The Omniverse SWOT

Good evening, everybody last keynote. Let's have some fun and let our imaginations run wild. Why the omniverse SWAT, I didn't wanna use the word metaverse. And I actually think that where we're heading from a technology point of view, it's gonna be everything. It's everything digital it's, and it's also gonna be everything physical, but I'd like to take this 20 minutes to take us back 10 years to the year 2012 and forward out to the year 2032. And imagine where we're heading based on where we've come from.

And in 20, 20, sorry, in 2012 co Cole published a white paper called life management platforms. And if you haven't read it, I would absolutely encourage you to look at it because at the same time, it was around the same time that I founded Miko. And I was working on our manifesto. This idea that in the future, everyone would get equity and value in exchange for the information they share. And I think what I didn't understand back in 2012.

And when you look at that paper, is that what we were describing was what is emerging as web three, the possibility it's just that the technology wasn't there then. So we hear every day now, just the, the, the last speaker throughout the last couple of days, everything that's emerging in this web three world, this promise all of a sudden this convergence of technologies means that we are positioned for this digital utopia.

You know, we are to foster and reward creativity, and everyone will be able to make their own NFT and everyone will be rewarded for everything they do. And at the same time, we're gonna write all the wrongs of digital equity. So all of a sudden we're gonna have the mechanisms to be able to fix many of these things, will we? Because at the same time we are moving and we are starting to experience the most immersive, collaborative and experiential form of technology. We ever know. We're actually from a spatial point of view, we're moving to live inside the technology.

So it's not so much technology as a tool, but technology as an extension.

And we're already starting to see along with the opportunities that that brings, it's already presenting new security identity and privacy threats, because that technology is so much closer to us and almost difficult at times to distinguish from us Bob Iger, who was the CEO and chairman of the Disney corporation recently was talking about web three and having spent the last two decades of his life, creating a physical virtual world for people to lose themselves in whether or not it's on the screen or in a theme park, as he looks to web three, his comment was, it's gonna need a lot of moderation.

This idea that you can experience things in three dimensions in a way where you are actually inside the technology and behave in a way that is consistent with our physical life, but completely in a digital way where there aren't those digital rules of the road or ways of being is going to call for lots of possibility for moderation tools. And here's a cheery headline from Forester in March earlier this year, web three promises, a better online future, but contains the seeds of a dystopian nightmare, beware, beware. So is it something that we can hold at bay or will we all live here?

You know, is this inevitable and are we already on track for it? And how far away is it? It's taken 10 years since that paper in 2012, for some of the underlying capabilities, from a technology point of view to evolve, will it take another 10 years before they all converge and come together?

Well, here's an addressable market that is already worth 2.4 billion. This is a market that is doing a few hundred million of revenue a month, and it's absolutely focused in enabling a web free experience. Problem is it's kids during the COVID crisis. And during the lockdown, one of the big changes from a social point of view is we had a whole generation of children that weren't physically connecting and out in physical playgrounds, but were pushed into digital playgrounds.

And so one of the things that's changing our relationship with technology is how do you say to our, to a generation of children from starting school right through to teenagers? Okay. I know you, we were told you to go to your room, do your homework go online, but now we want you to re reenter the physical world and sort of give that up.

And Roblox, I think is a great example of children that are already every day living in this tokenized world exchanging tokens of the 67% of Roblox users, 60 of the user 67% or under 16 and of the total are 54, nearly 55% are under 13 generating 200 and something million dollars of revenue every month. And these are children every day that understand what it is to buy a digital skin or trade a token or connect in ways from a UX experience that are not the same kinds of experiences.

They, they will find in the real world when they go to open a bank account or start a job or onboard. So we already have this disconnect with a generation through their form of play and creativity have an expectation that disconnects. So what else will drive the adoption if this is happening?

Naturally, if you have young kids and they are already living in this world, what's gonna do it for our generation. Do I have your attention? Yes. So here's an interesting thing about humans. There's a big connection between sex and UX. Do you want to talk to this guy? Is this someone you could approach? Is this somebody who would seem attractive or this guy? And so one of the interesting entrees for us into the Webre world. So if we're not kids and, and it's not immersive for us, it may be that it becomes an auditory experience before it becomes a visual experience.

And we already know Google glass didn't work so well, and there's been some experiments, but the reality of if the UX is not sexy, if it doesn't make us feel confident and attractive, it'll be really hard to scale. And so we may find that it's gonna be things more like podcasts or digital assistance or our auditory experience that is going to really accelerate things. And just look at what's happened with AirPods. And I know they're not the only sort of in device that we're starting to wear inside the body, but look at the growth and look it's early days for, for AR VR.

So it's probably not so much too fair to compare, but one of the challenges is this is something that is very solitary. And what we understand about this is its ubiquitous already, it's on an airplane. It's out in the hall, it's driving your car, it's on a bus, it's on a plane. This is already become an extension for us. And so of these cute little things that live in our house yeah. That listen to everything we say and create all of this amazing convenience or experiences that have been designed from a retail point of view, where things are so easy.

So simple that we just think, okay, the convenience is really going to offset any trade off that I have right now. So a lot of aspects of this web free world are peripheral things that are getting closer and closer. And we're also, I think, I don't know whether this has been announced officially or whether this is rumor or talked about, but I think apple, I just recently bought new laptop, new iPad, new phone. And I think there is talk that apple is going to move to a subscription model for the actual device.

I certainly was able to, to manage the, the apple care in a completely different way to, to I had how I had in the past. So we're also moving to this zero click world where everything can order renew. So we'll set something up or set some preferences and then that product or service, whether, whether it's a laptop or a car will order renew on a monthly basis. So we obviously need different infrastructure for people, things in our digital twins. I don't need to go into this with this audience. This is something that we've been talking about for the last few days.

And in fact, the last 15 years at EIC, this emergence of this infrastructure, as we've moved the periphery out from enterprise and organization out into customers, partners, as that has moved, we've needed to put an extension in place of the technology to allow this to happen. And one of the things that we've been focused on a lot over the last well decade, but certainly EIC over the last four or five years is this idea of reusable identity, self sovereign identity. So is that gonna save us?

Is this, if everybody is able to control their identity, is that going to save us a recent liminal report said that the global market for this reusable identities on track to be about 266 billion by 2027, that's a big escalation with financial services, digital commerce, and government being the largest markets. And certainly the themes over the last couple of days have been amazing things happening in the government space.

Interesting things happening around financial service travel online, but as we connect everything, we're also increasing obviously the amount of data we're increasing the identity and security considerations. So the question is, is S S I D enough, have we been really focused on trying to manage identity without thinking of the job to be done or the outcome? Because one of the emerging differences in the Webre world is also the fractionalization of everything, tiny units of investment in everything, art property, music forward funding, the design of a new sneaker.

So we are taking a generation of kids that understand this way of operating in the metaverse this tokenized world. We're bringing them into user experiences where their expectations will be, things can be fractionalized. And if everything can be tokenized, if everything can be unique, are we thinking enough around these emerging business models that need to go alongside the ability for us to join things, join industry sectors.

I, I, there was an interesting conversation today around the idea that, you know, banks, transport, insurance, supply chain, all of these things now are need this horizontal integration rather than having these separate industry sectors what's gonna happen when that cooperation is able to be tracked and traced. And we can, we can distinguish a tiny unit of value. What will we wrap around that asset? Will it be loyalty? Will it be fee currency? Will it be cryptocurrency? Will it be time? Will it be carbon offset? Because all of those things are possible.

We can fractionalize things and we can marry a tiny unit of value around every transaction. But at the same time where we find ourselves right now is with a significant shift in monetary policy, financial infrastructure is changing. I was shocked to see this statistic from Coinbase. I don't know whether that's actually the situation today as it was a week ago, as I'm sure there's a lot of people that have moved in the market. This has been a terrible week for crypto, but 33% of consumers of purchased cryptocurrency. And this was reported just last week.

Gucci made the announcement that five of their flag steps, flagship stores in the United States will start to take five stable coins and BTC E and even doge as a, a as their move towards what they want to evolve into is a Webre company. So we're also starting to see these experiences that are immersive, entertaining, attractive, sexy. And then at the same time, we have this ability to make everything an NFT.

And I've been in discussions over the last few months on being able to use this as a very helpful instrument to track trace, offset carbon, right through to turning an insurance policy into an NFT alongside a whole host of other use cases. As we know, from art to music, and then the ability to actually offer a fractional investment in something like the creation of a song or the design of a fashion garment before it's even made.

And we've moved our whole UX experience through this type of technology from testing and validating before, and then putting something in market and testing it to testing it before we even create it to see if we can forward sell parts of it before we even start to source the supply chain. So identity alone, will it be enough, or do we need to be able to bring together in wallets, the ability to, to issue prove store access, track, trace, trust, revoke.

And so I think there's this massive convergence, because we are now dealing with both the physical and the digital and the way those two things come together. So it may be a biometric that is able to complete a whole journey, but I may need to prove a number of things in terms of whether or not I have ownership of something, what that ownership allows me to do. So we are moving much more towards this idea, that identity is context. What am I trying to do right now?

What is the context and how much control can I have over the amount or of information that I have to give up or what I need to prove in order to have that outcome? Oh, and by the way, I need that outcome immediately. And I need that to happen in a way that's really seamless back in 2018, which I guess five years is that five years ago now, no four years ago, I'm jumping ahead at EIC. We launched our white paper, zero knowledge proofs of the modern digital life. And we were focusing on access control and exchange of identity and personal data. Even then it was only four years ago.

We were looking at kind of this tokenized world and describing alongside the technological possibilities, what the underlying economics might be of a tokenized world. And as we start to look towards, if I look at that paper again now, and I look at where we're heading to, I think we didn't have the language even four years ago to describe what's emerging, but we had this hypothesis that we've been focused on of life moving between ledgers and networks between private, which I would argue is our digital twin that we must literally protect with our life.

We are, we will become closely associated with our digital shadow, our digital twin, our digital exhaust, and we really need the kind of protections in place to treat that in the same way that we take care of our physical selves. We moved in into permissioned networks, which may be our hope governed by some kind of trust framework, known actors, risk mitigation, and then more and more, we are moving towards some kind of public layer that provides the governance and the ability for us to watch the watches.

So very, very quickly. I wanna just take you through some of the things we've been looking at that need to be in place to allow that to happen. First of all, disclosure, we need to be able to, because of this physical biological aspect, we've gotta be able to do fractional disclosure. We've gotta be able to do that progressively consent. Obviously we have regulation here in Europe that supports the right to consent, but it's not really consent. There's an arbitrage. Always. I need to do this. I have to click agree.

So we've got to start designing these maximum outcomes for minimum minimum collection or minimum data given up for a maximum outcome tokens. This I think is the first EIC where I've started to hear these conversations coming through. What's the business model. That's gonna sit on top of Webre. How do you monetize and reward and incentivize the move of an enterprise from centralized to decentralized?

And again, tokens, it's very easy to think we're talking about money or cryptocurrency. We're not, we're talking about any fair value that may be associated with an exchange, but the ability to track and trace that. And if you do that, we, then we also need to be able to settle real time. We need to be starting to think about treasury capability that marries together with our business model. We have to be able to show I've agreed this unit of value in this context for this outcome. And you can be absolutely sure that that smart contract or that agreement has been settled real time.

And I've been paid, rewarded, given access, whatever the case may be. A door is opened. A policy's been sent to me, so governance and I think what's been very inspiring about the last couple of days is starting to see convergence of, of governance. The idea that we can harmonize trust frameworks, that we can look at things from a cross border point of view. This last couple of years, with us being locked at home and forced into this digital world there, our whole sense of physical boundaries have completely disappeared.

So we are now emerging back out and it's wonderful to be here physically and be here in person. But our whole concept of the way we do things within a physical boundary is changing. And therefore we need to extend the governance across borders, across states, across boundaries and then recovery. And this has been a topic that we've D we've heard quite a bit about the last couple of days is how do we move people to understand the value of their keys and managing keys, but at the same time, make it convenient.

And at the same time, when everything goes wrong, mitigate that risk and help them get out of trouble. If we can do those things, then what we will find is that we'll have a balance between the commercial, the regulatory and the technology. And that's our challenge. We have to be working on these three things simultaneously. So in closing, if we look at the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities and threats that are ahead of us right now, the strengths is decentralization.

So not that everything should be decentralized, but we can solve some problems in certain context, by being able to embrace the capabilities of using decentralized technology. Why a baby's hand, this is a really important one for all of us. The weakness here is still privacy and security from a design point of view. But the difference is we're PA we're playing with generations that won't have any other choice, but to live in an omniverse, they won't have the option of being only physical. Their lives are gonna be physical and digital.

And if we don't start thinking about the way we design everything from toys to early education to games, then by the time we think about this at an enterprise or a customer level, it's gonna be too late opportunities. Everything I think of Webre as kind of colonizing a new planet, literally we could spend the next day looking at all the possibilities, real estate, fashion, food, supply chain, onboarding, like just everything is a possibility. And so just as anything that is new and emerging, there will be some amazing things that will happen. And there will be some difficult things.

And I think the biggest threat that we have right now is around digital rights or the harmonization of digital rights. Because the challenge we have right now from a regulatory point of view is our regulators are just getting their head around web two. And here we are about to go into this whole new frontier. So technology alone doesn't change things. The world also needs social contracts. What are social contracts, standards of social contracts? Interoperability is social contracts. Voting are social contracts.

So if we want to see a world that keeps pace with the kind of change we want, then we need to get involved in making that happen. Thank you.