"Why do you care so much about cryptovoxels anyways? It's so niche"

I was recently asked this, here’s the short versoin:

• It was the first NFT I bought (sentimental value)

• First live platform that integrated smart contracts + virtual worlds (launched April 1st, 2018)

  • Land was cheaper and platform was live nearly 2 years before DCL

• First NFT 3D avatar wearables (late 2019 - early 2020)

• Many legendary cryptoartists / collectors first metaverse experience

• IMO it's a perfect lab environment for interoperability

  • Starts with non-standard data / file formats, like many games

  • What we can do can set an example for others in the future

  • No investors, reduces complexity for incentive alignment

• Voxel art is highly accessible, any with zero 3D modeling experience can make stuff

• To prove something about permissionless innovation within the open metaverse

  • Got 5 years of interop experiments with Voxels

• Niche is good, serve users at the long tail of creativity

New drop from jin / 7oroy that goes towards supporting Openvoxels

Underdog Story

I get that building the metaverse is a marathon not a race, but I want to cement Voxels into cryptoart history. IMO it is the Cryptopunks of virtual worlds. The project attracted many early believers in the metaverse and cryptoart before NFTs and Metaverse became hype words. Unlike most other metaverse projects, Voxels has no investors and is fully bootstrapped by parcel sales. The world was live with parcels available to purchase, with affordable pricing, almost 2 years before Decentraland's public launch.

Imagine you're an artist and the choice at the time was either >$1000 for a parcel for a platform with 90k supply and wasn't even live, or <$100 for a parcel in an organically growing city which you can immediately start building in. The data speaks for itself the tale of an underdog.

From 2018-2020 we witnessed a single dev surpass to the forerunning metaverse project of the time in terms of active users, LANDs traded per month, and content created. It was awe inspiring to witness and be part of it.

Voxel Art is Ultra Accessible

Part of what makes Cryptovoxels special is the extreme accessibility of voxel art.

It's much easier for most people to pickup Magicavoxel and start making stuff than learning to 3D model in Blender from scratch (though there's plugins to import vox models to Blender and can export obj from magicavoxel too). Therefore focusing on voxel art interop is a force multiplier for new 3D creators. Also with projects like Smoothvoxels to convert, we can get the best of both worlds for voxels and triangles!

Perfect Case Study + Interoperability Lab

IMO platform lock-in has the opposite effect of having a sense of ownership over our data and creatoins. It's what tore Vitalik up when he lost his Warlock spell one day due to an update, and since then vowed to fight for decentralization. The incentives in crypto align towards having strong digital property rights, owning your data, right of exit. Interoperability is the unlock.

Voxels is an ideal case study for metaverse interop working groups as well; you have UGC wearables, authorship and attribution through a public blockchain, a mixamo rigged base avatar, incentives aligned towards greater ownership and interoperability, and a popular proprietary format (vox) that can be converted to open ones.

Voxels has a really solid and simple costumer app and the mannequin is the perfect representation of a placeholder avatar.

The lessons learned and tools made in making Voxels wearables and avatars more interoperable can prove to be very useful when tackling other projects. We’re mainly dealing with attachables here, not layered clothing like jackets and pants which also simplifies things just enough. Openvoxels is a perfect environment to R&D interop in, plus have immediate real world benefits. The stakes aren’t too high since the economy is not overall strong for Voxels wearables, which alleviates pressure to try new things.

To Spread Culture

There's always been a strong gift giving culture within Voxels of creators sharing wearables with each another. I still carry the wearables gifted to me in Cryptovoxels. Gift giving is a wholesome and sacred practice worth spreading across the metaverse.

I started to explore VRMs in 2020, making one-offs and content to promote avatar interoperability. This has lead to much wider awareness and adoption of the VRM format, which back then was pretty niche and known mostly only within the Japanese / vtuber communities.

It's part of a multi-year effort to catalyze the vision of a virtual economy that spans multiple platforms and engines, akin to the ancient Silkroad. The railways of the open metaverse will get built on open file formats / standards and permissionless protocols.

There's already an ecosystem for cryptoart that encapsulates 2D media formats (jpg or gifs), but we still have a long way to go for 3D. We have made great progress with VRM adoption in the last couple years, but how many wearable collections do you know of that are interoperable across avatars and platforms?

Btw Voxel wearables look pretty awesome on other avatars. Rather than limit ourselves to a captive audience of a few thousand we should expand market reach, spread our culture amongst other metaverse projects, hence the need for Openvoxels.

Prove Something About Permissionless Innovation

I was listening to a space the other week hosted by Improbable and Msquared (M2), the companies building the technology that will power Otherside. We share similar aspirations for building "a network of interoperable metaverses" as they have stated on their website. It's also a freakish coincidence that M2 sounds very similar to M3, however I'll save the comparisons for another day.

M2 and M3 both deeply care about same topics, but are taking a very different approach for connecting disparate virtual worlds together. For one, M2 is a company that raised 150M whereas M3 is a loose collective or hackerspace, a third space for metaverse devs. There were a couple soundbites that stuck with me from that space:

• Improbable is building out 6 different "metaverses" that aim to be interoperable

• Rob (CTO/Co-founder) asks "How do we get others to collaborate with one another?"

It's a very different ballgame when you're working on solving interoperability challenges amongst platforms you're incubating internally versus in the wild. The difficulty level increases when thinking about game theory, technical challenges, incentive alignment, diplomacy, and other kinds of knowledge in order to obtain greater compatibility between disparate apps. Higher risk / higher reward though, yeah?

I want to prove something, perhaps even just to myself. Although I'd much rather see others like M2 as collaborators than competition, I believe individuals can help solve big metaverse challenges without a ton of resources as prerequisite. Part of it involves looking for those unlocks that become force multipliers in the equations of creator workflows for making interoperable assets. Sometimes its bug reports to a certain tool, a blender plugin, a guide, a new metadata trait, contribution to gltf extensions, etc.

Speaking of which, IMO glTF extensions are excellent metaverse building blocks. M3 is pretty active in contributing to such with OMI group (see here)

Also the NFT metadata idea in the Otherside Litepaper is a good idea too if places / creators adopt it. Pioneers like Em0tionull / Phetta have gotten multiple platforms like Hyperfy and Oncyber as well as many popular collections to adopt vrm_url in metadata so that platforms can automatically recognize that token as an avatar and enable creators to equip it from their inventory. Phetta has shown that permissionless innovation can be a way to solve open metaverse interop from bottom up, and be rewarded through it by virtue of minting cryptoart.

Related post

PS: We did an AMA last week about the wearables museum snapshot. Here are the notes + recording from that discussion: