The Metaverse has a new set of heavyweight supporters from the entertainment industry, who plan to invest in the rising platform as strategic members of Outlier Ventures, it was reported on Friday.
US hip hop giant Snoop Dogg and Canadian music producer Deadmau5 have announced they would join the firm to invest in and advise startups joining Outlier Ventures’ Base Camp Accelerator programme.
Excited to join the @OVioHQ partnership alongside @SnoopDogg @deadmau5 @sandeepnailwal @borgetsebastien Shaun Neff, Gabby Dizon, and more. Let’s accelerate the open #metaverse and build the #future. #web3 #blockchain @jamie247 pic.twitter.com/8c4N6naFdU
— CathyHackl.eth – Godmother Of The Metaverse (@CathyHackl) November 19, 2021
The London-based venture capital firm aims to launch its base camp in early 2022, and is one of the first companies to invest in cryptocurrencies and an open Metaverse platform since its founding in 2014.
The pair will also collaborate with other major players in the group, including Sebastien Borget, Sandbox Co-Founder, and Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon Network Founder.
Outlier Ventures has earned over 5,000 new applications and helped raise more than $250 million in seed funding, it said in a press statement, adding it planned to accelerate over 100 startups in 2022.
Building an Open-Source Metaverse
The news come after Outlier Ventures released a major report calling on the XR industry to build a decentralised Metaverse platform amid skyrocketing growth in interest from the sector.
The platform, The Open Metaverse Operating System (OS), would create a “shared an [open-source] operating system” using open protocols with decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens, among others, using the open source Web 3 stack.
The report said it was “critical to interrogate their design principles, business models, and terms of service” to allow online citizens to decide how to invest in the Metaverse or join alternative platforms.
Outlier Ventures has also created frameworks for assessing Metaverse building and toolkits to create alternatives based on user-focused efforts to preserve identity, data, and wealth sovereignty, it read.
Jamie Burke, Outlier Ventures Founder and Chief Executive, said,
”We need the best people from across finance, culture, and technology to bring the knowledge, reach, and capital to accelerate the open metaverse. The metaverse will eventually connect every platform, virtual world, and game into a single permissionless peer-to-peer economy native to the internet”
Cathy Hackl, Chief Metaverse Officer and CEO of the Futures Intelligence Group, added the Metaverse would represent of the “most important technological landscapes of our generation” and would serve as a “backdrop” for interactions across society.
She stressed the Metaverse “must be built on decentralized, open infrastructure” and that Outlier Ventures and a few other organisations “understood this vision.”
The comments echo similar statements from a panel discussion at the Virtual and Augmented Reality Association’s (VRARA) Global Summit Europe in September, which urged Metaverse builders to develop the platform under an open framework and avoid centralisation under a handful of powerful tech firms.
The news comes after Morgan Stanley said on Tuesday it saw roughly $8 trillion USD in profits, which it believed would become the “next generation [of] social media, streaming and gaming platform,” and may initially facilitate eCommerce operations for online purchases, according to an analyst for the firm.
Massive interest in the Metaverse spiked after Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Chief Executive and Founder, announced in August he would shift his former enterprise Facebook to become a “Metaverse company” and later rebranded the firm to Meta in late October, and later unveiled a collection of Metaverse-based applications for users.
