Welcome to the show. We're here with you live from the Coin Desk podcast studio, presented by Bit Go. Actually, it's not a podcast studio, it's a TV studio. Founded in 2013, Bit Go is the gold standard for custodial staking in payments today. Bit Go supports over 800 denominations of Bitcoin and processes 20% of Bitcoin transactions. Check it out at bit go.com. We've spoken to a lot of influencers over the last three days. We're excited to have our next guest, Rebecca Barkin CEO Ramina, one of our co-founders. It's so great to have you here, Rebecca. I've only ever met you on Zoom before. This is the first time I've looked at someone and felt like they were taller, shorter, looked different, etc. I feel like this is the moment. There's a history there. Well, you've been involved in immersive work for a long time, too. I know you've only ever seen it in the metaverse. Well, it's true. So, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. And of course, Rebecca, before we go in, I think you have a very interesting history. Uh, I know you're in the consensus. I'm going to talk about Lamina, but I was wondering if you could just give us 30 seconds of your story of how you got to this moment. Uh, uh, thank you for listening. Yes. I started my entertainment career in music, right? It was at a time when we were going through a very difficult transition of trying to figure out what the value of intellectual property is in the digital age. And then I got into film just at the time when they were going through exactly the same thing. So it really gave me a clear picture of where we were going in entertainment. If you really value IP, you had to understand that because technology was driving the way at that point. So I moved to Silicon Valley and, thinking about it now, I got a job at a music, integrated music, hardware and software company. And then I fell into the hole of location tracking, location tracking. And then I went to Magical, where I led the studio for four years and worked on a series of AR applications.It was a really great learning about where spatial computing and all of this immersive, large-scale location-based stuff is going. So what was holding us back when we moved into enterprise? I led the redesign of the operating system for Magic Leap Two. Then I went to MS G sphere and worked there. Uh, what kind of content and technical partnerships did we need to really leverage that technology in a way that was immersive at that scale and that spoke to people's emotions. Uh, Neil and I worked together at Magic League for years. Uh, I was there. Uh, we worked together on adapting some of his intellectual property into a global augmented reality game. Uh. So he called me when I was at sphere and said, hey, I'm on tour right now for Termination Shock, which was his book at the time. And he said, everyone keeps asking me what I think about the metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg's version of the metaverse. And I said, I think I could travel the world and talk about it and what's wrong with it, what's different, and even make my own rails. So he asked me to do it with him and his third co-founder, Peter Vain. Yeah. LaminaOne is a company co-founded by Neal Stephenson, who is famous for being the author of Snow Crush and a bunch of other books. I had the good fortune of interviewing Neal at Consensus two years ago. I think it was when they first announced LaminaOne. I was super excited. But one of the things that stuck in my mind when he announced it was that he wanted to create something that was totally different from anything else. L-One and L-Two, which were coming out at the time, were very financialized and focused on just advertising tokens. Can you walk us through that? Does that still remain as a vision? Yeah, even more so. So I think what we wanted to do was improve the economics for creators. Well, we felt that the current system of funding, distribution, monetization of creative content, connecting IP holders directly with fans, was just broken, and that kind of IP licensing system and studio system was a little bit outdated. Well, we even felt that blockchain was the magically important foundation of the open metaverse, because your identity needs to be able to move fluidly with you and your assets through this world of interconnected physical and digital experiences, and blockchain is really the only place that can do that. Well, as AI comes online and becomes more and more important, there's this question of how do you validate and how do you make sure that this is someone's identity and this is protecting someone's IP. You know, Neil himself has a long history as an IP holder. So who better to take the helm than someone who understands and protects the aesthetic quality and the narrative in how technology is developed. We had that same philosophy, the magic leap. So, we just pushed forward with it. But what we realized pretty quickly was that it's not enough to just build a protocol, it's not enough to just build layer one. And we felt that a lot of the things that we needed to unlock were actually in the application layer and the consensus layer. So we focused our time and energy on how to build not just the protocol, but the platform stack on top of it. There was no code that directly connected the IP holders to the fans.And we always thought that Avalanche had a really good architecture that would enable that, because it allows you to keep developer costs low and predictable, protects performance, and enables an ecosystem of interoperability across the core. So we adopted that as our consensus layer and then we really focused on building the application layer stack. Rebecca, this week was a big week, right? You guys went live on mainnet. So tell us what the launch was like and how everyone from IP holders to developers can build on the platform. Yeah, yeah. It's been a really exciting week for us. Uh, you know, it's been the toughest market for, you know, two years. I mean, metaverse and cryptocurrency have been like, toxic terms for the last two years. But we stuck to our guns. Uh, we shifted our focus a little bit, saying we don't want to just focus on VR and AR. So how do we build a platform that welcomes a larger, broader set, and we really decided to focus on trans media. So how do we connect IP holders with such a wide range of transmedia content directly with fans and make it easy for fans to co-create with their fans? That was number one. And that's the design of Tonos. We wanted to make sure we had a new type of economic design that encourages creative reinvestment. We had TGE this week, on May 17th to be exact. This was a very big event for us. It's a big milestone. We're a small but very powerful team of nine people. We've done that over the last two years. And we had our main night live at 517, and we unanimously announced public access to the beta platform today, the 28th, in our second year. Developers can go to Lama one.com and actually get into the hub from that domain. The hub has a wallet, a very Web 2-like login process, very simple and streamlined. And once you're in there, it's very experience-driven, so you can look for other content creators. And the creator studio is where people can upload and publish content, create web-based mini games and things like that. You can co-create within the confines of the allowed IP and build together. And, you know, we have the Unity SDK, we have the Unreal STK, we're trying to take all the great technology that already exists and put it together in a way that makes it easy for people to use and participate. This is up and running, so check it out. We're still in the early stages. Uh, that's why we say we're in beta on the public platform side, but the mainnet is up and running. Keep talking about interconnectivity and interoperability. This seems like a really important topic. How do you think metaverse platforms like yours and other platforms will coexist in the future? This is a really important question, but I don't think we've necessarily talked about it enough in the right way in terms of what the roadblocks are. Interoperability starts with identity and assets to move around. But the reality is, we can talk all day about mash-up games. We can talk about whether you can bring swords and football games and stuff like that. But it basically requires creatives to build in a totally different way. If you're building a two-sided platform or marketplace, that's a big burden. So, we decided to take a little bit of a different approach and have been working with a lot of partners that are really committed to standards. So, magically, part of the challenge was, how do you port content over? As asset metadata moves from platform to platform with different processing, capabilities, etc., aesthetic quality is not maintained, so there has been no easy way to port content. We're talking about shaders, these are things that artists really care about. In fact, our friends at Future Verse are building a standard called UBF, which can be used to dynamically detect which platform you're using and enable transcoding of those assets. You can take the metadata and all the credits, royalties, everything that goes with it, and allow it to move from environment to environment while maintaining aesthetic quality. If you take a step back and look at where interoperability really is, we have all the technical infrastructure to enable it, but we don't have the content. We don't have creators yet making content at a level of quality that people care about. So what are the fundamentals? It's identity and assets. Let's make sure that across the Avalanche and Lama content ecosystem, that they can communicate with each other smoothly, and work with our partners to really implement standards. Let's not always sit on boards and talk about it, let's pick one. We feel like this is a big step forward, and we're always asking for it, but this is a really important part of driving true interoperability. Yes, Rebecca. Thank you so much for joining us today, you've all been great partners to Consensus.
