W3B_W@Y (webway)

w3b_w@y
ʎɐʍqǝʍ_
/

Decentralized 3d metaverse experience builder and tokenization protocol.

Problem

There are no actual protocols for a decentralized metaverse Even the grandest attempts fall into some type of protocol centralization at some layer Many metaverse platforms claim to be open, but the data and the applications to run them are hosted on centralized servers, essentially locking them in a closed system. If the platform goes down one day, all of the work that metaverse builders put into creating experiences on these platforms can disappear and become inaccessible.

Solution

The Webway aims to create a new paradigm to put the power back in the hands of the creators by enabling them to own their data and access it on their own terms, whether or not Webway is around one day. Each metaverse space is hosted in a fully-sovereign and ownable ERC-721 token in the form of an interactive application which is hosted on IPFS. The json scene graph is stored in the metadata of the token, and all assets hosted on IPFS. Owners of these spaces can update them through smart contract operations, where the resulting updates are stored on a combination of on-chain and IPFS. By focussing on the space between spaces, the Webway, we are penvision a new paradigm

Since spaces are ownable tokens, creators can sell them through any NFT marketplace, incentivizing them and giving them the ability to support themselves through the act of building.

We envision NFT communities giving their token holders access to mint these worlds and have a socially connected network through the ability to create portals between spaces with smart contract operations. We ultimately see this becoming a massive, open, decentralized network for community owned metaverse worlds.

Since all data is indexable by the graph, users can build their own interfaces and interactions on top of this content.

Question: What even is a metaverse? And why does it have to be utterly decentralized and composable?

Answer: A metaverse is ultimately a network of relations. Relationships between objects, people, agents, spaces, contracts, code, added effects: the sum total of a metaverse is a computationally delivered experience (meta) to 2+ individuals (verse). The simplest way to define a metaverse, then, is as a state machine of relationships. The relationships that define the spaces we live in are all the more interesting in a metaverse; as the door at the end of the hall may exit into a penthouse on one of Jupiter’s moons.

The webway is the interstitial routing and content delivery network which connects all metaverses. It already exists; we just all need to become much more aware of it.

Current grand-vision open metaverse projects fail insofar as they silo their users into a type of experience. Sure, everyone can own their own city. But is that manifest uniformity truly an equitable destiny?

We solve for this problem of vision by identifying the two universal (inter-galactic) rails of the metaverse: addressing and data persistence. Luckily, we have two great tools on our hands.

Blockchains create a universal and computationally accessible addressing space by which we an uniquely register and identify any object, space, or relation within the metaverse, without fear of censorship. On the rails of the blockchain, the hard linkages (think: IP addressing) of metaverse relations are set it stone (at least, until the next block!) Content-hash-based file retrieval schemes, such as IPFS, allow for the content-rich immersion of metaverse spaces to be made readily available for all to engage with; both as seeders and leechers.

With these two tools in hand, we can craft an entire metaverse that is 1) truly distributed and 2) arbitrarily composable. The feat of bootstrapping the metaverse as a natural outgrowth of human societal evolution won’t spring from the monopolar vision of a (somehow, look harder) tokenized drop. Instead, it will be the result of sensible and scalable open standards and tooling that allow anyone to create spaces that can interoperate with everyone.

To that end, we have designed and constructed in the past 36 hours a prototype space built entirely using the bleeding edge stack of decentralized technologies. In this way, we aim to prove that the vision of a truly open metaverse is possible at this very moment; and indeed, it sits open at the computer before you. Updoot our project so that we can build out the blockchain addressed objects/metadata + IPFS addressed content standard as a series of documents and toolings that will make it as easy as using an SDK for any enthused team to boldly enter the free domain of metaverse spaces.

No (root) gatekeepers, no (unrouteable) masters!

only w3b_w@y, my way & ur way

We used a scaffold-eth base to build a react-powered web3 app with The Graph & all popular web wallet softwares. The front-end application is built using react-three-fiber on top of three.js. It is a single page application that is packaged as a standalone application on ipfs. It uses the blockchain as the routing layer and a combination of the graph and IPFS for asset and configuration storage. Each sovereign space is accessed at /:tokenId in the client-side application, and it uses the token id to query the graph for the erc721 token located at that address. Contained within the token are: a json scene graph describing what all the assets that are bundled in the space are, and what ipfs addresses they are hosted on. It also contains all configuration value for every dynamic element in the space, with configuration options such as what color water is, how big of a scale the whole experience is, and how loud a video's audio plays. If a user owns the metaverse, they can trustlessly login to it when they are in it, using their web3 wallet, and can through smart contract operations update certain traits of the space. All of these updates are stored in IPFS, and the application pings the graph for these changes, and updates the content dynamically. This way we have a real-time syncrhonized space experience powered by decentralized technology.