Welcome back! We hope you enjoyed Edition One of Pangea’s Virtual Land Series. In this edition, we will outline Pangea’s plan and current thinking for: Establishing a 'DAO Squad' structure to plan, design, & execute Metaverse digital land strategies.
Digital worlds across the Metaverse are visibly sparse. Too many landowners are passive speculators, buying and holding their digital asset that is likely to grow in demand. The value of digital land, broadly speaking, depends on user growth and activity. Content will transform virtual land from an inert, speculative asset into a productive one. The vitality of the Metaverse depends on it. Perhaps, some speculators simply lack the knowledge, resources, connections, and incentives to build on their land. PangeaDAO is building a Community with domain expertise and desire to level-up the Metaverse. As famed investor Charlie Munger once said, “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.” Pangea is designing incentives for the architects, designers, connectors, thinkers, and planners to organize and build, rewarding those who enrich the ecosystem as a whole to drive community development across the Metaverse.
These types of individuals will be the driving force in creating valuable experiences in the Metaverse. In addition to internally-driven creations, the opportunity to deliver value to small, medium, and enterprise businesses is massive. In order to optimize and organize, Pangea will be establishing squads within the DAO.
DAO Squads
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are currently in an experimental phase. Just like any other type of organization, their goal is to create value. In order to execute on the shared (or temporarily disparate) vision, incentives and organizational structures guide and enable the value creation. There is no desire to force structure prior to the organic need, so we’ll roll these squads out, as needed. Our first two teams are introduced below.
Our first squad is PangeaCreators. The construction of this team is already in progress and we welcome all newcomers and experts alike! If you are a digital architect, designer, artist, project manager, writer, or world builder – this is for you. Pangea is building a community of artists from all walks of life, creating a space where a multitude of genres can come together and co-create. In addition to compensation through governance rewards, PangeaCreators will also benefit from co-learning, gaining development experience, and generating attention for their work. Each creator will have potential to significantly boost their portfolio of work as Pangea's other squads bring projects back to the PangeaCreators. We expect to face greater and greater demand for this team to add value and will need an army of creators. Pangea strives to create access for all to the Metaverse, and that starts with the ones who are building it! The Metaverse is a nascent space with many new participants, and our community welcomes creators of all skill levels and is establishing a space to come to learn and find mentorship from more experienced members. Pangea will also provide a "test kitchen" of land and assets for creators to play around with ideas and gain experience building in the Metaverse. Our creators’ main role will be building out structures and developing land, but an important aspect of this squad will be populating these structures with content, adding color and texture to these scenes. Rather than just building out a sparse structure, we can add flesh to the bones of our scenes by showcasing our creators’ 2D and 3D art, music, writing, and more.
We see prefabricated builds as a significant opportunity for PangeaCreators, leveraging scene “skins” for digital land that can be modified, bought, sold, traded, and rented. While our consulting and build-to-suit services will be for clients that are looking to establish a long-term presence in the Metaverse, leveraging pre-fabricated scenes for pop-up stores will allow our clients to dip their toes into the Metaverse without making long-term commitments. Pangea could rent land to a client then customize development from our existing portfolio of pre-fabricated builds, tailoring it to their exact needs.
The next squad is PangeaPartners. This squad will strategize, target, and execute by offering a full suite of consulting and build-to-suit services to IRL companies looking to establish themselves in the Metaverse. IRL businesses of all shapes and sizes across the globe will be looking to get a foot in the Metaverse and explore options of reaching new customers and better engaging with current ones. This team will work to organize and manage relationships outside of PangeaDAO as it relates to connecting external individuals, companies, and DAOs with both Pangea’s available land holdings and in-house guild of creators in PangeaCreators. PangeaPartners’ full suite of consulting services seeks to activate digital land holdings by demonstrating the insights and return on investment potential to existing business owners. Most small and medium-sized businesses will not have a dedicated Metaverse strategy for years – we are bringing it directly to them. These companies may want to get into the Metaverse but don’t know what virtual world(s) to get into, where to buy land, how to design and build their desired structures, or how to market their efforts. There are over 200 million businesses on Earth. At this point, we aren’t going to set any expectations on total addressable market, targeting, conversion, etc. – but suffice to say there is ample opportunity. Pangea will actively position ourselves as the natural choice, leveraging our community, experience, and knowledge to provide these companies with a singular touchpoint for all their Metaverse-related needs.
Metaverse Land Value Creation
What is the purpose of land development? The answers to this question are different for every business or individual that has identified the Metaverse as a channel for value creation. At the fundamental level, it’s just that – value creation. Value for whom? Where does this value originate? How quickly and at what scale does that value transfer? These are key questions that our DAO Squads will be digging into with partners as they are deployed into the market. A key strategy for Pangea is outside-in Metaverse pull-through, working with businesses that need guidance to establish their custom infrastructure - land, designs, storefronts, advertising, events, augmented reality commerce, and much more.
There are endless possibilities for developing virtual land. Through Pangea’s Creators Guild, we will build businesses, event spaces, homes, advertisement spaces, NFT galleries, NFT museums, and community hubs. These builds (also known as “Scenes”) not only increase the value of Pangea’s virtual lands, but also create value in the virtual worlds we develop in. Active and engaging building serves to develop user-generated content that these virtual worlds are dependent on, and oftentimes find to be in short supply. Pangea’s builds would also provide opportunities for our creators to collectively build the Metaverse, developing their skills and experiences in the process. Builds including, but not limited, to the below options will be considered by the community:
Business storefronts are massive opportunities now and increasingly in the future. There are businesses that are web-based that are primed for a more immersive, meaningful experience. There are businesses that are brick and mortar that can replicate and enhance their entire physical experience digitally. As we described in Edition One, we expect shopping malls to have a sort of renaissance. The experience of exploring and discovering new brands and items hasn’t died. The path of least resistance was grabbing your smart phone with an Amazon app, which won’t go away – but, AR and VR will still be easier than hopping in the car and driving 15 minutes or more. On that note, AR commerce is perhaps the most underestimated piece of the Metaverse puzzle. Pangea will position itself to immediately get to work with AR and hit the ground running when the appropriate tech hits the streets.
Entirely virtual businesses are structures that contribute value to users such as a wearables shop in Decentraland or an item shop in Axie. These businesses provide access to popular assets in these virtual worlds, and are an important part of a healthy ecosystem
Games & Contests are a significant portion of current user-generated content in virtual worlds and can range from casinos to taverns and even custom games. These types of structures could charge (or stay free) to access or play and offer users either financial rewards or simply a good time. From an augmented reality (AR) perspective, MMORPGs in open space parks, casinos on street corners, games in a coffee shop… it’s all possible. As more companies formulate their strategies, games and contests will be central to engagement.
Advertisements provide a natural path for companies of all sizes, as well as individuals, to test the waters of the Metaverse. From a small, medium, and especially large sized business perspective, these are opportunities to extend reach to potential customers at a fairly low marketing spend. In the real world, billboards (particularly digital billboards) on major highways and roads are worth millions of dollars. Augmented reality enables digital content on every square inch of Earth. AR gives companies the ability to market shrewdly and make their way inside stores and beside brands that they compete with.
NFT galleries and museums are also an attractive proposition as they offer a new way of exploring digital art. Rather than just scrolling through OpenSea, users can benefit from a more immersive and interactive experience. Artist’s tools are going to improve, ultimately leading to continual breakthroughs in immersive experiences. Galleries also open up the possibility for curation, grouping works together based on theme or style to create a cohesive viewing experience.
Event spaces host networking, educational, or any shared experiential events. These spaces have the potential for both crypto-native and crypto-naive to spend more time in virtual worlds without having to leave home. Interesting use-cases for NFTs can be applied here, like access to events that are token-gated, where entry depends on the user holding a specific NFT.
Music is a strong contender to be one of the next hottest things in Web3 and consequently the Metaverse. While the role of music in the Metaverse is still unclear, it will likely be huge and there will be many opportunities to build verticals around this art. Whether that be building studios, live podcast rooms, or featuring artists at event spaces or parties, Pangea lies at the intersection between culture and virtual real estate.
Commercial Office Space is also a promising use case, as teams seek to utilize interactive co-working spaces to create more efficient workflows, meetings, and avenues for presentations.
Space for shared viewing experiences are also growing in popularity. Groups of friends or entire communities (think watching the World Cup with friends across the country with different fan zones, watching the newest episode of Succession with fellow fans, etc.) could join together to collectively view sports games, TV shows, movies, and more.
Homes are places for users to represent themselves in the Metaverse. As our digital and physical identities continue to converge, we will continue to see development of homes in the Metaverse as people look to carve out dedicated space to spend time and showcase their digital assets to their friends and peers. Nearly one year ago, Krista Kim’s Mars House sold for 288 ETH, demonstrating the demand for this type of build.
Creating a community hub/HQ for Pangea members would be a more community-based build and we would like to explore constructing an interactive and customizable space for our community to hang out, exchange ideas, and essentially just spend time with like-minded people while sharing the fruits of our collective efforts.
Closing Thoughts
PangeaDAO’s squads, particularly PangeaCreators and PangeaPartners, will drive value in the early days, post-launch. As we deploy capital into virtual land, we will actively seek to develop and provide value to these spaces. We anticipate a robust market of onlookers making the pivot into the Metaverse with the desire, but without the knowledge to execute. An organized, thoughtful, professional approach to consultation and land development will drive value for all parties. We are extremely excited to plan, design, and execute Metaverse digital land strategies.
Follow @pangeaDAO on Twitter to stay informed, apply to the community Creators Guild & join our Discord to participate, and stay tuned for the final edition of Pangea's virtual land series: Generating active & passive revenue from land holdings.
Website: https://pangeadao.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/pangeadao
Discord: https://discord.gg/5hFdFJ5nqY