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February 1, 2023

Jawad Ashraf Of Virtua, A Gamified Metaverse Delivering Immersive NFT Gaming Experiences, Plus: Brian Anderson Of Raze Fintech

Virtua is a gamified metaverse that provides immersive social Web3 gaming, digital collectibles, and interactive experiences. In Virtua, you can explore, hang out, and own land and properties where you can showcase your personal NFT collections. Co-founder and CEO Jawad Ashraf joins the show to tell us more. Jawad is an entrepreneurial industry leader in blockchain technology and the metaverse. As a pioneer in emerging technology and innovation, he has built a career-launching and leading successful businesses. In this episode, he tells us about the inception of Virtua and what it entails. Also in this episode, learn how Raze Fintech is bringing fundraising into the next century with crowdfunding-style crypto integrations. Tune in and get the latest scoop from the Edge of NFT!

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Jawad Ashraf Of Virtua, A Gamified Metaverse Delivering Immersive NFT Gaming Experiences, Plus: Brian Anderson Of Raze Fintech

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This is Jawad Ashraf of Virtua, the gaming metaverse platform which changes the dynamic of engaging with digital experiences. I’m here on the Edge of NFT, the platform which tells you about all the dynamic projects in Web3.

NFT-curious readers, stay tuned for this episode and learn why 2023 could turn out to be a year of shakeouts and building, how our guest’s most prized possession is a simple garment that means everything to him and how Raze Fintech is bringing fundraising into the next century with crowdfunding-style crypto integrations that are carefully crafted to be on the up and up with the latest regulations.

Finally, NFT LA 2022 was a blast but it was also a blast off in a giant plume of bright burning rocket fuel. Web3, NFTs, blockchain, decentralization and a suite of immersive new tech developments have exploded onto the canvas of life. Outer Edge is the theme of 2023’s event dedicated to those of you building with us at the outer edges and making the future happen.

The community-centric gathering returns to Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2023 to uplift creators and technologists through interactive experiences, a wide variety of discussions and presentations and entertaining surprises that transport participants to the outer edge of what’s possible when we co-create a new paradigm, embracing the decentralized web, AI, extended reality and more. To register to attend or learn how to co-create an experience on the Outer Edge, head over to OuterEdge.live. The event is being organized by The Edge of Company and us founders of the show.

This episode features Jawad Ashraf of Virtua, an NFT and metaverse ecosystem. He’s the CEO and cofounder of Virtua and an entrepreneurial industry leader in blockchain technology and the metaverse. As a pioneer in emerging technology and innovation, he has built a career launching and leading successful businesses. Virtua is a metaverse driven by games and social experiences, a world where you can constantly reinvent yourself, a world where you can create, play and socialize with like-minded people and a vast virtual space that you can truly call home. In Virtua, you can explore, hang out and own land and properties where you can showcase your personal NFT collections. Jawad, welcome to the show.

It’s good to be here.

It’s a pleasure. Virtua is a gamified metaverse, providing immersive social Web3 gaming, digital collectibles and interactive experiences. Tell us how this project came into being and what it entails.

Back in 2017, I was very interested in VR and the way that new technology was coming out but what you wouldn’t get with VR was any market data. I would come off building some other companies and come up with an exit. To gather market data, I formed a company. What the company was doing was releasing VR games. We did that for about a year. We launched them on every platform. There was a Google one that used the phone. There was a Samsung one. There was an Oculus Rift. We used that to gather lots of information about how to build decent VR games.

At the end of 2017, I went looking for people to join the team to form what was known as Terra Virtua. We dropped the Terra after the whole Luna thing, which seemed to be quite pragmatic. I got ahold of my cofounder, Gary Bracey. Gary Bracey is one of the luminaries of video games. He’s a BAFTA-awarded member. He was one of the guys in Ocean Software, which was one of the biggest gaming companies back in the ’70s. He’s had his hand in Tomb Raider and plenty of the AAA IPs.

I got ahold of him. I live in Dubai and he lives in England. Finally, I managed to pin him down. We met up in a Starbucks outside a car park in Staines in England. We sat down for the first time, “This is what Virtua could be.” Within a week, we incorporated the company. We got on so well. It was great chemistry. We formed it. Gary brought a whole bunch of great people to the table, including Doug Dyer who was one of the guys involved in Warner Digital. He was one of the people who were behind Rise of Empire from Microsoft and who worked in Harry Potter and a whole bunch of stuff.

We bought in some great games people who had built the beginnings of the MMO and worked with mobile. That was trying to get the right people in place who had access as well as talent. We did that and got in some other people like David Atkinson, one of the founders of Holochain. We got in people who could allow us to walk into large brands. There was a massive thing years ago where the world and their dog were trying to get into IPs but we were there first.

We got into Paramount and got Top Gun and The Godfather. We went into legendary pictures and got the Kong franchise. Every meeting we were doing for the first year was all about trying to make people understand what NFTs were. When we formed the group, the first thing we did was take our VR knowledge. We created a full VR metaverse prototype with a bunch of games in it. That was back in 2018.

You could wear a VR headset, walk around, play five different games and also have VR experiences. That’s where Virtua first came from. After we did the VR experience and set up that prototype metaverse, we realized that no one understood what NFTs were, what blockchain was, what VR was or what the metaverse was. We thought, “Let’s double down on an NFT platform first but with a USP.”

We were the first in the world to allow credit card payment from day one and create a wallet seamlessly in the background from day one. Years later, everyone thinks it’s a great idea but we did it back then. What we did was built it all up so that we could come into the metaverse layer. We got all the CGI footage from special effects. Half of every NFT we’re doing is based on 3D models we could put into the metaverse layer. That’s a massive monologue but that’s where we came from.

It’s interesting when you listen to folks in the street talk about how we have to make Web3 more accessible with credit cards and on-ramps. There are a lot of projects like yours that were thinking this way much earlier. People talk about problems when there are already solutions. OneOf also does things with credit cards and taxes. Several projects have been successful at doing this. Magic Link is another tool. That’s why we’re excited about our upcoming event. We will drop some alpha later on but making the metaverse as we call it accessible to all is fundamentally important but it’s not something that we have been thinking about for a while.

Even when we introduced credit card and wallet creation, we got spanked by a lot of users for not being very gung-ho on wallets because we were thinking, “This is the crypto audience. This is the mainstream audience.” We were getting a lot of flack for not doing that so we incorporated every wallet and everything else. Years later, everyone has gone the other way.

What I wanted to share with you is we’re tied in with Mocaverse where we get about 10,000 audiences per episode. Plus, we have a 25,000 newsletter. We’re a year-round media outlet. When I think of how we can collaborate, year-round we’re going to be planning a gaming/metaverse event separately maybe in summer or fall depending on the market. With Orange Comet and some other top projects in the space, we have skin in the game around the NFT infrastructure.

It’s a very Web3 partnership. It’s unfortunate we’re starting to get to know each other before Outer Edge LA but I’m open to any way of collaborating in a way that you collaborate with other marketing community partners and whatever fits seamlessly. I don’t know how you pitched NFT LA but fundamentally, it’s how can we add value to this event together and create a bigger pie together.

One of the things that we’re trying to do a lot of and that we do with Cardano Island is creating simultaneous events. You have something which happens there. You’ve got a metaverse event, which is a dovetail into what you’ve got. We give space to people as well.

We don’t have a metaverse partner yet. We have talked to everyone, even Matty, known as @DCLBlogger. He’s a big metaverse guy. He’s an investor. He wants to create experiences. The hardest thing for that has been this. We need someone to figure it all out. We say yes because we don’t have the internal bandwidth to think about it.

We have done a lot of that because we have worked with a ton of brands. We’ve got almost different mix decks, which explain different possibilities that we can work together.

That’s fascinating. It’s exciting to finally have you on the show, given how on the forefront of things you have been. If we look at what has happened since you got rolling, Web3, the metaverse and the NFT industries have all converged. I’m curious what your thoughts are on where we are in terms of the state of the metaverse and what we have to do next to enhance mass adoption.

That’s one of those things. It is been a journey over the last few years. They say, “In crypto, time changes.” I do feel like I’ve been at this for twenty years. It has been a long time. The interesting thing is that we have almost gone full circle to where we started. They say timing is everything. When we launched, we launched a metaverse in VR with games and VR experiences. Pretty much everything that we did was too early. When we started, we did that and then took it down to the NFT platform. The main thing is that when we did the platform, we still had our eye on the metaverse ball.

In crypto,time changes.Click To Tweet

What we did was made NFTs, which were high-resolution and high-fidelity 3D models directly from the CGI footage of movies. We had the special effects visuals from Lost in Space or the actual series itself and Godzilla versus Kong. We had the Cliffs Notes and the movie scripts before the movies came out. Until we created 3D assets, which would work in augmented reality, which we had on Android for three years, we launched that years ago but why would we do that? It’s because we knew when the metaverse does come, which we’re starting to see.

Those assets would immediately work in the metaverse. That comes back down to what you’re saying about mass adoption because, ultimately, in crypto, we tend to speak a lot about the tech, the chain and everything which is underneath it but the mass market consumer doesn’t care. They just want it to work. When you’re on the iPhone and you’re doing an in-app purchase, you don’t care about the underlying stack, the hosting or wherever it’s working. You want the utility.

NFT | Gamified Metaverse

Gamified Metaverse: In crypto, we tend to speak a lot about the tech, the chain, and everything which is underneath it. But the mass market consumer doesn’t care. They just want it to work.

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This will be quite interesting. I’ve been in technology for a long time. This is the only cycle of tech where everyone who is into tech contemplates their navel and talks about the technology. If you engage all of the crypto community, any metaverse worth its salt still won’t have enough daily active users to be of use to anyone. Roblox and Fortnite eclipse anything on the market. Ten thousand daily users of some of the top metaverse projects aren’t going to cut it. You have to go deeply into the mass market and adopt them. That was your second point. That has always been something that we have been focused on.

That’s why we have made partnerships with Shelby, Jesse Lingard and quite a bunch of brands but we’re focused on how you can bring in the mass market. Shelby would be a good example. If you look at the way that we’re dealing with it in Virtua, let’s say that you’ve got a Shelby game. What you do is that you have different acquisition channels. Let’s say it’s mobile. We want the mass market user. Mobile is the main channel to bring the mass market. If you’ve got Shelby NFTs, you launch a Shelby mobile game, which is part of a games network. You get the mobile gamers engaged with that and then do a drop of NFTs, which they don’t even necessarily need to think of as NFTs. You think of them as DLCs.

From there, you move over to give them a free metaverse crib and do a freemium upgrade model for the metaverse. That’s how you’re going to go ahead and acquire users. I don’t think it’s all about the land of the landowners. It’s going to work. It has to be about coming into the metaverse and having lots of gaming experiences and interesting things to do. It’s about the acquisition and then retention. Most metaverses have nothing to do with it. We are pushing hard to try to integrate new game ecosystems. We have over 190 people in the house. We’re building games. We’re a game studio. We’re also going to be doing tons of hackathons everywhere to get people to build games as well.

That intersection point between gaming and the metaverse is so critical. The two go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly.

There are 3.4 billion gamers in the world. It’s more than Hollywood and music combined. If you want to start in a metaverse, focus on those. Don’t focus on celebrities, stars, movies and music. Focus on gaming and look at how you can bring the Web2 games into the metaverse and bring the Web3 games into the metaverse because, ultimately, Web3 games have no audience and/or they’re not very good generally.

Web2 games don’t understand it. They have heard the metaverse is the front of NFTs. You need to gently guide them in. That means if you’ve got a Web2 game, integrate them into the metaverse and do it in a way that it’s a persistent online virtual world and DLCs as opposed to, “We want to go ahead and make NFTs and metaverses,” because it frightens them and frankly, it makes no sense for them to do that. They don’t want to disrupt their business model.

Let’s take a simple game on mobile. If you’ve got a mobile game, which is a Web2 game with a massive audience, they have reached the pinnacle of its monetization. It’s all ads and in-app purchases but they could bring that game into the metaverse along with their community. Let’s say you’ve got a mobile game like Subway Surfers, for example. They could have surfer shacks and skateboards. You now have social elements. They can do NFTs and crafting, which has a little monetization on top of that.

When you say acquisition, that’s how you acquire. You bring gaming communities and mobile communities all in. If you can get a fraction of the users that we have done in the past, you can do well. Before Virtua, one of my companies was a kids’ gaming mobile company. We acquired 24 million users in 9 months. I’m sure that if we follow this model linked to our metaverse, we can get an acquisition that should hopefully blow everyone else out of the water.

One thing that I come back to over and over again when people talk about the metaverse or getting into the metaverse is a lot of what people are working on is replicating real experiences, “We want to have a lecture. Let’s put you in a virtual lecture hall.” I always go, “A Zoom call is better. I can be closer to your face.” We want to do the things that you can’t do in reality in the metaverse. What you’re getting at here is that gaming is a lot of the stuff that people enjoy about these virtual worlds that you can’t do in the real world.

To give an extreme example, I can’t go out with guns and shoot zombies in the real world. I’m going to go into a metaverse to do that. These games have in effect built small versions of what we think of as a metaverse. They built these virtual lands. All you’re going to do is port them into your system and make them a part of the bigger collection of what’s available. That’s interesting. I mentioned the word collect surreptitiously there. Tell us about Virtua Kolect. Can you tell us what’s going on with that?

When we launched TVK, our token, we were very lucky to be listed on Binance within a couple of months. We were one of the few metaverse tokens that are sitting on Binance. One of the things we were careful of right from the beginning was regulation because we’re based in the UK. Our token was launched in another country but effectively, from day one, we have collected tax VAT. From day one, we have been careful in terms of how we use a token with an eye on how this regulation will come into the future, what we should do and what we shouldn’t do with that in mind because a lot of projects are close to the wind, which means that in 4 or 5 years, you may end up paying the price.

There are certain things that we didn’t do from the beginning, which was to allow TVK to be used to buy stuff on our platform. It’s more like a membership club or loyalty club that allows you to go ahead and do things. You stake your TVK and end up getting a whole bunch of benefits but also, moving forward, we’re going to have an in-game metaverse currency and TVK will be able to be used to buy their internal currency, which will allow microtransactions because whenever you go ahead and try to do anything on the chain for those things, you get muddled by fees.

You’re going to be able to use Ethereum or Bitcoin to buy their internal metaverse currency but if you use TVK, you will be able to get it at a discounted rate. There will be much more value in using TVK. Plus, the Monster Zone is one place that we have launched. First of all, on the land sale, you could purchase with TVK. It opened up to other currencies. What we haven’t done from the beginning is do what is like, “Stake your token. Get free tokens until the project eventually runs out of tokens.”

It makes no sense. It has always been about, “Stake your TVK. You’re going to get value. You will get these features and these things.” To be fair some of our implementations haven’t been fantastic but in 2023, we’re going to be up-ramping it to tons of metaverse benefits by having TVK, including voting rights for certain things, naming stuff, deciding the future of certain areas that you’ve got and having access to sale drops. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that will get utilities from the token.

Can you clarify it for the readers? I don’t think it got clear. Make a distinction or join the concepts of TVK as the token and then Kolect. What does Kolect represent, the name of the token? It’s for the readers’ sake so they know what we’re talking about.

It’s the Virtua Kolect token. We treated our token as a collectible because that’s everything in NFTs. TVK is a token. We’re on a ton of exchanges from Kraken to Binance and a whole bunch of them. It used to be Terra Virtua Kolect. Now, it’s The Virtua Kolect because we did a big branding exercise after we got people contacting us about Luna and telling us we destroyed their lives. It’s not us. It’s them. We rebranded.

You mentioned some partnerships. You’ve got one in development with Monster Zone and JLINGZ. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that’s going to work?

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Shakeouts and building.

There are some strobe lights.

I’ll clarify. What is that place that you go to?

Teen Titans #1, a comic.

Is it online on a marketplace?

A jumper for vocabulary purposes is a sweater.

It’s a sweater he used to wear.

That’s very sweet. Do you wear it as well?

I had a shisha.

Should we head on over to Hot Topics?

Let’s do it.

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We’re honored to be here.

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It has been a blast.

Thanks, Brian. Take care.

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