The Metaverse & Future Human Potential
The metaverse can be a puzzling concept. Is it just an immersive gaming experience or a type of virtual reality? No – it’s much more. The metaverse is taking hold in gaming but has wide-ranging implications for art, culture, finance, “corporate” governance, the future of work, and more. In short, the metaverse will change the way people globally interact and generate economic activity. Just as public blockchains allow for a new, global economic infrastructure for shared truth, digital property, and economic interactions, the metaverse immerses people into a brave new world.
To help illuminate the metaverse, not just the concept but also the adoption cycle, the risks and rewards, and why it’ll work best if it becomes a global public utility, we are joined this week on The Money Movement by Michael Wagner, Co-founder and CEO (and often called Captain) of Star Atlas. Star Atlas is a grand strategy game of space exploration, territorial conquest, political domination, and more. It has played an important role in helping grow adoption of Solana.
Listen to the episode today to hear our thoughts on blockchain gaming, the metaverse and future human potential.
Jeremy Allaire: [00:00:06] Hello, everyone, this is Jeremy Allaire. Welcome to The Money Movement, a show where we explore the brave new world of digital currency and blockchains. I'm very excited to be back with some new programing and in particular are really, really excited to be here with Michael, who is co-founder and CEO. I think that's your title of Star Atlas. Or maybe you go bye bye like captain or what are your title is good. Maybe we can get to that, but very, very excited. And Michael on Star Atlas is a really, really incredible project in the crypto space, in a lot of spaces, in economics, in the way people are experimenting with governance in art and culture and gaming and finance like it touches so many, so many topics that I think are just really, really fascinating. I think it's one of the projects out there today that expresses and connects so many different disciplines, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about it, because it's it's really innovating at the cutting edge of so many of them. So we're going to have a great conversation with Michael about Star Atlas and some of those themes in detail. But first, just welcome, and maybe you can just quickly introduce yourself. [00:01:24][77.7]
Michael Wagner: [00:01:25] Yeah, thank you, Jeremy. Really exciting to be on the show with you as well. And you know, the community refers to me as captain. I like to think of myself as that's just a humble servant of the people, but it it is quite endearing. But yes, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Star Atlas, among other projects in the crypto space, and my background is really in traditional finance as a CFA charterholder and working in portfolio management, investment and securities analysis. Kind of. Ironically, shortly after getting that charter, I went full time into crypto and thought I would never get to use that. But as it turns out, kind of with the economic design of Star Atlas itself, I've been able to pull from that toolset quite a bit. So I'm really excited to be here and just looking forward to the conversation. [00:02:08][42.9]
Jeremy Allaire: [00:02:09] Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I mean, I I had degrees in political science and philosophy and had a minor in economics. And I never thought, I get to use all of that. And now crypto, it brings a lot of different disciplines together, right? So and we're actually going to talk about that. I think there's sort of political and economic systems that are being designed and and actually, it's an interesting just maybe a way to kick off the conversation and, you know, the metaverse as a concept and people, I think, struggle with that sometimes. I want to hear your definition in a moment, but I think one of the things that I've been thinking about and I think Star Atlas is emblematic of it is the way in which these digital universes are really they're living, breathing economic systems, but they're really experiments in ways that broader facets of the world might work in the future. There are laboratories for what might actually work in the future. And while the metaphor of this galactic exploration is is a metaphor, right? But we're actually seeing experimentation in basic unit of organization and work and and economic and political systems. And so it's just such a fascinating backdrop. But maybe that maybe that's a good way to start. And when you conceptualize what Star Atlas is, maybe you could just talk about it at a conceptual level and then maybe we can, you know, for for folks that aren't familiar with it, talk about it at a more concrete level. [00:03:45][96.5]
Michael Wagner: [00:03:46] Sure. Well, I love in your introduction, you use the term Brave New World. I think that was a great book and kind of a great mentality to approach this future that we're emerging into a great mentality to approach it from. And in many ways, you know, not only are we exploring the future potential of humanity through crypto and decentralization and all of these alternative kind of philosophical ideals, but we are genuinely creating a brave new world in Star Atlas, a digital universe within which a person should be able to persist. And so as a starting point. So it's the story of us is multifaceted. But as a starting point, Sara Atlas was a Triple-A video game concept. And so it's centered around this universe where space exploration takes place, territory control, political domination. And those are some of the core gameplay pillars that people will be introduced to when they join Star Alice. And when I say this is kind of developing out to the highest quality gaming standards, the highest graphical fidelity. We're building an Unreal Engine five, but also things like LOTR and storyline and gameplay mechanics and the various aspects of what it means to be a video game. However, what I what I always tried to clarify is that. The video game itself is really just the spearhead for us, and this is our entry point into a new way of thinking of a new paradigm. And so people will be able to enter Star Atlas, engage in gameplay, but also be able to engage in some of these constructs, like governance and constructs like social interaction, human interaction and experiences. And so, you know, evolving past the video game itself, what we see is the emergence of the Metaverse being this place where it's not necessarily centered around gameplay itself or any of the mechanics that we have in gameplay, but rather an environment where opportunities are prevalent. And so, you know, people all over the world should be able to find an opportunity for themselves within the metaverse, even if it's outside of our core gameplay mechanics. Essentially, I think of the metaverse. Is this likely being the future of the web? I think it will be incredibly disruptive across things like ecommerce, across social interaction. To your point, the ability to experiment with new models for governance and economics and society, and we could see that bleed through to the physical world. But but really beyond that is is this concept that it can become this living, breathing public utility for which the world as a whole has an opportunity to mold and and form as it goes into the future. So I know a lot, lot to unpack there, but realistically, I think it's the future of the web. It will change the way that we shop. It will change the way that we socialize online. It will create new economic opportunity for people, and I fervently believe that it really does need to be a public utility not owned by a single centralized entity if it's to succeed. [00:06:53][186.1]
Jeremy Allaire: [00:06:54] Yeah, there's so many lenses on the metaverse. You know, I talk a lot about how, you know, kind of blockchains, public blockchains are kind of there like a new operating system layer for the internet. And I really do. I mean, technically, I have a technical background and I look at, you know, if you take a blockchain like Ethereum or blockchain like Solana right there, computer computing environments that are data storage models, there's the transaction model like the building blocks that you need to kind of create stuff, but it's internet scale internet distributed. So you have these kind of internet operating system, but they're purpose built around shared truth. Digital property and that and enabling people to interact with that around the world. And in my mind, it's sort of a new global economic infrastructure. And the way I think about it is over time, organizations will this, they'll be principally based on this. And you're kind of such an interesting microcosm of that because your own entity, Star Atlas itself is a digital, a digitally native organization, and you don't know if you call it a doubt. We'll be talking about what Star Atlas itself is. Sure. You know, we don't need to get into like your underlying legal structure per se. But just like you know, it is itself an entity that has stakeholders and has participants. But then within this is the metaverse piece within Star Atlas. It's a universe where people can create their own corporate forms that have value, exchange and have work and labor and property. That's real. I mean, it's it's very real to the participants. And so you're trying to matter here because Starbucks itself is set up that way and then you can instantiate these things inside of it, which is kind of mind bending. But again, in this concept of that, we're this is this new economic infrastructure and it's this laboratory that's taking place. You're an interesting microcosm. And then you can talk about Star Atlas itself, what it embodies in terms of these new types of corporate forms. [00:09:27][153.1]
Michael Wagner: [00:09:29] Definitely, there are layers of complexity, both inside of the game as well as externally. But I just wanted to touch on a point I've read, you know, the Bitcoin white paper a dozen times. Probably I've read through all of Satoshi's posts on bitcoin talk. And I as much as these are technological systems that you know, to your point, are building blocks. I still think the greatest invention of bitcoin itself is the elimination of human trust, not a vision. It's I mean, that is what was accomplished through the blockchain and through open source decentralized tech. But you know, and it we genuinely are building on the shoulders of giants with everything that we do and being able to leverage this technology and think about this industry that has emerged as a result of the concept, an idea that was brought to life. So I think it's amazing. But for us, you know, it's kind of odd. We so we are a centralized company, but we also operate a decentralized economy, an ecosystem from our viewpoint. We are kind of the caretakers of this concept of the metaverse in the early years. And so our vision is essentially to develop out this product that starts as a video game and then it evolves into more experiential interaction with the metaverse. But, you know, we understand that we need to have pretty tight control over product creation in the short term and short term. I'm saying three to five years, maybe seven years, that will enable us to deliver this product out to the world that we think the world is going to want to consume and want to enjoy. However, side by side, we have the entire economy that exists inside the metaverse, which will grow over time in theory, and we have decentralized autonomous organization structure that is driven and governed by stakeholders of one of our tokens, the this token. We have to Atlas's the medium of exchange currency in the game policies, the governance token, and that permits those governors to influence in the long term development decision making processes that we make as a company. So things like feature releases or asset release schedules or contributing to modifications of the governance system or even the economic system itself, emission rates and inflation rates in the game, things like this within the game, we also have a three tier. Ouch, structure that we're working on making turnkey solution for the user base, but that includes deals at the fashion level, at a regional level, kind of like a local solar system and then all the way down to the guilt level. So we call these decentralized autonomous corporations, but it's essentially the guild system in the game. And the idea is that we can empower these guilds to have their own internal governance structures and manage their own treasuries on how best to interact with the game. You know, whatever's most enjoyable, but also, in theory, most efficient from a productivity standpoint, so long term for us. The Dow will actually take over and own the metaverse itself, as well as all of the economic value that's created within it. And we, as a company, we ultimately become a almost a contractor to the metaverse. So right now we have the exclusive monopoly, the metaverse. [00:12:46][197.1]
Jeremy Allaire: [00:12:47] The policy holders could eventually hire other, you know, other developers that have grown in the community who want to contribute to the to the to this as well. Right. [00:12:55][8.6]
Michael Wagner: [00:12:56] That is the idea. And again, you know, we keep pretty tight control. Initially, we have the majority of the it's kind of like the stackable pull of supply, but it's designed such that over time through emissions, we essentially get inflated away. The world then who has earned all this over time, gets to determine what the outcome of it is. But that allows a really interesting potential outcome, which is this is not a product that would live for, say, five years or 10 years. In theory, this is a product that could evolve in perpetuity. It could again, it once it becomes the public utility, anybody can contribute to it and modify it and mold it into what it needs to be, and it can just live on forever in digital space. [00:13:35][39.3]
Jeremy Allaire: [00:13:36] Only there was a DAO for the for. Pac-Man seems like Pac-Man forever, but from when you were [00:13:44][8.0]
Michael Wagner: [00:13:44] running around collecting coins, so or maybe not, maybe those are skills, I don't know. [00:13:48][4.0]
Jeremy Allaire: [00:13:49] But yeah, so I mean, there's so many places we can take conversation. I think the concept of these guilds basically individual entities, individuals inside of Star Atlas being able to form their own corporate entities, and that's going to be something that that will be possible in the game. So let's maybe make it more concrete for people. And I do want to come back to technology in a little bit because because I think you've made some really interesting technical choices. And I want to connect the dots for listeners to sort of what the state of the art is in this kind of technology as well. But maybe just in terms of that, this kind of gameplay as it were. And so I'm an individual and I'm like, Hey, this is really cool. I want to. I like, I want to go, I want to. I want to play in this world or I just want to come in this world. I want to see if I can get a job. I want to own something. How, how, how can I be part of a of a of a of a, you know, a decentralized autonomous corporation that someone decides to start in the game? And what might I bring to the table and how might I do that? And just as a starting point? [00:15:04][75.4]
Michael Wagner: [00:15:05] Yeah. So there's a couple of things there that I would touch on. First of all, the court, the the ducks, the decentralized autonomous corporations have actually been forming in our discord is as early as February of this year. Before we had any content out, any product out before we rolled the NFT marketplace, our groups of people were starting to collaborate and coordinate on how they would like to execute in the game with very little information. And we've seen that evolve and [00:15:31][25.3]
Jeremy Allaire: [00:15:31] those don't yet exist on chain that sort of people communicating about it at this point. [00:15:35][4.1]
Michael Wagner: [00:15:36] Correct. That's 100 percent correct. So it's all just in communication channels, not official yet in again, that's coming very soon. So for people that are interested in getting involved and finding a source of information or just discord is a great place to go because the community there is about 70 to seventy five thousand people strong and a lot of them are very just invested in in their interest in this, and they're willing to help and answer questions. And so it's a great community. So that's a good place to start. With respect to getting entry into the game, and I love how you said you just want to maybe just want to go get a job. There's a couple of different demographics of users that we see the first of which is the player in order to become a player and you do have to own an asset. I like to differentiate, though, between legacy games where it's almost rent based. You have to you purchase access to the title and the value that you get in return is the entertainment value or the ability to escape reality for a period of time while you're playing. However, once you leave that game environment, you often forfeit any of the assets or items that you earn. So it's kind of like renting, right? You rent a house, you get to use it while you're renting. When you move, you don't get to keep any value of that. Property, our model is transformative in that there is a purchase requirement to get into the game, whether it's chips or land or crew members or other forms of assets, but the value then is retained by the player. So that's the beauty of having NFTs as the asset base within the game. Now that asset also permits the player to create monetary value for themselves so they can actually monetize time spent in the game through the deployment or use of these assets. And we don't have to get too deep into the specifics of it, but that's that's only one demographic. The second demographic is what you just referred to, which is if you don't have an asset at all, that doesn't mean you can't get involved in store unless there are many people that are contacting us right now that are interested in purchasing substantial portfolios of assets with no intent to play. They don't have the time to play, but they know that they can hire people to manage those assets and operate those assets for them in the game. And then there's a third demographic, which is people that are already offering services like basically services on which ships to buy, for example, which combination of ships should people buy? So advisors of sorts that are making recommendations and these are completely tertiary and outside of the metaverse itself and outside of the game. But they're they're essentially building a business around how people should best interact with metaverse. And so I really think the metaverse itself is going to lead to the largest job market economy the world's ever seen because we eliminate all of the friction of geographic borders for employment and we create these open markets for employment for everybody all over the world. [00:18:27][171.3]
Jeremy Allaire: [00:18:28] And that whole dimension is fascinating. I mean, the fact that that there's digital property, the fact that people can can, you know, obviously there's sort of native digital property, presumably over time, people can bring other digital property creators or property. In this, they can create organizations that organize that capital in a sense because property is a form of capital. It got me thinking a little bit about, you know, there's sort of the Marxists if theories of like labor and capital and work and you know, it's very grounded in, you know, was originally this this movement from agrarian to industrial economies. And you know, we sort of later had this idea of like post-industrial economies, the information age, you know, that was sort of brave new world. Obviously, it was an interesting book at sort of a pivotal point there. But there's also, you know, Alvin Toffler, who I don't know if you read Alvin Topher's work, but he was sort of, you know, the futurist and he wrote about the third wave, which was, you know, this sort of information revolution. And and Jeremy Rifkin, who's another interesting writer. We're talking about the end of work and all of these were sort of kind of conceptualized. A lot of this is conceptualized in one was like this shift from like physical labor to knowledge workers. And we've sort of seen that now it's it's this is not, you know, equal all over the world. But we're seeing these like radical shifts in in in in labor and radical shifts in in productive work. And there's this overall narrative of, you know, essentially machines and robots, and I are going to make a lot more work unnecessary. And so. Jeremy Rifkin had the theory. The end of work was this is just going to be plenty. There's just going to be this principal world and everyone should be able to be an artist or pursue their kind of creative passions and so on and so forth. But I think in the reality of things is a little bit different. But we are seeing a world where, you know, knowledge work, you know, is one opportunity for people. Another is physical work, right? But metaverse work is now like a very legitimate and growing part of the economy. And what's fascinating about it is, is this these historical relationships between labor and capital existing now in the metaverse and exactly what you just described, which is that you can have someone who owns digital property and then would like someone to use their property to till the land as it were. Right? You know, I own this land come and tell the land, but now I own this like wicked cool spacecraft, and I just don't have the time to like, wield this thing. But you know what? I'm willing to enter into effectively, like an on chain contract where, again, don't need trust. You can know like that that you're never going to lose control of the asset, the assets available to this particular owner of keys to be able to utilize it in this context in the game. And it has a time lock and like you can actually build a contract in a sense that's expressed in a declarative way and you're enabling a labor market to exist. And I know there's other examples of this play to earn, et cetera, that are out there. But I think in some ways what you're what you're envisioning is one of the most powerful expressions of that, potentially. But this really is a shift in how labor can work and and how property can be owned. And it's all in a digital virtual form, which is, I think, to most people, inconceivable that there might be, you know, in a few years, there might be five hundred million people whose primary source of income is jobs in metaverse is using property and interacting around property and participating in self-organized economic systems that that are in there. It's just mind blowing. And you know, I'm curious in your mind when you think about that labor and capital and how big that can be as a as a labor market as it were. I mean, what do you think? [00:22:53][264.6]
Michael Wagner: [00:22:55] I completely aligned with your thinking on it, and this is where we've had concerns that have been brought up in our Discord channel, for example, people that aren't necessarily thinking about the economy in the same perspective that we're describing it here, but just rather, you know, is it are we going to reintroduce a feudal system where you know, the whales, the whales get to buy everything, they get to own everything, and then other people can only go in and work for somebody else. And I don't think that will be the case for one, just because this is going to be an incredibly competitive job market, right? Once again, there is no friction of geography, of borders of distance. You, you can work for anybody in the metaverse and the way we're trying to design the economics that are such that everybody should be able to get some access to land, some access to ships and through earnings over time, they can. If they if they redeploy their capital back into themselves through upgrading items and purchasing bigger items, then they have the ability to earn more and more over time as a result of that. But without question, I think there are going to be an enormous amount of people that are employed through the Metaverse. You know, a lot of credit to Axie Infinity, by the way, they say they were pioneering this model and they saw whether they saw it or not through through the support of the games and capitalize on they essentially supported an entire economy locally in the Philippines as a result of this. This game played right through the pandemic. They were able to support people financially, which I think is just the first demonstration of how this is going to function in the future. [00:24:36][100.9]
Jeremy Allaire: [00:24:36] Right? You know, it's it's very interesting because some that at least nine responsibly, oh, this is just like gratuitous. This is like there's nothing here and this is this is all B.S.. But, you know, the media and entertainment industry is happy. I don't know if it's a couple trillion dollars on. No, it's pretty big. And when you think about the number of people who are employed in the production of film, the production of television, the production of Triple-A rating games like, you know, the production of news, all these things, there's an enormous amount of labor that is basically created for the purpose of people to access some form of entertainment. This is this is deeper than that, though. I mean, I think that's part of the point of all of this is this form of human interaction and entertainment is just it goes way beyond traditional what we think of as entertainment. I mean, games have been evolving this way for a really long time, and this sort of goes even further where the participants become part of the creative class and are participating in creating these things. I just I feel like people who just dismiss this outright as, you know, this is just some huge waste of time. I mean, you have to kind of compared to what compared to the how many people who build some stupid comedy that you know or whatever, you know. And yeah, I want to talk about some of the choices that you've made. We'll talk a little bit about technology. I have to, of course, make a shameless plug for USDC. OCC USDC is is is is currently aware that people are are purchasing property that that exists at the founding of the game. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you using USDC and then I want to move to the some of the other technical choices that you made. You chose to build this on Solana. I think like you over a year ago, we got really excited about the architecture of Solana and thought, You know, there's just me, a whole new class of applications that are possible today. They're going to need USDC. We want to be there for whatever comes, whether it's DeFi or now it's, you know, Game five or what have you. But maybe a little bit about some of your choices in terms of how you how you've brought this up. [00:27:00][144.0]
Michael Wagner: [00:27:01] Sure. And I do maybe just want to finalize one thought on the economy itself. And I do think that it's critical to create this self-sustaining economy that's not driven by inflation or emission. Rates of tokens can't be purely extractive. You're never going to create a perpetual system where everybody goes into play and only gets to take out. And so this is where the content creator economy needs to take hold. People need to be creating businesses that create value inside the metaverse external to the mechanics that we've introduced. And that might be somebody who starts an art gallery or purchases land, builds a building, creates an art gallery, curates NFTs, maybe from a OpenSea on a Ethereum, brings those into the metaverse and then sells those and acts through it through his or her art gallery experience. And to your point about entertainment, we think that that is going to be a major sector performances, music. Festivals, other cultural experiences, museums. Right, all of these things can be recreated inside the metaverse and when value is being exchanged peer to peer as opposed to developer to player that I think would lead to the long term success of the Metaverse. I think it's absolutely critical that we establish that. So with respect to USDC, I mean, I've actually answered this a number of times only because people are asking why we aren't enforcing Atlas or Polis for the purchase of assets. But this is a massive endeavor and it's going to have significant capital requirements. We're estimating anywhere from 500 million to a billion dollars in the long term. Epic, who is the creator of Unreal, just raised a billion dollars to further develop the metaverse and in their massive studio. So we know that the capital requirements are going to be heavy. We have operating expenses. USDC works perfectly for us. We get to store our assets digitally. We get to deploy those assets in DeFi instruments that generate great yield, by the way, you know, anywhere from something that's relatively safe at eight to 10 percent to maybe moving out on the risk spectrum a little bit and generating 30 to 100 percent per year. So it's a great way for us to generate market operational income on our otherwise dormant Treasury assets. So and it's easy. It's seamless for us to move that in and out of the crypto ecosystem so that we can do things like a payroll, you know, they can't contracts and pay for services. So that's our primary use for it. And I think that going into the future where we would see USDC being valuable to the player base is that we we have a heavy emphasis outside of the game and metaverse on DeFi integrations. So we want our players to be able to compound wealth that they're generating in the game, earn Atlas or earn Pulse in the game. These are volatile assets by nature makes a lot of sense to liquidate some of that. And instead of withdrawing to a bank account where it earns practically nothing now or negative yielding in some cases deploy that into a smart contract that were aiming or liquidity pool or something that can earn additional income for the players. So that's kind of where we're thinking going forward, but also on features such as lending protocols where, you know, we were talking about about the kind of the labor force and people's ability to enter the game. Well, if it's possible for someone to take a loan and USDC, purchase an asset and start playing with that and have this all executed through smart contract Allaire to your exact point, these are secure assets, then it's kind of a win win. We get more people playing the game who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford a ship or parcel of land, but now they're just taking a loan out to do that. So I have some thoughts on that about essentially, you know, indebted people immediately upon joining the game. So it's still up for debate. But the lending protocols and markets, I think, are going to be beneficial to players. Net, net and USDC would be one of those items. [00:30:56][235.2]
Jeremy Allaire: [00:30:57] And I think one of the other things I notice you're you're you're sort of taking advantage of the competitive ability and scalability of Solana. So you have something like USDC, you have a marketplace protocol like serum, the DEX as an underlying kind of markets engine and some of these other things that you're looking at. And if teased, that could be presented as collateral and someone could borrow USDC against a strong US entity or things like that. But maybe just talk for a minute about again some of the other kind of key choices that you've made in kind of building this. [00:31:33][35.6]
Michael Wagner: [00:31:33] Yes, I mean, the purpose of selecting Solana was this was after extensive research and just identifying them as really the world's only one scalable blockchain technology. And given our vision for this product, what we wanted to accomplish with attracting not only tens of millions, but potentially billions of users if we if we actually succeed in our mission of reaching the world with metaverse. We needed blockchain technology that was capable of scaling to that user base. And so while it's still early days, we appreciate that, you know, as long as capable of greater than 50 thousand transactions per second, subsequent finality on state changes. So that's like low latency interacting with the metaverse. And then another critical component is just low transaction costs, so less than a penny per transaction. When you think about hundreds of millions of users all interacting with the with the chain all the time, that's many, many millions of transactions, right? And technically transactions their state changes. So that was important. But I think, you know, totally Raj and the team, those guys gave us a lot of confidence in their ability, the algorithm that they've developed a proven history with the parallel transaction processing on the back end. I think it's brilliant. And but but perhaps more than that, we saw an opportunity to get involved early with a very promising block. And so there were maybe 20 projects when we got involved. We got an enormous amount of support from them early. As a result, they connected us with their entire community and that was kind of the seed of our of our current community and we were able to grow from that. So. And beyond that, you know, seeing endorsements from other institutional players like the consortium that has developed projects serum that that was also very promising to us and it's led to some great relationships and has really helped us succeed. So I have I have no doubt selecting talent was one of the best decisions we could have made. Feel very confident about the potential going forward. [00:33:30][116.8]
Jeremy Allaire: [00:33:31] Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Well, we've seen a huge amount of uptake for OCC on Salon. So we're we're excited about the fact that, you know, I think a lot of people are overly focused on DeFi or are overly focused on, you know, kind of trading kind of stuff. And I think what you're doing and and this broadening out of of how the crypto economy and how this economic infrastructure and creative infrastructure, everything kind of fuzes together, it's pretty amazing. Well, this is awesome. This is it's like I said at the start, I think this is what you're doing is one of the really most interesting kind of projects. It brings together so many different dimensions in this space and excited to see it. But for folks that are, you know, want to dig in more? What are some of the best resources to do that? [00:34:25][54.2]
Michael Wagner: [00:34:27] We post articles regularly on Medium. So I think it's just Medium.com slash star atlas. As I mentioned earlier, join our discord. A lot of information gets posted. They're very popular on Twitter, something like 120000 followers there. And we're releasing content drops pretty regularly. So things like concept art that you would like how you would interact with the game, what it's going to look like. Personally, you can also find me on Twitter at Underscore and Wagner. But yeah, yeah. And you can also sign up for our newsletter. And if you haven't looked yet, the website starless dot com, we just released a new version of the website. It's immersive. It's intended to pull you into the metaverse. I think we succeeded with that, and you can also find our our whitepaper on there, as well as the recently released game economics and tokenomics white paper that describe kind of how value is is derived and utility is driven across the metaverse itself. [00:34:27][0.0]
Jeremy Allaire
Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman at Circle
Michael Wagner
Co-founder & CEO Star Atlas