Crypto Pioneer Joel Dietz Creating Interoperable Metaverse

After sitting on the sidelines for a couple of years, cryptocurrency pioneer Joel Dietz, ​​a founding architect of MetaMask (formerly Vapor) and developer of Ethereum, has launched a new company to create an interoperable metaverse.

“It’s even a sense of personal responsibility, to be working on this,” Dietz told CoinDesk. “A lot of early ethereum people had this very utopian vision for what the internet could be, and I don’t want to say they got distracted, but now with the metaverse it feels like we’ve gotten back to that.”

As CEO of MetaMetaverse, Dietz is envisioning a digital ecosystem attached to its own layer 1 blockchain that uses a still-being-developed programming language — metametalang — that will enable users to create their own metaverse initiatives. Users can also create schemes on MetaMetaverse’s virtual land using several different game engines, including Blender and Unreal Engine 5.

“I’m a geek, I need to work on things that are really interesting to me. And building a language for the future of the metaverse that can map all realities, including parallel realities, I’d say that’s pretty cool,” Dietz said. “And potentially very profitable as well.”

Launched in January, MetaMetaverse raised $2 million in a December 2021 seed round backed by Polygon Studios, DAO Maker and Ghaf Capital. The company’s headquarters are split between Lisbon, Portugal and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with a workforce of 25.

In Dietz’s metaverse, experiences are mapped within cubes, which users can own as virtual land. Inside cubes are more cubes, and inside those cubes, are more cubes. The platform is still under development.

Using play-to-earn gaming mechanisms and advanced NFT technology, users can own profitable virtual real estate that is customizable, tradable, and open to community engagement, according to a blog post.

Related: How Meta Views the Metaverse

Meta (formerly Facebook) is counting on artificial intelligence (AI) to drive the metaverse, enabling people to use only their voice to create detailed worlds that can be explored and shared with others. AI will also be tapped to create universal language translations and improve spoken interactions with voice assistants.