethereum.
SERIALIZING HUMANS ON ETHEREUM
Ethereum does not bestow an individual’s identity upon them the way a Nation-State assigns a number at birth.
By their own actions, individuals choose who they are on Ethereum.
Why the need to know our skin color, religion, hair color when we can have our identities defined in the metaverse?
Ethereum does not know an individual as a specific human, nor does it care. But when an individual purchases an NFT, they are selecting one specific NFT from the millions+ that exist and make the decision to have it become a digital representation of their digital self.
On Ethereum, we choose our identity. Rather than have our identity bestowed upon us in the form of an eight-digit number, Ethereum asks us: what identifies us?
In the Renaissance, a time marked by the rise of the individual out of the tyranny of oppressive, top-down religion, history shows a transformation of art from 2D profiles and primitive perspectives, towards 3D representation and photo-realistic styles.
The metaverse offers a similar change in thinking, this time regarding the properties of identity.
In the legacy world, our physical attributes shape our identity. In fact, Nation-States use skin color, eye color, hair color, sex, and height to register our properties to its central database so it can keep track of us (passports, driver licenses, …).
Ethereum does not (and should not) care! It has no way of knowing the color of the skin, or any physical characteristic.
There is nothing stopping humans with specific physical properties from selecting a digital representation that is entirely different than their DNA.
Physical attributes and/or biometrics should NOT be what defines us. Forget about retinal scans and fingerprints.
The movie Ready Player One has displayed an interesting concept. Avatars defining someone’s identity. The individuals’ privacy is secured as long as the avatars in the metaverse don’t disclose their real name.
The practice of mindfulness teaches individuals how to separate their mind from their body, and to be more aware of their internal processes as independent from the processes of their physical body. Our human form is an overlay upon our human spirit. While these things interact, they are also distinct.
Given the opportunity, our human spirit could, in theory, choose to embody a different vessel. Our face is just what we see in the mirror. Not what we are. Our actions define what we are and in the metaverse, our actions are unlimited. We can access all things!
The future is a combination of Ready Player One type avatars combined with specific NFTs, enabling individuals to fulfill their lifestyles while owning their identities.
Self-identification is the most revolutionary aspect arriving in the metaverse. As soon as we have established ourselves, we will have easy access to all the things existing and upcoming.
Once humans evolved from nomadic hunter-gatherers to agricultural settlers, they started creating new things and collecting them.
With the metaverse, we go from collecting things to integrate them into our lives and exchanging them with the world.
COMPOSING THE METAVERSE
Whatever the metaverse is, it will compose itself as an emergent structure.
There will not be a specific genesis moment or location. The metaverse will gradually manifest all around us. Shared and interactive objects will compose the metaverse.
To become more immersive, the metaverse will have to manifest cosmetically. The computation required to produce a cosmetic layer upon the metaverse will not come from a blockchain; that is technologically unfeasible. Realistically, each universe of objects with their respective rules will render the metaverse. For instance, DeFi manifests with its own rules while gaming, arts, properties do by NFTs rules. The same applies to the electric marketplaces that DexGrid will enable for each community microgrid.
What makes all this part of the metaverse is the shared registry of metaversal objects. Just like SMS, and TCIP, the protocol identifying objects will build the metaverse.
If it matters in the real world, it can be serialized in the metaverse.
The metaverse may begin with several distinct and incompatible silos. These separate silos will only acknowledge certain specified objects that are relevant to that corner of the verse. The only connections to the rest of the metaverse will be via deep connective structures like open exchange platforms, each focused on a specific category of object.
Many items will only be relevant to a specific locale of the metaverse. However, liquidity providers will connect them all within the Ethereum ecosystem, abiding by the same standards already defined and accepted by the entire protocol.
But just as DeFi slowly migrated from separate applications into single universal financial structure “the money-lego,” the metaverse will stitch itself together via similar fluidity mechanisms.
The metaverse will grow by appending larger and more seamless components of a metaverse-universe upon a central foundation of asset and object identification. It will slowly manifest into one composed alternative dimension of digital existence.
Ethereum has positioned itself as the Economic and Social Foundation of the Metaverse.
Even though each fragmented silo of the metaverse manifests according to their own specifics, the global metaverse requires a set of standards:
· A neutral credibility
· A central asset registry
· A layer of financial/exchange/liquidity applications
· An economic engine
This is what Ethereum is. A registry of tokens. A composition of applications. A native money and economic system.
DexGrid is an application improving fundamental human needs in connection to a world of digital opportunities.
Composed together, these are the underlying foundations of an economic system for the metaverse.
HUMAN ORGANIZATION IN THE METAVERSE
To allow humans to organize and interact with each other, Ethereum offers an entire ecosystem replicating corporate organizations. These structures are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).
Think of them as a better economic and social version of a corporation setup made possible by the flexibility provided by the Ethereum technology.
Thanks to its interoperability and encoded smart-contract capacity, incentives-based protocols have replaced the traditional chain of command.
DAOs have built-in treasuries that no one has the authority to access without the approval of the group. Proposals and voting mechanisms govern decisions to ensure everyone in the organization has a voice.
DAOs have different purposes and memberships. Some can be charities, or a freelancer network or ventures and grants or any for-profit type of organization.
Some may operate under a token-based membership with voting rights proportional to the number and/or longevity of tokens held. Some may be fully open to the public without permission (permissionless) while others may require the members to accept new entrants (necessary when focused on a specific expertise, like software developers for instance).
Founding members can fully customize DAOs for whatever purpose of the organization to be. However, all DAOs share a common set of functions that is publicly verifiable, encoded, and immutable.
Having DAOs on Ethereum means that the barrier to entry is negligible. Anyone can access, anyone can leave, anytime. This means that anyone can create a DAO, with a few lines of code and attract any talent from around the globe, with various incentives and rules embedded.
Once again, these opportunities are available to DexGrid’s users. While artists will be able to display and sell their art, individuals and groups of individuals will be able to create and operate their DAO. Solar associations, non-profit organizations, residential associations, among many others, will be connected to the metaverse, all through their digital wallet.
ULTRA-SOUND ECONOMICS & INCLUSIVE SOCIAL GROWTH
We started this paper illustrating the desires of a Nation-State and alluded to how its physical nature establishes material desires upon the land over which it controls.
Crypto-economic systems like Ethereum are a step-function improvement of the relationship between the individual and the social organizational structure that Ethereum offers. Rather than devolve humanity into a yield farm it harvests, Ethereum is a public goods system that optimizes for minimal value extraction.
Rather than telling it how it is, the community tells Ethereum what it is. Rather than optimizing for rent-seeking, Ethereum charges based on the size of the object (in data terms), and the complexity of its interactions with objects around it. The more complex, the larger, the more expensive.
All economic systems we have seen in history has had some sort of tax collection system. All systems need to maintain self-protection and the stronger the economy can finance its own protection, the better the civilization does.
Like any software, Ethereum can update its protocol. The community proposes improvements, the community votes on them, the developers implement them.
As the metaverse expands, more objects will arrive inside of Ethereum’s block space, and some portion of these objects will have continued on-chain interactions with other objects. This will require state-updates on Ethereum to update the state of the surrounding metaverse.
As more objects are introduced in the metaverse, more applications are made available for users to interact with these objects. Users being the first and best supporters of an application, it makes them the most adequate supporters of the interest of this application. These users are essentially the best shareholders that exist and should be retributed for their loyalty and contributions.
The metaverse will see a brand-new set of investors, essentially holders of the protocols and applications tokens, shifting the wealth of property investors from a limited number of institutions and high net worth individuals to the actual communities of users.
DEXGRID WITHIN THE FUTURE
The vision for the future is the opening of human interactions on all things social and economic like the world has never witnessed before. It is also the accessibility to reliable electricity for the individuals and businesses. All in a fair, level playing field.
Communities will be at the center of it and will organically set themselves as active supporters of things, technologies, ideologies, concepts, etc. Doing so will be rewarded at the application layer.
These communities existing in the traditional world will thrive in this multiverse world where the underlying trusted settlement layer enables all things to be accessible to all these communities and individuals. Tremendous untapped opportunities will be made available. Some have already been tapped as displayed by the exponential growth in the $3 trillion crypto space with self-custody wallets, DeFi and NFTs.
The next organic evolution of the metaverse will include digital identities, gradually eliminating any form of discrimination. It will also appear in the “real-verse” in which DexGrid operates and connects the communities to the metaverse.
However, as history has shown us, there will be abuses along the way. Humans being humans, there will be greed, attempts to attack privacy, scammers, and power grabs. In this new era, trusting the digital bridge to the metaverse should be the same for the communities as trusting the resiliency of their electricity access. Anything less is unacceptable!
At DexGrid, our perspective is that even though decentralization is the only way towards achieving the necessary trust of the settlement layer, the real-verse needs to incorporate certain aspects of local centralization as a necessary path to resiliency.
Energy resiliency, for instance, is easier to achieve when local microgrid anchors have the financial power to size up their systems to the benefit of their communities. However, in an efficient marketplace, no single party or group should be able to disproportionally balance the system to their favor. All parties should be able to have equal access to these opportunities.
Privacy of our users, open and easy access to all objects and opportunities are fundamentals that are dear to us. We will fight for them and ensure that our ideals and principles are sustained for the benefit of the communities.
Contact us to help us bring forth our vision:
Media: DexGrid blog, Twitter, Linkedin
Questions, interests? Reach us
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READS/LISTENS
Lots of credit goes to the Bankless team on topics related to Ethereum and the concept of the Nation-State. We strongly encourage our readers to check out the great podcasts below for more information.
Crypto-economic systems (Ethereum) are the next evolution of human mass-coordination. From hunter-gatherers, to religion, to nation-states, to digital protocols, humans have found increasingly better technologies to operate at larger scales of group coordination.
Ethereum hosts a digital nation in the cloud, which operates on bottom-up incentives rather than top-down coercion.
Continuing from A Bankless Nation, the Ethereum protocol is an extension of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, but instead of an absolute monarchy or executive leadership, control over the leviathan is shattered and shared amongst the people that compose the body of the Leviathan.
This gives new energy to the idea of “A Nation by the people, for the people.”
The meaning of “Leviathan” in that regard is the proposal that the natural basic state of humankind is one of anarchy, with the strong dominating the weak. Our one natural right is of self-preservation.
The crypto revolution is a revolution in the means of exchange and technology, but the legacy of crypto will instead be a renaissance in human culture and social interaction.
ARTICLE DEFINITIONS
Block space: A block records some or all of the most recent transactions that have not yet entered any prior blocks of a ledger. Thus, a block is like a page of a ledger or record book. Each time a block is ‘completed’, it gives way to the next block in a blockchain.
Cryptocurrency: A digital currency in which transactions are verified and records maintained by a decentralized system using cryptography, rather than by a centralized authority.
DAO: A Decentralized Autonomous Organization is the replication of a corporate-like structure in the form of a software running on a blockchain that offers users a built-in model for the collective management of its code.
DeFi: Decentralized Finance is a financial system that reimagines financial transactions by removing intermediaries and is based on blockchain technology, typically Ethereum. Various financial transactions are possible with DeFi’s ‘smart contracts’ that execute financial transactions under certain coded conditions.
DLT: Also known as blockchain. It is a permissionless digital system for recording the transaction of assets in which the transactions and their details are recorded in multiple places at the same time. A distributed ledger can be used to record static data, such as a registry, and dynamic data, such as financial transactions.
ENS: Ethereum Name Service is a name and lookup service built on the Ethereum blockchain that allows crypto users to translate their machine-readable addresses to human-readable addresses.
Ethereum: Ethereum is a platform powered by blockchain technology that is best known for its native cryptocurrency, called Ether, or ETH. The distributed nature of blockchain technology is what makes the Ethereum platform secure and the largest neutral settlement layer.
EVM: The Ethereum Virtual Machine is the software platform that developers can use to create decentralized applications (DApps) on Ethereum. This virtual machine is where all Ethereum accounts and smart contracts live.
Governing protocol: Blockchain governance can be regarded as the integration of norms and culture, the laws and the code, the people and the institutions that facilitate coordination and together determine a given organization.
Liveness: For distributed systems, liveness means that a protocol is able to exchange messages among nodes, with the nodes successfully coming to a consensus that the history of transactions is accurate. Nodes are comparable to small servers governed by the same consensus and that serve to store blocks of data on the ledger.
Metaverse in the dexgrided space: The word “Metaverse” is made up of the prefix “meta” (meaning beyond) and the stem “verse” (a formation from the universe). This is the version of the commonly known Metaverse used in its broader digital context of social and economic things enabled by the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for the people.
Metaverse in the Zuckerberg world: In futurism and science fiction, the term is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets.
Microgrid: A small network of electricity users with a local source of supply that is usually attached to a centralized national grid but is able to function independently. In contrast, a Community Microgrid is an off-grid microgrid for which reliable electricity alongside social and economic opportunities are made available to their members.
NFT: NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token, which means that it’s a one-of-a-kind digital asset that is identified as unique and is associated to a specific wallet address. The most popular NFTs right now include artwork and music, but can also include videos and even tweets. Traits of an individual’s identity, like their citizenship and age, can also be digitalized as an NFT.
Smart Contract: Smart contracts are simply programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. They typically are used to automate the execution of an agreement so that all participants can be immediately certain of the outcome, without any intermediary’s involvement or time loss.
Stablecoin: Any cryptocurrency designed to have a relatively stable price, typically through being pegged to a commodity or currency or having its supply regulated by an algorithm.
TCIP: (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) The global standard networking protocol.
TCP/IP prepares and forwards data packets over private local area and wide area networks (LANs and WANs) as well as the Internet. In fact, the Internet is the world’s largest TCP/IP network.
Token: A crypto token is a virtual currency token or a denomination of a cryptocurrency. It represents a tradable asset or utility that resides on its own blockchain and allows the holder to use it for investment or economic purposes.
Web1, Web2, Web3: Three versions defining the first three phases of the World Wide Web. Web1 is commonly referred to as static and personal websites. Web2 usually refers to the social web, enabling users communication through medias. Web3, more recently, refers to Web concepts associated with blockchain-based decentralization and token economics.