Saro McKenna, co-founder of Alien Worlds, joined Cheddar News to discuss the latest headlines in the metaverse space. 

Opening Bell

Metaverse Monday: Video Music Awards, Metaverse Workplaces, and Virtual Land Prices

for more insight. We're joined by Saro McKenna, co founder of Alien Worlds, one of the world's most popular Blockchain games. Thank you so much for being here. So sorry, we gotta ask you, you know, this comes as a time when a lot of brands are really trying to experiment with the metaverse. So do you think this is a smart promotional strategy for M T V and V M A S and how will this actually encourage users to turn on the awards show if they do? Yeah, sure. Hi, Santa, it's great to be here. I think it's really important that companies, brands artists and people themselves are actually getting into the matters using the technology and experimenting. So yeah, it's a smart move. You know, at some point you have to sort of throw your hand a ring and begin the discovery process of what consumers are looking for, what level of adoption they're ready for. What works in terms of artists being able to deliver the type of experience that they want to. So yeah, we're just at the beginning, I think that there's quite a lot of failures happening to, you know, the technology is still nascent and also um being, you know, within a metaverse concert is still not the same thing as being at a physical concert, but it's not always an option to be there physically. And so it's it's great to be developing the technology to try and deliver experiences that are, you know, getting increasingly rich over time within the metaverse. Speaking of all that kind of experimenting, we know that musical acts like BTS, charlie, X es, Travis scott, They have all held these concerts on virtual platforms, like a Fortnite and Minecraft or roadblocks. What does it mean though for MTV to actually acknowledge the genre of musical performance and what does it mean for the broader musical industry? I think it means that they recognize that there's something really disruptive about this technology, the power that it gives to consumers, and in fact, the new opportunities that it gives to artists and they're trying to capitalize on that, you know, they're trying to be part of that bandwagon. You know, one of the things that's really exciting for me as a founder of a large metaverse is how users themselves are creating these types of grassroots artistic musical commercial experience is one of the great things about metaverse technology, especially Blockchain, metaverse technology is that it allows people to get together and to produce content and other types of goods and serve for each other for a profit. And so what we see then, is this massive opening up of creativity and entrepreneurial activity in the metaverse. So, of course, you know, traditional companies, legacy media companies need to learn how to capitalize on that, and, and not to let those, you know, profit potentialities just just passed them by. So, you know, MTV, and and all of the, you know, artists that are signed, a big record labels are learning how to perform within a metaverse. It's a different medium that involves you know different types of technology. People are kind of floating around with their avatars and and the you know the way that you deliver the sound and the experience is completely different. So technicians and the artists themselves are learning about that. But I think more than that they're learning how this new peer to peer technology is changing the taste that consumers will have and how they need to capitalize on that. Sarah also want to get your thoughts on this. You have tech giants like meta apple google and even Microsoft. They're moving ahead into the metaverse. However, employees aren't too keen on the idea of a metaverse that has a workplace component to it. Right? According to a survey by software company Express VPN 77% of employers expressed some interest in immersive work environments like the metaverse compared with only 57% of employees. The survey also found that 63% of employees Are concerned about their employers collecting data in the metaverse data on them. In particular, employees are also worried about potential workplace surveillance with more than 50% concerned about employers tracking their real time location and real time screen monitoring monitoring. So with that I wonder what do you think is driving this disconnect between employers desire to have some sort of work environment in the metaverse and employees having that at a far and more significant, lower rate. Yeah, so I mean it's no secret that, you know, some of metas technology, you know, is fairly um emphasizes eyeball tracking and, you know, tracking of users through hardware. Um And of course the extension of that two employees in their time will will be met with resistance, but, you know, by employees and by people that that's perfectly understandable. You know, what's really interesting about the metaphors today is that it's a whole new economic environment where people, individual people are creating new things that they're selling to each other and making money off of that. Um It's like a whole new economy and that's how we've seen this explosion of new technology and and new goods and services within the metaverse. So if you're a big company, I mean, it's a similar theme to the last story that we were talking about, where if you're a big company and you're facing this massive disruptive technology that has the power to bring people together to create new lines of business for people to potentially disinter me, mediate your normal, you know, ways of making profit. You need to find a way to get in on that, right? And but but for employees that dynamic isn't really there, right? So they might be, you know, using zoom to connect, they might be being asked to go back increasingly to the office, but it's not necessarily in their interest for their employees, for their employers to be sort of encouraging them to work within the metaverse, whatever that means. I I mean ultimately at this point most companies don't know what these terms mean, and when they're saying that they're open to it, that means that, you know, some of them are looking into the beginnings of bringing people together in that way having their employees interact, you bring up a good point because some companies don't understand it, they don't know it. So how can these companies address the concerns of their employees when it comes to the metaverse, especially if they're not already in that space? So um the metaverse is more than immersive technology, you know, like so for example through hardware, like the headsets, the metaverse is a way of people having an identity that they own and that tracks them across their various interactions within that metaverse. So in the same way as we don't necessarily share on facebook everything that happens in our lives, right? So we've got you know for example, linkedin is more for your professional life, and facebook is more for your personal life if you use it at all. So to within the metaverse, do you want to separate out the identity and also by the way, the reputation that you've crew through your various metaverse activities, you want to separate those out between the workplace and your personal life. So whilst you might for example be accumulating N. F. T. S. And and badges that show the different activities that you've undertaken in the metaverse or the content that you've created or the new technology that you've created. You don't necessarily want those badges or there's those N. F. T. S to follow you everywhere you go between you know your your social interactions and your workplace life. So this is one of the key things that all of us within the metaverse are going to need to learn how to do is to manage our identity and our reputation across the different sides, essentially our privacy across the different parts of our metaverse interactions. This is why actually the user owning their their data and their and their Blockchain personality is really important but it's also important then that the user knows how to manage that so that for example their employer doesn't see everything that they're metaverse. Okay that's a good point. Keep it separate. Alright before we go, I got to ask you a little bit more about this story because finally the average price and trading volume of virtual land in the middle has collapsed amid the wider downturn in the Cryptocurrency market, according to the analysts who conducted the information, conducted this research from information. Now the average virtual land prices fell by more than 80%. Meanwhile trading volume is down by more than 90% from November 2021 highs. Now the drop in prices and trading volume comes after a boom in the metaverse virtual land investments now, much like the real life housing market demand has cooled off. Leading buyers who entered at that top nursing heavy losses and a lot of people are kicking themselves right now that they didn't get out sooner. So this crash has reopened debate on whether virtual land is a bonafide investment asset. So Sarah, what's your outlook on the viability of virtual worlds? Yeah, so virtual land is something that you buy because you want to use it within the metaverse that you're in and normally land has value because of its adjacency on a map right? And different meta versus sort of that dynamic works differently. So your adjacency might work in your favor if people have to cross over your land getting from one part of the metaverse to the other or because by being in a sort of preferential place within the map of that metaverse, you get better visibility to people in the metaverse. Um So you know more eyeballs on what you're what you're producing or the event that you're hosting. Um So yeah, so owning land confers some type of value on people because of adjacency, the rises and falls in the value of of that. I mean this is an extremely nascent technology which should be obvious to everybody, right? And the propositions the reasons why you'd be owning the land are normally still being built out by the people who bought them in the first place. I'd be very surprised if many people are selling their digital land that they bought, you know, during the last sort of bull run because most of them are still building them out or using them and learning how to use them in collaboration with their communities. The other thing that I mentioned is this concept of communities and the metaverse, our relationships are more sticky than they are um in other sort of places where we interact online because we're actually collaborating with other people collectively. So it might be the people in your district or your neighbor in a land sense, it might be in a decentralized autonomous organization at tao which you might have access to because of the type of land that you own or where the land is located on that map. So these relationships, the relationships that you're forming with other people a community and you're all working towards a common purpose again, you know, relationships like that don't tend to follow a just because the markets come down and I don't think necessarily people are are selling, you know, and and experiencing this drop off in the market. So yeah, new technology very risky from a financial perspective but from a usability perspective from the things that people are doing and the friendships that they're making the communities that they're forming, the reputation that they're accruing that's all real and that's continuing alright well hopefully the market bounced back and they won't have to worry about it all. Thank you Sarah McKenna, co founder of Alien Worlds