Building Community in Virtual Social Worlds
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From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we're demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I'm your host, Luke Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API. ♪

You're listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Yamel Yardi, who is a co-founder of Decentraland and the executive director of the Decentraland Foundation, leading the organization's efforts to build a decentralized virtual world in the open metaverse. Driven by a passion for blockchain, Yamel began building open source Bitcoin tools in 2014 and later co-founded Casa Voltaire, which helped incubate major projects like Decentraland, OpenZeppelin, Hardhat, and Moon. He's also deeply engaged in the AI revolution and how blockchain

Intelligent systems capable of problem-solving, learning, and adapting will shape work, culture, and the dynamics of virtual worlds. In this episode, we discussed how they're providing more bandwidth for human connection through socially-rooted virtual worlds, unique use cases for creators and businesses to leverage online worlds, balancing decentralization with the need for governance and moderation, and ethical concerns with AI and social virtual worlds. And now for this week's episode of The Brave Technologist. ♪

Jamel, welcome to the Brave Technologist. How are you doing today? Thank you so much, Luke. I'm doing fine. Thank you for having me here. Yeah, definitely. Decentraland has been around for a little while, but just to kind of set the table for the audience a bit, let us know a little bit about your journey. How did you find yourself at Decentraland and what got you kind of excited about working at the company? Well, I have a background in software engineering.

I have been in Decentraland from the very early days. I'm actually one of the co-founders and writers of the white paper. But this was like 10 years ago. 2014, I decided to invest my career in the crypto space. At that time, all crypto was only Bitcoin. Working in open source software, creating libraries for people to

craft transactions, build applications, indexes, wallets in Bitcoin. With my friends at the office, we have this recurring conversation of how blockchain technology can be applied in other aspects of life. For example, recording ownership of digital assets or assets in real life.

We discussed about land ownership. Then we came into the idea of building a decentralized virtual world that uses blockchain as the ground truth for ownership. We believe it was an amazing idea and also an interesting sandbox to test all these technologies before bringing it to real life. I believe that Decentraland was one of the early projects that...

kind of implemented the NFT standard. Actually, if you go to the definition of what an NFT is, Decentraland is one of the examples. So very early on, I helped throughout the initial phase to 2017 and then rejoined the organization two years ago as executive director of Decentraland Foundation. So leading innovation now at the foundation.

Awesome. No, it was such an exciting time too. In 2017, you had all these people thinking about, okay, what are ways we can tokenize use cases and things like that, that it kind of scaled up. You mentioned it was kind of an experiment when you started. At what point did you start to see this kind of go from, okay, there's more to this than just the experiment and we really want to turn this into something special here, like beyond the experiment? What were there certain things that kind of

happened that were signaling events to that or how did that kind of evolve? Well, I think the tipping point was finding a big amount of people who believe this project was amazing and they wanted to collaborate. Like we built the first prototype of Decentraland that was

A web-based 2D grid of the map. You mine lots of land on the web browser and you can just assign a color to the parcel. It was an experiment. We got some attention. Second prototype, we forked the Bitcoin network, like the node.

build our own blockchain and also build like a 3D explorer in Unity, like a very basic definition of an aesthetic scene. So you can create like 3D models and place them, but no actually running code. In this second prototype, we got a YouTuber from London,

And he explained the project way better than we could at the time. And like in a day, we had like hundreds and hundreds of people who joined our slag looking for ways to collaborate. And I think that was a tipping point on like, okay, let's scale this from a hackathon project into something real. That's where we got the motivation because of the excitement of the public. Awesome.

There was like a bit of a, like a metaverse kind of moment for a while there, but really like metaverse is so much more than kind of a meme, right? I know we've been, we've been working together on a few things with you guys, like, and it seems like, you know, you could do everything there from meeting with communities to events and all sorts of other things. Like, is it hard?

when you kind of have the metaverse that people have a different mindset of what that is and what it actually could be or how much are you guys adapting I guess to the bigger trends that are happening and what is kind of the value prospect for users or what are you guys doing to kind of grow the base a bit more I think you know in the months ahead well I think

Many questions there. Regarding the metaverse, we have been starting the discussion about Dissension after reading Novels as Snow Crash Ready Player One. And also at that time, Facebook bought Oculus, which was like the...

I think number one company building VR headsets. For us, that was kind of a kickstart as well. Like, okay, this is the cell phone is not the ultimate computing platform. There is a trend of like the integration between human and computers. We will eventually be plugging into a computer and being experienced a more immersive internet experience.

Those novels already talk about metaverse. So I think like we jump into the idea with a strong belief that open source is what made the internet great and amazing. We have been seeing in the past decade a shift towards centralization. Like if there is a new way of computing platform and a new way of experiencing internet, that world needs to be built on open standards. And that's our taking in metaverse.

the metaverse, even though we don't say that we are a metaverse, like the metaverse, I like to say like the internet, the metaverse. Right, right. Like a compilation of so many experiences that you can have. We are just one piece in like this ecosystem, building it on open standards, actually get the network effect of the internet. Yeah.

So then we have like this hype cycle of the metaverse as a word that gets into the mainstream parlance after Facebook changed their name to Meta, after COVID. I think like most population,

Hold one main topic to be discussing at the same time. I think that was an effect of the pandemic. Like everyone is talking about the same time, the same thing. If it's like the pandemic itself or like bull market or like AI. So I think like we got a lot of attention, uh,

during pandemics and after that. And then the market meets, like the expectations of the market meet the reality. Like they were hoping for something similar to what you see in Ready Player One movie. I believe the hardware is not there for like offering that kind of experience, even though like socializing online is something that I have been for ages, like from

ERC chats to like so many ways like Discord nowadays. Decentraland provides something different, like a spatial way to connect with others. And I think the value proposition is to actually have it

truly human connection through a computer. Like can we provide more bandwidth for human connection? I have the point, the hypothesis that that is becoming more of a need in these days. While AI is growing, all the content now is like easily generated. All the conversations that you have online are asynchronic. Yeah, like you are interacting with content that was produced some time ago and maybe by a machine.

There is a deep need of human connection and knowing that you are talking with a real person on the other side, that's life. So we are like, in order to bring new people, I think that was part of the question as well. We're doubling down on that basic human need of connecting with others. Like it's the social aspect of essential and what

Keeps the community moving. And I believe that's our biggest mode. Like what's the difference between different Decentral and other platforms? We can talk about the ideology with the open source and many other stuff. But I think the community we have gathered along the years and they are here because of the values, the technology and the other people as well.

Yeah, no, it seems like too. I mean, I've been playing around because I was one of those things where when there was a web-based experience, I was like really into it back in the day too. And then I've been able to kind of spend some time in too as we've all been working together a little more recently. And there's something to it where communication, especially like virtual communication between people has become very flat.

It's like in this podcast, right? Like you've got one view of you and one view of me. We're talking to each other. But there's something to that element of being in Decentraland and being able to track the movement of a person. And you can kind of gesture in different ways and stuff. It feels more like a real... You know it's a virtual experience, but there's just gestures and certain elements of it that are there that aren't there in typical virtual communication, right? And I think...

It's got to be challenging. How do you kind of communicate that? Let's unpack like Decentraland a little bit, just as folks might not be familiar with it. So is it basically kind of this space where you can have different projects come in and set up different areas to meet or things like that? Let's walk it through for someone who maybe never even had heard about Decentraland before.

Yeah, totally. So Decentraland, super short, is a virtual social world. It's mostly community driven. So everything that you can see and experience has been built by our community that goes by like the virtual space, but also the different digital items that you can use in your avatar. So you create your avatar, pick a name, customize how it looks. You can also purchase more clothes and just start roaming around and

And what will happen eventually is that you connect with someone else. Maybe they are doing an event, maybe they are projecting a film and they are doing like a watch party. And then you start engaging with a community. We have many communities inside the Centron and each of them have their interest. Main interest maybe is around music or art. So I think you find your way in the community and eventually be part of something bigger.

That's awesome. And how is it attracting builders to the space? Is a part of it kind of growing different spaces within Decentraland? And how do you do that? Are there developers, toolkits, or is it a special breed of developers? I'm just kind of trying to give a thousand-foot view for folks who might not be familiar with this stuff. Yeah, totally. So we have it...

Genesis City, which is like the main city, the metropolis of Decentraland, is created by 90,000 parcels of land. Each of them has an owner. You can purchase land or you can rent land or if you get involved in the community, you may get like a free lease as well. Maybe a landowner is looking for a creator to host an activity or an art piece aligned with the topic.

Also, we have an integration with ENS. So if you have an ENS name, you also have access to your private world, kind of an isolated island in which you can build and test your ideas. And people can teleport to that island, but it's not connected to the metropolis. Like if you want to get all the benefits of the adjacency to the

and other parcels and all the food traffic you may get, getting land, access to land, that would be ideal. We implemented these isolated versions of worlds to lower the entry barrier for any creator. Like if you have an ENS name, which is

super common nowadays, you can already start building. Regarding the tools to build, we have a no-code approach. You have to download the Creator Hub. You can create a scene and start dropping some assets there and you can publish into your world on that. But also integrates with like

actually coding. So you can open Visual Studio Code or Coursor if you're now in the vibe coding trend. Since Decentraland is open source, there are so many examples out there of how to build content. AI is catching up very fast. If you want to create...

You need maybe some skills on 3D modeling, or at least being able to download assets online. Maybe you want to code in JavaScript or TypeScript for the logic of the particular scene. Yeah, and then I think it's up to the creativity is the limit. That's awesome. Yeah, it's like a whole new canvas kind of thing for people that build spaces. What are some of the most compelling use cases that you've seen beyond just basic social interaction?

Well, hey, I mean, social interaction is quite broad. So maybe like making new friends and roaming around or building your own community. We can say that social interaction, other approach to that is like team building. Like if you already have a community that they know each other, there are so many companies that are remote. Maybe they struggle to find an activity they can do with like 20, 30 people online.

So team building is another use case. Then for the creators, I think like I said, as you say, the open canvas for build new experiences. If you also, you can...

create like digital assets and sell it on the marketplace. So for many creators, it's also like a revenue stream. They get part of their time in building new collections and sell it into Decentraland's marketplace. And they not only get the fees from like the primary sales, but they

We also give the creators a part of the fee of any secondary sale that is processing our marketplace. That's actually interesting to continue a revenue line of a collection you already made. And I think like for companies or brands in general, they are doing activations in Decentral looking for like maximizing the time spent by a user. Like if you want to get to a big numbers of views,

probably you should go with like Instagram or like a social media platform. But if you want to get like 30, 40 minutes of interaction, like real engagement of a user, I think Decentraland or this, any immersive experience will make it. We see many brands looking for like how we can build something that is memorable, how we can launch or...

Include something in our lunch party, doing an experience in Decentraland. It's quite different way to set aside from the company. Mostly if the product you are doing is community-based or has a strong focus in your users. I think those are compelling use cases other than just socializing and making friends.

And then I think if you're a techie person and you like to thinker, Decentraland, since it's an open source project and all the stack is very well described, we have seen many people who just jump because they find this is a place in which they have a say. They can prototype a project, then actually submit it to a governance platform, maybe make a change in the product.

The very small 3% of the population that has the push for making a change in this world, they can't find a home in the central. This is a place that we welcome everyone who wants to have a say and actually get their hands dirty. They may get a grant to build their prototype. So...

I think that's like a place for innovation. That's the other one. Yeah, it seems like even, was it last week or the week before you guys were doing like a fashion week or like events or things like that too, right? That seems really interesting. Yeah, we just wrapped up the fashion week, which was a big event that we host a few of them through the year. We have like music festival events.

And last November, Fashion Week now, we will have a LAN party that is towards gaming and multiplayer interactions in Decentraland. We'll have smaller ones like Prompt Day, a career fair. And for us, it's a way to bring together a lot of creators for a particular theme. For Fashion Week, we collaborated with many creators

art designers and communities online who were investing in digital art, some universities as well. We make an open call, curate all the participants and organize many panels and talks. Yeah, build it like a

four-day event around all this content and also a really nice place, like a meeting point for all the community to gather and see what's new. For the central foundation is also like a moment to showcase what's new in the project, like the new features are there and always raising the bar on what can be built in the central.

That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where like Decentraland's a rare breed of a project that's been in this space for long enough to have like gone through some pretty, you know, severe events that have happened and still building despite that. Like there's not a lot of projects that have been able to kind of evolve and find fit and

and continue to iterate and build and re-release and, and all of that. Like what have some of the challenges been that, that you all have seen as, as one of those few teams that can say, Hey, we've been around since, you know, 2017 and are still building and releasing new things now. Like what, what have been some of those challenges that you've, you've had to kind of iterate and learn through? Well,

So many. I think like the first big challenge was the scalability of the Ethereum network. I think that that was the first one. And we moved to Polygon Network as a solution. Like the main smart contracts in Decentraland are hosting Ethereum, like the LAN smart contract, MANA, the marketplace, the names, etc.

But for example, for the user generated content, like all these digital assets that creator can create and sell, like animations for your avatar, like T-shirts, those kind of stuff, we minted in Polygon and sell it there. And it has been working well since then. I think like,

Understanding the right timing for the innovation when the pain is real. Understanding when you need to move. Because, for example, now we have so many chains out there. Like you use roll-ups and new layer ones. Some technologies call layer zero. And I don't believe they are solving a problem for us right now. Like there is no pressure, still.

as hard as we had before. Like, okay, fees in Ethereum are crazy. We cannot sell t-shirts with these fees. Right, right. So understanding when the problem is real and your problem and then jumping into that point of innovation, I think that's the first challenge. Otherwise, you will get pitched

to move your technology to another chain or implement this technology or another, and maybe that's not moving the needle. Another challenge is like moving away of Web3 as like the main user. Web3 is like the core of our technology for asset ownership.

However, for example, asking every user to have a wallet in order to experience Ecentra for the first time, that was a boomer. Like we were missing a big part of the market there. So since a year ago, we slowly introduced social login that has a non-custodial wallet behind the scenes that...

makes you a first class citizen. You can hold any NFTs and transact online, sign messages. But for that user, most of it is kind of transparent. I think that was also a big win. Yeah. Removing part of the crypto slang to be more appealing for a mainstream audience. I think we have the blessing, if we compare Decentraland with other crypto projects, that our use case is

pretty wide, it's mainstream. Like, it really applies to so many people compared with, I don't know, a DeFi project. Like, if you are building a decentralized exchange, okay, you know your audience. But for us, like, it's

like a dj wannabe who like wants to dj at parties at home while their kids are sleeping right they say create or in the middle of the woods that it's pretty far from society but they want to like find like-minded people so i think like understanding the audience and lowering the entry barriers removing the crypto slung of course is part of the

at the end game, you know, like you will get into the ideology and the tools and why this is different, but no need to make it on like the first screen. So that was a challenge. Then decentralization,

It has been another important topic, like from getting the right balance between ideology and pragmatism. Yeah. Because like for us, it's like super important. It's in the name, you know? Fair enough, fair enough. Yeah, but it comes with its own cost. It's not free. Like the centralized version is...

of course like probably faster like it lets you iterate easier like it may scale better going with a fully decentralized approach leads to i don't know some inefficiencies so understanding where is the line in which things we this is completely decentralized and for us it's like

The identity layer, okay, that's decentralized. Like anyone with a private key can create their identity and own stuff here. You don't need our permission to access decentralized. So that's number one. Then asset ownership stored in the blockchain. That's great.

Then we have a decentralized network that stores the content of the world and it's replicated. You are sure that if you deploy something to Decentraland, it will be there permanently, forever, or at least while the network is running. But we cannot take it down or...

like sensor part of the content. So that's great. But then for example, for the communication layer, we started with a peer to peer protocol for like broadcasting the messages between the peers. And that didn't really scale. We end up with like using open source technologies and we have one cloud service

that is using LiveKit technology. Yeah, basically there is one central server in which you connect and you can see other people online and relay the messages more efficiently. So for us, centralizing in one main solution for networking makes sense, but we're mitigating the risk by holding up

open standards and open source code. I think that that was also another challenge. Internally in the company, you know, the culture, like they always take the hardest solution for everything. It's like, come on, this is not necessary. I know how that is.

Yeah, that goes, you know, it's one of the pros of working with like principled people to like on this front, especially building to is where like, you know, I kind of like that. And even though it could be a little more challenging sometimes, then it seems like it's really fascinating to hear this too, because there's a lot of what we deal with that brave to that similar in a lot of ways to whether it's like around privacy or to what you're dealing with decentralization and like, so finding solutions that fit.

And what are the key parts of this to be the purest on? And then how can we scale it by using other services that maybe are less critical to the overall experience, but are important enough to have a centralized service behind? And then if you're going to do that, do it in an open source. It's a lot of things, the trade-offs, right? And then a lot of considerations. And just to kind of... Another part of the decentralized discussion, which I think might be worth getting to a little bit on the governance side, right? Like,

with the organizations too. That's another part of that, right? Like maybe we can break down how does that work with Decentraland? Decentraland has two main entities. The Decentraland Foundation, that's like the company I run, where 70 people, most of them are engineers. We're basically the protectors of the brand. We hold everything

the brand rights on this physical world. We do marketing, hold the assets like the Twitter account, the website. We also are entrusted with the security of the platform since we have the main assets and we do software development and innovation. Then we have the other entity that is the Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

that both companies were like kickoff in 2020. They both received the same amount of funding, like a 10 year vesting contract each. We are independent in funding.

but the DAO is the one who owns the critical smart contracts in the blockchain. So any change to the land registry, changes to the marketplace, changes to the names and many other critical things are managed by the DAO and any changes there need to be approved through a governance process.

And we also have like draw the line in which like, okay, this is part of the protocol. So any change in this part needs to go through a governance process. And the responsibilities of the DAO are mostly like protect the smart contracts and like long-term changes in the central. If you want to issue more land or if you want, we have been having this conversation of like, I lost my private keys, how can I recover my land?

okay, should we modify the land smart contract to allow someone to like get their land back? And okay, should we have like a committee that can,

Recover land, recover is a nice name to expropriate land as well. Right, right, right. Like a community voted no, they're like, okay, this may start as a well-intended idea, but in long term, this can degenerate in so many bad things. So I think the DAO is a place that all the different witnesses of dissension along the years come to there and have a voice and discuss about the long term.

Dedao also is the one who collects all the fees from the platform, like all the marketplace fees. So they get this revenue stream and with the best income, the treasury they already have because of the best income track and all the revenue they get from the user economy, they reinvest in strategic projects and building content inside the platform. So Dedao

the body that leveraged our community to building more content inside Decentral. I think we have a nice split of responsibilities. We work together, definitely. Maybe we build a new kind of experience and then the DAO scales that into actually having communities using it more and more.

That's awesome. As somebody that's been in the space for back in those 2017 days, I think you all are a real standout in the fact that you're still building, you're finding market fit. And I think it's really timely too, where we've got times now where the event circuit for real life events has become so commercialized and so expensive and people just want to get together in different ways. And a lot of the approaches that you've outlined here have been great. Like

you can figure out a no code way to kind of build a space and get people to go meet there and, and kind of bring the essence of what, you know, bringing people together is kind of all about without them having to like worry about it, killing their budget, you know, like it's just not a lot of outlets for that, that are really immersive and fun, you know, these days. And I really love that you guys have like stuck to your guns and like, you know, really care focused on the things that are super important. And while,

really trying to keep a laser focus on that market fit piece and finding that. And yeah, I hope, stoked that we're all working together too. If people want to, you know, get involved with Decentraland and try it out, how can they do that? Yeah, well, just go to Decentraland.org. You will find like a big red button to download the Decentraland Explorer.

our latest version of Decentraland desktop-based. So you can run it on Windows or Mac and basically log in, create your avatar and jump in and try to find a party out there.

Awesome. Awesome. And if people want to follow any of your work or anything you're putting out there, where would you recommend they check you out online? They can follow me on Twitter or X. My handle is Yemel Jardy, like my name and last name all together. And also they can follow Decentra and also on socials.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Yamil, I really appreciate you being gracious with your time and coming and sharing with us today. Love to have you guys back too, like as you guys bring new things to the metaverse and get more things out there for people to check out and to check in on things. But yeah, thanks so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Luke. Has been a pleasure. All right. We'll talk soon. Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist podcast. To never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow in your podcast app.

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