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Dubai's Web3 Marvels: NFT Gaming, Metaverse Wonders And High-Tech Couture With Blowfish Studios, Nova Lorraine And Upland
Even more Web3 wonders are gracing the Edge of Dubai, this time with groundbreaking developments in NFT gaming, metaverse, and digital fashion. Our host Josh Kriger ran into some of the leaders behind these advancements and spoke to them. In this episode, Dirk Lueth and Idan Zuckerman of Upland discuss their virtual world in Web3, the launch of Sparklet token, and their involvement in the Open Metaverse Alliance to promote interoperability among metaverses. Chris Bowden of Blowfish Studios introduces Phantom Galaxies, an online multiplayer mecha-based shooter set in space, leveraging Web3 integration for cosmetic NFTs and emphasizing ownership. And digital fashion icon Nova Lorraine discusses her journey from launching Rain Magazine to exploring blockchain, NFTs, and her futuristic fashion project, the House of Nova. Plus, our guests share their optimistic views of Dubai and the Middle East Region as an emerging leader in the Web3 space. Tune in!
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Dubai’s Web3 Marvels: NFT Gaming, Metaverse Wonders And High-Tech Couture With Blowfish Studios, Nova Lorraine And Upland
We are live in Dubai, the Future Blockchain Summit. I’ve run into two gentlemen that I am excited to have a conversation with. I don’t think I’ve ever met them both in person at the same time and place, but that’s not surprising. They run Upland, one of the largest virtual worlds in Web3. It’s great to meet with Dirk and Idan. We’re happy to have you guys on the show.
Thank you for having us.
It’s a pleasure. I’ll give everyone a little bit of your background. We’ll jump right into it. Dirk is a Silicon Valley-based serial entrepreneur and blockchain technology enthusiast. He co-founded and co-leads Uplandme and serves as the Chairman of the Open Metaverse Alliance Web3, OMA3, which I’m also excited to talk about. He’s done a lot of stuff. All right. That’s the bottom line.
Idan is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Uplandme. You’ve also done a lot of stuff, particularly in gaming, consumer, internet, mobile, engineering, and all those fun things. Thus, we get into Upland, which you guys were part of the first inaugural NFT LA. You’ve been in this space for a long time. You have such a rich perspective that we can’t nearly get into in this interview. What does the world need to know about Upland?
That’s probably how we all got started. We started in 2018, which makes us somehow OGs or whatever you call them.
I was getting into the space around then.
It’s a very long time. I started already in 2011 with the old blockchain. At that time, everyone was talking about Bitcoin. Blockchain as a buzzword was not around. I was fascinated by it. I wrote my PhD about private state-controlled currencies. I said, “Bitcoin is a cool concept.” Since then, I never let go. In 2018, Idan Mani Honigstein, our third founder, and I put ourselves together. I said, “When we want to build something, we have to build something ready for the mass market.” We were thinking about lots of concepts during that time and said, “First of all, what does everyone understand? Let’s take the idea of Monopoly. Let’s get inspired by Monopoly because I’ve never met anyone who does not know what Monopoly is.”
Everyone’s played it. Everyone’s had those long games that they’re like, “Do I want this to end? This is fun.”
That’s the first thing. The second thing was, “Everyone’s talking about VR headsets and so on but no one’s using it.” We said, “Where are people on? On mobile phones. Let’s do mobile first.” We then thought, “Blockchain’s complicated in the sense of private keys, wallets, and all that. The mass market is not ready for that.” We said, “When we want to build something, it has to be easy to use, and so on.”
We also add this whole real-world component to it where we say, “Upland is based on the real world.” We live in 23 cities in the US, 3 in South America, and 4 in Europe and Tokyo. You don’t have to be in those cities to play, but that’s how we all got started. It creates this emotional attachment to a place like San Francisco, New York, or London where we open.
It’s in Boston where I’m from.
Boston’s not open yet. I’m sorry.
It’s got to be coming because there are some diehard Bostonians out there like myself even though I’m in LA. Idan, I have to ask you. I imagine your gaming background fits into the mix here. You were sharing with me you have 30,000 active users daily, which is incredible. Not everyone realizes that. That takes some gamification. Was your background in gaming, the fundamentals, key to how you created Upland?
Yeah, absolutely. What’s important in the consumer space, and we’re talking beyond the crypto crowd, we’re talking about mass audiences, it’s hard to catch people’s attention. Even once you do, it’s hard to convert them into engaged players. One of the things we use to do that is gamification loops. When you walk into Upland, it’s an open-ended world. It’s an open metaverse. It’s easy to get lost in all the things you can do and engage with. That’s why you need some simple loops to, first of all, grab people’s attention.
Web3 Dubai: What’s important in the consumer space is really how to catch people’s attention. And we’re talking beyond the crypto crowd; we’re talking about mass audiences.
Dirk mentioned the immediate connection to Monopoly. You immediately understand getting properties, completing collections, building up your properties, etc. That’s the basis, but then, discover more. It is things like community building, world building, car racing, and a deeper engagement loop with brands like the FIFA World Cup and the NFL Player Association. To get deep into that funnel, you need some gamification to keep you engaged until you are able to comprehend, discover, and go deep into the product.
It makes sense. You guys have done a lot of collaborations and partnerships over the last couple of years. I know this is like asking who your favorite child is, but I’m sure there are some warm spots in your hearts in terms of some of the collaborations you’ve done in activations. Are there any that you think about fondly?
Each of us is going to give an answer. I know what Dirk is going to say. I’m going to leave it to him. I will go with one of the partnerships we’ve done with a Brazilian racing league called the Stock Car Pro Series. That’s equivalent to the US-based NASCAR if people are more familiar with that. They take Toyota Corollas and Chevy Cruises and make them into amazing racing machines. They have an entire league with famous racers. For example, Rubens Barrichello is a racer. He used to be in Formula One. He races in the Stock Car Pro series with his son also on the same team.
What excites me about this partnership is it’s one of the first partnerships that covered the entire vertical of our offering inside of Upland. Everything from collectible cars where you can race them but not just race them, you can race them on the real racetracks. We have the Interlagos racetrack in São Paulo, which is an iconic racetrack. You can go with your Stock Car Pro car and race it there all the way to spotlights from the races. There are video moments as NFTs that you can engage with, win, and collect in the races.
There’s an eCommerce component, too, with digital collectibles and physical merchandise, correct?
Absolutely. It’s the driver wearables. It’s their helmets. These wearables can be worn inside cafes in Upland as actual wearables. Everything is tied together. There’s a gamification of this collection. This is exciting. The community is excited about it. These brand partnerships magnify the offering and make it more approachable and palatable. Also, it attracts the fans of that brand to come into Upland, explore, and get into Web3 metaverses, etc.
That makes sense. Dirk, does another one come to mind?
It’s probably what Dan suspected I would say, which is FIFA. I’m such a big football fan, or I mean soccer.
Not the American football. Got it.
We also do the NFL Player Association, so we do American football. I was super excited being originally from Europe of having the goals of Messi at the last World Cup when he scored it. I know we watched the final. It was amazing. You can get this as an NFT in Upland. That’s one with the big brands. We have also what we call the Upland Developer Network. We have a third-party developer platform where many developers can put their own apps on top of Upland. Also, here, our community has started to develop apps there. I also love how they engage with the existing content. They understand Upland very well. They created apps like Uplandia or Upland Kingdoms. They’re interesting apps.
That co-creation with the community is such a meaningful experience to see their passion come out and use these tools that you guys have put all this time and energy into. It makes a lot of sense. I thought it was pretty interesting when I found out that after all this time, you’ve chosen to launch a Sparklet, which is a token component of Upland. We talk about on the show a lot not going token-first too early and building real community. I have to assume there’s a lot of thought that’s gone into this process to decide to do this. What inspired Sparklet and what’s it all about?
Maybe to start and Idan can take over. First of all, what it is. Sparklet is the root of what we have been doing for two years. We have two tokens in Upland. One is called UPX, which is a fixed exchange rate. If you buy it for $1, you get 1,000 UPX. You purchase virtual assets in Upland, like properties or cars. It’s a median of exchange. The second token we have is called Spark. Spark is what we call the resource token. The idea is that when you want to build something in Upland or want to manufacture something, you have to stake Spark. The more you stake, the faster you build. That’s the high-level idea of that token.
We launched a token already a few years ago and were able to collect a lot of data, on how people are using it, how much they’re staking it, and how much they contribute. You can also contribute your Spark to other buildings and all that stuff. We learned a lot. We took that knowledge. In combination with the latest Ripple ruling, which has happened in the US, we saw an opportunity for our community to provide them because you cannot trade Spark within Upland.
We give them the opportunity to trade it but outside of Upland. We are doing this by bridging Spark out of Upland onto Ethereum. It’s called Sparklet. Why Sparklet? It’s because we divide it by 1,000. We sold Spark for $460. You don’t need one Spark to build a lot. It’s more the small amounts. However, we divide it by 1,000. That’s why it’s called Sparklet.
It makes a lot of sense. If you want to elaborate Idan, that’s fine. I am curious as you elaborate on what you hope happens as a result of this external economy. I talked about the tokens if it’s new, and thanks for clarifying that, but this is a major step in terms of expanding the token economy, right?
Yeah. There are a couple of reasons why we want to do this. This is together with the community. We published the white paper proposal and then gave the community the opportunity to make comments. We had a vote in Upland. This white paper was approved by a majority of 87.3% of voters. The first job for us to do was to seek the approval of the community.
The reason we want to do it is, first of all, we want to give the players the ability to trade Spark. As Dirk said, it was not tradable. In a way, that maintains regulatory compliance for us. In the US, this was one option or one opportunity to do that. I don’t want to say more important, but equally as important, the Web3 industry is going through some kind of bear market. One way for projects to resume growth and have growth is that visibility can be obtained by having these tradable tokens on exchanges. As it gets tougher for projects to grow by traditional means like acquiring users on social media, appearing in blogs, etc., this is a major opportunity for growth for Upland, which we want to seize with both hands.
The other thing is it gives us a bigger visibility and credibility in the wider Web3 community. Upland has been able to recruit audiences from the mass cart markets. They were not necessarily crypto aficionados. If you ask the Web3 native community, “What are the top metaverses?” Oftentimes, Upland would not be up there. It doesn’t necessarily identify with Web3 metaverses because it didn’t have a token. That’s another important thing because Upland has its place among the top metaverses in Web3, for sure. Having that token traded in reputable exchanges creates visibility and credibility internally in the Web3 community.
Is there a gaming integration component here where you’re able to integrate Upland with more outside games? Is that possible?
This is something we’ve thought about from day one, how to build a completely open metaverse even before it got branded that way. Upland is completely open for anybody to connect with their offerings to the Upland economy, the user base, the identity system, the land system, and the NFT creation system. Everything is open. You can come to Upland. You can recreate the entire neighborhood and entire cities outside of Upland in a completely different game and allow Uplanders to play your game and it seems like it’s Upland. We encourage that. We encourage people to do that and expand Upland beyond what it is.
We look at Upland as a Layer 1 platform. You can come up with any offers that you have as a developer or as an entrepreneur and expand, add value, and add new types of things. It could be games. It could be services. It could be anything you can imagine. This was super important for us. In that process, you can also make use of Spark and integrate that into your offering as well. It’s not just the UPX, the economy, and the land. It’s also the resources of the players that they can utilize in your offering.
That’s very cool. We love to cover things on the edge of Web3. This is certainly one of them, so that’s exciting. You mentioned something that I wanted to go into with you a little bit more, Dirk. You guys have been open to partnering with all the different metaverse platforms in this OMA3 metaverse council. For those that don’t know about the council, how long has it been around? What are some of the key initiatives you’re doing there to support the next wave in removing some of the friction that we all have seen going on in the metaverse experience over the last wave?
A few years ago, I was at a conference about NFT or metaverse. I saw all these projects. I said, “They all are working somehow in their silo. We have Web3. It’s supposed to be open.” We don’t want to repeat this whole idea of having a world garden and getting all the users. The true value of Web3 is that the users at the center of everything are in control of their assets and data. How can we make this vision a reality? You can only do that if you start working together.
Together with Batis from SPACE, we said, “At the next conference, why don’t we invite all the big guys or OGs in the space together in one room.” We have a picture of that. Everyone was there. There was Animoca Brands, Sandbox, Ava Labs, and Decentraland. We were all in one room together. I said, “We have to work together. We have to get this started.” That was the birth hour of OMA3, which stands for Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3.
We had to do some strategy stuff. It’s an association in Switzerland in Zug where we’ve started. Anyone can go and join OMA3. The mission of OMA3 is to drive forward interoperability between the different metaverses. In OMA3, we have several vertical groups. One is called the asset transfer group. One is called the NFT working group where we are working on standards, royalties, and all that stuff.
One is called the portal group. I saw a demo. People are developing things. You were in one world, and then you should see a circle. You could look through into the other world, which is so cool. You can move that. It’s important. We are then governed by a board. I’m chairman of the board. Robby Yung, the CEO of Animoca is in there as well as Lazaro and Batis. There are a few people in there where we try to bring things forward.
I can imagine at some point in the future that these board meetings will be simulcast in every metaverse. That could be fun. Are you guys taking policy positions on things like what Meta is doing? I’m sure that’s come up in conversation at least a little bit, right?
Yeah. First of all, we don’t have all the details of what they’re doing. They’re quite secretive.
It’s a little bit opposite of open.
Even though I talk to them, they always share only what’s public anyway so I don’t have any judicial knowledge. The idea is also that OMA3 doesn’t work in a vacuum. There are also other standards, organizations, or committees. The most prominent is the MSF or Metaverse Standards Foundation, which is a loosely coupled forum where people are together. We have a liaison agreement with them. We are active in there as well. However, we always represent Web3. We represent the blockchain-related stuff through ownership and all that. That’s coming with us.
It makes sense. Idan, we’re in the heart of the MENA region. It’s bustling here. There is a lot of building going on in this region, but also a lot of people are gathering here. I’m curious. Why did you guys decide to come together to this region? What is this region’s significance in terms of the development of your ecosystem?
We live in a world where our industry is a baby. It’s evolving. During that evolution, there are a couple of very significant hotspots in the world. Dubai is one of those hotspots. They’ve been investing a lot in growing the ecosystems. They work to create regulation that works with companies. This is such a big contrast to what we are experiencing as a US company, for example. We feel like we have to work very hard to understand the regulation even though most of it doesn’t exist.
I heard from someone on the show that there’s a 1,300-page guide, but they’re like, “Thank you for putting a guide together so we can at least know what the rules are and then we can follow them.” We don’t have that luxury in the US.
Both of us are in the US. We’re a US company. We love the US. It’s very heartbreaking to see because we feel that the US is missing an opportunity to take a leadership position in the industry, but we’re not giving up.
There’s something to learn from what’s happening here and to share with folks in the US.
It’s always good to be engaging in these ecosystems, be active, learn from what’s happened, and connect with people. At the end of the day, we’re going to take it back to the US and apply it. I don’t want to be presumptuous, but we want to be in a leadership position where we spearhead how to do things right in the US. Hopefully, regulation and legislation will mature and we can work hand in hand to a better point.
We can take examples from places like Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and throughout the world where they are treating Web3 as an opportunity, not as necessarily a liability. Don’t get me wrong. We need regulation. This thing needs to be able to tackle all the problematic aspects of an unregulated space. If the US took a more proactive approach to regulation, taking examples maybe from places like Dubai and Hong Kong, we’d have an easier time. The US can capitalize on this huge industry that’s going to emerge.
It makes sense. Dirk, is OMA3 thinking about coming up with some policy recommendations for different countries, particularly countries like the US, that don’t have that playbook defined yet?
There’s a lot to unpack there.
Thanks for hanging out.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
For those of you at home, think Transformers.
Congrats.
It’s like coming back to your second home.
No bias.
PhantomGalaxies.com is our website. We’re all across social media if you search for Phantom Galaxies. First and foremost, wishlist the game on Steam and Epic Game Store.
Check it out.
Let’s do it.
It’s great to be here.
Yeah, let’s do it.
When did the podcast come into the mix?
How many different characters?
A few years ago, I was a NASA Accelerator.
I love how you casually dropped that.
I went to William & Mary.
What’s the timing on that?
Not that far away.
Yes.
This is my first trip to Dubai.
They have you booked solid. That’s great.
It’s such a pleasure being here.
Thank you so much.
Important Links
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@UplandMe – Twitter
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@DirkLueth – Twitter
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@IdanZuck – Twitter
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Phantom Galaxies - X
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LinkedIn – Nova Lorraine
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Instagram – Unleash Your Supernova