Step into the Metaverse

Foreword

Science-fiction stories such as Snow Crash or Ready Player One have described the metaverse as a virtual world of unlimited potential for entertainment and value extraction. In the metaverse depicted in these books, a centralized entity controls the metaverse, including all data, digital assets, and the people entering it. This is a dystopian future that by no means is impossible to happen in the real world, given that we have already built a centralized, closed, proprietary, and extractive internet. The current Web is governed by shareholder supremacy instead of user centricity, and we all have become addicted to “free” access to these platforms.

The downside of all these “free” services has been the degradation of privacy and the lack of control over our own data and identity. That is why I started Outlier Ventures in 2014, because I felt the need for a different story. It is a story where end users can regain control over their digital lives, driven by the convergence of technologies such as blockchain, crypto, artificial intelligence, and mixed reality, among others. Over the years, we have invested in dozens of companies that are building Web 3.0 technologies across all three key layers of Web 3.0 innovation: infrastructure, middleware, and applications.

Web 3.0 technology will enable a decentralized, permissionless, open digital economy centered around the user and identity and data portability. It will allow us to create a fairer, more inclusive internet. It ...