Rebooting the Metaverse with Lex Avellino of Passage

Transcript

the biggest kind of like technical hoop that we jump through is kind of this initial experience of being able to jump in from any device and access a world with lots of other people who are all actually streaming the experience from the cloud that's the biggest utility there is owning your digital assets so uh right now we have on the marketplace assets for several game ecosystems the strange Clan game ecosystem and the waa verse uh Chihuahua uh ecosystem and exactly slack Discord telegram teams whatever it may be like people are paying for tools to collaborate and passage does all of those things [Music] better welcome to the interupt today my

guest is Lex he's the founder of Passage passage is a virtual collaboration and creative platform that allows creators to leverage a bunch of really interesting exciting tools uh to uh encourage their communities to engage with them and it it's this really immersive virtual world we're going to get into all that today um and understand what passage is if the metaverse is still a thing and um what it means for crypto before we get started make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to get notified when new episodes drop and if you enjoy this content please consider staking with us

we're validating on a handful of blockchains including passage I should also note that passage is a portfolio company of interop Ventures and if you're coming to Brussels this summer you should definitely come to nebul Summit that's on July 12th and 13th right after ECC we're dropping new speakers every week check out the website neb. Builders early bir tickets should still be on sale when this goes out but prices are going to go up soon so make sure you get your tickets for Neer Summit it's going to be great Third Edition we have a amazing venue lots of speakers lots of people come hang out you're going to love it Lex how's it going good good oh always a pleasure brother yeah it's been a long time since

we wanted to do this and I'm really glad we can finally get you on because there's lots going on in the passage ecosystem uh you guys just announced um this new uh Elite uh product there's the AOS integration that I want to talk about but yeah first tell me a little bit about your background and like how you you know started working on passage and wanting to build this really interesting immersive collaborative platform yeah yeah totally so I've been in kind of like the creative technology space for over a decade um you know I started off uh with a in probably like 14 15 with a pirated copy of Photoshop uh don't hold that against me and and then you know just being in the digital party I know I know right um uh getting into like the it was probably through

like lime wire right like for those who remember back in the day um that was before I learned about torrenting and all that but then um again being kind of like uh into the tech space I I cut my teeth on some coding with Neopets uh back in the day and um you know I've always been kind of in between creative and and Technology I started our creative technology Studio in 2017 so like seven over seven years ago now and you know we were initially doing a lot of like uh event design we're doing 3D renders animations so very much the intersection of creative and Technology um doing very kind of like technical creative stuff 3D renders simulations things like that for um all kinds of

Brands we worked with like Warner Brothers Capital Records Dallas Cowboys um for a lot of um live activations so immersive events and once people started switching more digital more remote uh for you know out of the whole you know Insanity that happened in 2020 um then there was unique opportunity for us to really bring out more of our side of the equation which was the virtual digital element of these interactions these engagements and so we saw a lot of people doing different types of like virtual experiences but so much of it was really just like a live stream and a chat right and anybody who's doing something like unique or

immersive it it was very heavily oriented towards the game side there was some kind of download and it was going to be uh prohibitive for 99% of people who aren't uh Gamers who are trying to get into this uh it's just a practical Tool uh for a workflow that they were suddenly figuring out you know in in that 2020 era um and and since then you know big question we've gotten is like okay is virtual digital still relevant right and uh for anybody who's watching this virtually I have to say Yes um you know it's become more relevant than ever I think just that era opened people's eyes to what's possible which was something that was already happening I

think you know 2020 was just the uh uh kind of like accelerant yeah exactly for uh a fire that was already burning right more people streaming more content creators uh more interaction education happening digitally people trying to find ways to connect with their audience digitally right like shoot I've got 10,000 you know 100,000 people watching live as a content creator what do I do with this group right because I see this chat next to my stream just flying right and so people are doing subscriptions to kind of limit the number of people who can be in that chat to make it more meaningful and people are looking for just more meaningful ways to engage online so I really do think passage is

just as relevant but it came out of a very real world experience working with um big Brands we had to build virtual experiences that were relevant usable sellable right like this was not uh uh crazy web 3 speculation land right we had to build something that people actually wanted uh and that's the the phase that seated passage so we started building passage you know entirely self-funded uh for a real client base in the world uh doing unique events that's kind of where we we cut our teeth yeah cool looking back now to to 2020 and the the changes specifically you moving towards more more virtual and digital content around that period you know one

thing that strikes me is in in 2020 in early 2020 and throughout that year into 2021 um there were a lot of online events so like I I I organized an online event in like March of 2020 two days with like it wasn't crypto thing it was more of like how is the pandemic going to change the world sort of thing and we did it in zoom and I remember then there was just like very little uh available in terms of software to do this kind of thing oh yeah you know easily and uh and lots of other folks were organizing online events and I think if you know remember going back and thinking about it there was this sense that after the pandemic that events would change in the

sense that there would be more online and um offline interaction like there would be more interaction between online and offline so that you know a physical event would have kind of a digital component people were kind of brainstorming and thinking about like what what that would look like and and how how that would how digital would change the in-person event experience you know don't get me WR like in in terms of virtual content podcasting you know all that stuff has you know 10x in terms of the software you know Riverside Riverside came out around Co um uh things like hop in uh streamyard all these platforms that enable digital creators to create content emerged out of that of that period but what really hasn't you know innovated so much or at

least that that I think hasn't changed so much is is events that that whole idea of digital and and offline kind of merging in the event space hasn't really happened right it's still like now people go to events and like they go to events and there's not much of a digital component to it y um yeah just wondering if you also if if this like Rings true to you and you why you think that the kind of events uh have not gone more digital or at least not as much as I think they were meant to to go digital when we were thinking about it back then yeah because it's hard like it's just a hard problem to solve um and I think that's why not so many people are doing it because even when the answer is right

in front of you a lot of people don't see it I mean we pitched passage uh events and experiences to all kinds of companies and and you know we got to work with some really cool companies when we were building the first passage events Capital Records Amazon screw debron American girl but we pitched to a lot more than that I mean we pitched to like Disney Marvel um there was a bunch of Brands who like frankly just didn't get it and when I saw the solutions they did go with it was like man people are really stuck in this mold and so it's just really hard to make that transition uh because again so many people just chose to go live stream and a chat and because that's what they're familiar with that's what a lot of people can understand and I get it because even on

the consumer side people don't change quickly right change happens slowly over time you might have a handful of innovators I mean look at VR we have VR forever now um years I mean I don't I don't you know I don't remember exactly when the Oculus came out but I mean I I think we're talking at least five years now right I think it's more yeah yeah but of like real development huge push tons the funding for VR and how much of adoption have we really gotten and it's because I think it's such a big shift in the ux right in terms of how people interact um so if you want people to do something different um then then we absolutely have to uh slowly bring them

through it right and so for us it was about minimizing the barrier to entry um and maximizing the change in the experience right so that was a really difficult balance and that's why we constantly talk about this this duality of immersion and accessibility because what you're talking about is how do we increase immersion right how do we push digital events closer to physical events so that people will use them more right so that it will be a bigger part of the way people activate for events in general um but so many of the solutions right like again it's a live stream people are doing a live stream um and for digital events you what's funny is it usually is

one of the other right if people doing a physical event you get the live stream and that's it right that is the digital component because it is hard to combine those in a thoughtful way but then if people are doing a digital event yeah it's Zoom it's uh some people have used uh gather toown which is fun but again it's basically Zoom except on a 2d you know Pokemon map um and that type of stuff is again just so it's much it works and it gains traction because it's so close to what people have experienced right I I click on the link I see my video you know cool camera's on mic's on Bo I'm ready I don't need to figure out like am i g to use like a game controller right like do I have to have this computer right to be able to run

this experience like what people don't want to have to think about that and um that is why with passage yes we've tried to push immersion as far as possible but also at the same time um like reducing the barrier to entry as much as possible and that balance I haven't seen anybody body else do it right um I do think it's complicated in terms of the infrastructure but also like how is this going to to work right how is this going to um how are people going to to interact yeah it's it's such I mean passage is such a uh a unique and novel experience in terms of how you interact with people on a screen

that yeah I think it I think it's a huge um it's a huge lift for people to get out of this you know this this box that we're in right now right this this screen this this rectangle um you're looking at the screen but you're actually looking at yourself I saw your deck I saw in your deck you mentioned that most people actually look at themselves when they're looking at uh when you're look call everyone's going to feel called out in the chat right now yeah yeah and um yeah so it's it's like it's a huge leap for people to you get get comfortable with this new experience and I think that V you beyond the the hardware component and the cost of the hardware and the inaccessibility of the hardware I think

that's one of the reasons that like VR hasn't taken off um one of the reasons but but also just because it's such a huge uh leap to get into that new kind of experience so there's like sort of a Confluence of things that have made it such that VR hasn't really taken off I think the Apple Vision you know I don't think that that product selling super well or that um you know the initial excitement has kind of worn off there yeah and I think that stuff is really cool and I I will say you know Apple Vision Pro uh in terms of AR that is the fruition of AR right like you know AR trying to like you know oh trying to capture the whole world inside this little frame not going to cut it

right you need some field of view um but I do think that AR is like the way forward for a lot of digital immersion because the problem with VR is you can run into your couch right like like just the fact like that breaks immersion so quickly is when the physical world interrupts what you're seeing right like oh I bumped into like you know uh my dog or the desk or whatever and it's like wait that wasn't there and suddenly your inertia is off and all this and um what's beautiful about AR is it builds on top of the real world right so you have this basically infinite base to work on top of um rather than competing with the real world but yes like you said I mean the prohibitive cost um

totally new ux right like people have to figure out I'm going to do like gesture control and you know crab hands and what's going on over there right people with the headset on Just In Another World um and I do think you know we'll solve some of those problems I think those are really interesting mediums for what they're worth um but yeah yeah bridging that U ux Gap and you said this that um passages is is very very unique and honestly I I stand by that very heavily because I've been in everything I mean you name the virtual application and give me 5 Seconds on their website and I'll tell you exactly what software they're using you know what kind of

roadblocks they're going to run into I have been eating sleeping and breathing virtual experiences for longer than I'd like to admit and um and watching as everybody's innovating right we've talked with everybody who's doing all sorts of different solutions and Passages at such a unique intersection that other people just aren't doing and and I think there's an education problem right so like people need to understand how this is different but also the beauty of Passage this is why it's different is that you don't actually have to understand because you can just click that link in your calendar invite and suddenly you're in passage right yeah somebody who sets up somebody who does know who is on the inside can set up a passage event drop the link in the calendar everyone can click it and have

no idea what they're getting into with her of preparation and suddenly they're in passage loving it right with this totally different experience so there is the opportunity for people to um get access to um to jump in without any preparation right I think it's really important for something that is a new format because people will anticipate right like oh okay cool this is one of those like you know virtual things okay do I they get they'll figure out like do I need Hardware like they're suddenly they're problem solving it's like you don't have to right just click the link and that's what sets past decide from pretty much every other platform no interesting and um yeah I think I think you know sort of what what people are used to is clicking a link

and and and opening a Google meet and um and that experience being seamless I think with with passage having that similar experience of of entering a passage room um really makes it easier I think for for folks to to get used to that experience so we we'll we'll talk a little bit more about what passage actually is in a few minutes here because we haven't really gone into it but I want to ask you first like is the metaverse dead is this whole like metaverse idea really going anywhere because it feels like no I mean look in 2020 2021 like everybody was talking about the metaverse like

Facebook renam meta I know it was like this kind of hot topic that was very a propo you know in the context of CO as well yep but now that things have gone back to normal sort of normal like postco normal right that that whole idea has kind of gone to the Wayside uh yeah and and I think VR and AR are making you know I mentioned this earlier but are making slow progress in terms of adoption yes yep you know is this is AR is is is metaverse still a thing and and you know will we as people prophesized you know in 2020 2021 live and work in sort of like AR environments um the sorts that you know

Facebook workplace were uh promoting as uh ways to you know meet collaboratively Etc yeah no I and I would say um in a lot of ways it is dead uh and that's a good thing in one sense right because um nobody ever made a a huge Opportunity by knowing what is exciting right now anyone can look around and see like what's trending on Twitter who knows what right and understand what is exciting right now it's a people building for the things that will be exciting in the future right the people who are getting ahead of Trends who create unique opportunities so honestly like you should be looking for the dead

narratives right because again the the the whole ecosystem is cyclical and also look for things that have real demand real need um the beauty about what we've kind of seen is that we were never chasing a trend right we were already in the virtual space when the opportunity to create these virtual events came up and then uh even now right we're still building because for one this is a tool that we could have used for the last seven years right not just since 2020 but since we started you know we've got team team members who are all over the world everywhere from from Indonesia to Indiana and um the uh the collaboration of within our team has benefited wildly

from being able to use use passage right it's just we we've seen so many ways in which it is more personal um it's more engaging and for so many businesses that's the case right they're looking for a premium solution and it just doesn't exist um you know the best you get is you know hey I'm going to like cut out my background in Zoom or Google meet right like I'm immersive now right and so there isn't really a premium solution for team collaboration there are things like gather tal we can talk about how you know some of the differences between passage and other uh collaboration tools or virtual platforms so there are some people who are trying to solve that problem but there are like zero premium solutions that offer an

immersive experience that's as accessible as Google meet right so that's why people are just using Google meet because like hey whatever like this is easy and so yes in some ways I do think the narrative has died but that doesn't mean the problem has died the problem is that people you know get up on the horse and fall off on the other side right like it's like oh like we're all going to live in the metaverse right and it's the people who weren't saying that who are kind of in the middle like well I don't think we're going to do that but I do think it's an incredible tool for teams that are already collaborating all around the world right those people are still building it's the people who are saying like no we're gonna eat live and breathe in there like this is the end of the physical physical

events like those are the people who are like n it's dead now right because since we didn't manifest that reality immediately in one cycle um now it's like no that's dead the people who are saying like no this is just a really good tool to solve a problem that we've been experiencing forever um those are the people still still building right so I think in some sense yes their narrative is dead but the need the problem is not it's just as alive as ever again case in point if you are hearing the words I'm speaking right now you are watching virtual content and there are better ways to interact right there's better ways for creators to connect with their Community for teams

to connect with each other like anybody watching this stream cannot say that there is not a need to connect better virtually right and so you know just because we don't immediately jump to 24/7 VR headset doesn't mean that um that isn't a real need and that we don't we aren't still in the process of creating tools for that problem so let's let's talk about passage what you know can can you describe for for people listening what passage is like how how do they experience the this this immersion uh that you've been describing yeah so essentially you know like what what can people expect when they're

using passage Yeah so basically they can expect the best of uh AAA video games right so if you've played anything uh in the last two years that's what you can expect in terms of the experience that we can hit the best of AAA Graphics right now our first uh engine integration is Unreal Engine uh which is just topof the line in terms of the graphical possibilities from real-time raate tracing with RTX to um you know uh uh all the different things right they've got okay that that that's all very technical but like yes what what like for people who don't know what Unreal Engine is like sure highly immersive right uh the idea is that what we're creating and and this is the problem because if you're looking for something that's not as immersive then

you can just do Google meet right the accessibility isn't necessarily the issue it's the combination of accessibility because I've been saying you oh it's so easy to get in it's one click but so is Google meet right the difference is we're bringing people into something personal right um something where it's a three-dimensional experience you can turn and and see who you're talking to who's talking to you on these flat screens one of the biggest problems we see is that yeah most people are just looking at themselves right but then um everyone's also the same size you may not have talked the entire meeting but you are the same size as the speaker right like there's just this fundamental like disconnect between how we present ourselves in a in a video call um versus how we interact in real

life you might be that person who's like kind of on the back of the circle of the crowd talking right and you're just observing right and and maybe you've got like a little whispered conversation with your buddy but that isn't possible here there is no Whispering there is no being on the edge it's like you're front and center just like the speakers everyone's on the exact same plane um got it so maybe I can describe my experience of using pleas you know we've used it together so essentially you you click on this link and you're in a video game you are in this 3D immersive experience in a firstperson shooter Style um format right where you see the world around you and you see the people around

you now I think a lot of people probably have seen demos of you know the Facebook um you know metaverse thing where you have these weird looking kind of comic Booky avatars right this isn't what passage looks like today uh what you see is you see you see people's video feed like you see their faces uh but they're they're kind of floating around in these little circular screens so you know imagine like um pods yeah I was going to say imagine an Apple Air tag with a video feed on it yeah yep exactly basically it's like this little Apple Air tag sort of round white thing that that has the person's video feed on it and and you can use your keyboard you

can walk around you can turn away from someone uh you can go talk to someone else and what what really I think is kind of interesting about this format and you you mentioned is it is not only the the interactions that you can have where you can actually look at someone and turn away and look at someone else is using spatial audio if you move away from someone you're going to hear them less and you're going to be able to have a conversation with someone else maybe on the other side of the room yeah and that that's really cool and I think you know in a meeting setting you know if you're having like a team meeting or like three or four people you're probably all sitting around a corner around a circle and and talking to each other right and you might want

to look around and stuff but if it's more of like a conference or maybe a panel or something like that then you might have folks kind of in the audience that can speak to each other and be sort of listening to the panel and not be disturbing the panel although I don't know maybe maybe like a pod turns around and goes like sh you know or something like that but um but yeah it's quite cool and so the Unreal Engine thing you know Unreal Engine is this this framework for building immersive experiences that's used in gaming like um uh you know first kind of developed by Unreal Tournament U that that gaming franchise yep and you can go and buy assets so you can go on these websites

and just like you can buy you know stock footage or stock video or whatever you can buy stock Unreal Engine assets so entire world's uh Studio sets characters objects whatever and you can go and build your own world so you know we were think thinking about okay let let's do like a kind of podcast Studio where we're all sitting around kind of sports center style and having a panel or having a conversation and passage and people can come in and watch and like they're kind of in the audience so it's it's actually it's pretty unique and what's what's really cool about it is that you can run this on your phone like and we're going to get into this but all of the rendering is done off of your computer you're just streaming it's like

watching Netflix you know there's yep you just need a good internet connection and you're hard you don't have any hardware requirements um so that's that's my sort of the way I explain passage and my my my experience with it um maybe there's things I'm missing here but yeah no I love that that's great that's perfect um yeah you you captured kind of the immers immersive element you talked about spatialized sound and the other cool thing about spatialized sound is that when you Circle up you know you're looking at somebody and talking to them uh you know when we live we did a live stream from passage with the cosmos bases crew and and they immediately got this idea one you know I went over to a different area um with with gains and we're talking to him while other people

are talking to the other side and and that was wild to him as like Wella we're having two different conversations but we're both in here right yeah and then also um you can tell who's talking to you because they're looking at you and if they turn you know they're talking to somebody else or they're just you know looking off into the distance you know paying attention to something else so there's a a different level of Engagement but then also if somebody next to you needs to like talk or interrupt you can hear who it is who's interrupting right and that's really interesting because with zoom it's really hard when you're when you're going back and forth in a in a dialogue between more than just two people because people will start to talk over each other because you know uh two people start start to talk at the same

time and there's no spatialization to it so it's hard to know like wait who who was just talking right but when somebody on your left is like oh and you're you turn everyone gets a sense of oh this person's talking and everyone kind of adjusts and listen to what they have to say but but you can immediately tell where people are talking from right it's not just how far away they are they're you can tell they're on my left they're on my right and so it's very natural to shift between different people talking there's a lot of just really interesting nuances when you bring that into 3D but everyone's going to have something to compare this to as well right because everyone's going to be like oh well but isn't that like and I don't know maybe they've been in sandbox maybe they in D

Central land because those are also 3D experiences right but most of those 3D experien it's really interesting there's there's a bunch of layers to this that we kind of peeled away as we were building passage right because we started building passage um directly in the web so like like a website that you're loading your computer's running the graphics all of that um using webg you know web 3D basically um and we moved away from that because yes that's still technically accessible through a link like decentraland runs in the web um sandbox runs in the web but you're super limited on Graphics because it's it has to run on everyone's machine right and then the problem is

it's still doesn't run on everyone's machine right even if you pair it down as small as possible you know turn the graphics all the way down um there's going to be it's for one it's not going to work on phones almost across the board any of these 3D platforms don't work natively on mobile on on mobile browsers you got to have download a dedicated game on your phone right so you got to go to the App Store you got to find the app for your your platform Android or iOS and maybe it doesn't support Android yet whatever um so there's all these hoops you have to jump through just just to be able to pull it up on your phone right so again this is where that whole element comes in of like yeah maybe it's a web experience maybe you can click a link to get in but

only if you're at your desktop you know at your desk sitting down um with your big computer or your laptop and um what's really unique about passage is that it's the exact same experience across every device and it is like you said because it's running in the cloud it doesn't matter what Hardware you have because your Hardware is not running the experience yeah yeah we we'll get into the hardware aspect in in a second you know one of the things that I found a little bit jarring though with with passage was having to use the keyboard to get around I think if yep you know if you're not kind of like a PC Gamer and you're not used to using the keyboard to getting around I think that that can be maybe a barrier for people I

wonder you know if you guys have thought about other ways to because you know if you're in a room and if there's like people in the room you if you want to go talk to this person or you want to talk to that P person like you shouldn't have to kind of walk there you should have you should you should be able to click maybe on them and you're just immediately there or you kind of yeah or or maybe there's some gestures that you can make with your hands or your head that get captured by the camera and um and allow you to move around or like you know be in a different place or talking someone else I wonder if you guys are thinking also about the you know the interaction with cuz it's not it's not VR right like you can't turn around and

start walking or right do some kind of like gesture with your hand on Apple Vision Pro and start moving so I wonder if you're thinking about the you know the the the interaction from from the the the kind of ux perspective right the the interface with uh with this thing that remains on a screen but that isn't a virtual space yes one of the things we're working on right now so okay for so for context we're currently in kind of the closed Alpha of Passage so we have um basically you know users right now who are paying for passage and onboarding into the dashboard this week so we're kind of in that stage where bringing people in who are using and

paying for the platform but it's in a closed setting right it's kind of a gated experience so there's things we're working on because it's technically still Alpha um it's not fully featured yet and some of the things we're building we're we're finishing now are for instance um updating the mobile navigation mobile controls and so that's touchbased controls where you can go in without keyboard or mouse or anything like that and just click and drag to look around like oh I'm turning I'm turning tap where you want to go and navigate automatically right yeah actually I actually think on a phone it's easier yes than on a keyboard it actually is it 100% is and um with that that will apply once we update the controls that'll apply to computer as well so could turn on touch controls and

just click and navigate around just your mouse right so we're going to add more and more features for navigation and then also the beauty of working in Unreal Engine is that we have VR and AR integration basically by default right we can just basically update at a new camera type a new character controller um for the different Hardware now what that means is you would have to run passage locally on your Hardware right to to use your VR headset and stuff um so there are like you know uh uh some some Integrations people would need but it's it's from a tech the technical side it's an easy easy integration right to add VR support to add AR support where people can basically navigate however

they want then they can put on the headset and just teleport everywhere or whatever um so these this is stuff that we'll Implement over time adding more ways for people to to navigate the biggest kind of like technical hoop that we jump through is kind of this uh initial exper experience of being able to jump in from any device and access a world with you know uh uh lots of other people um who are all actually streaming the experience from the cloud that's kind of like the unique infrastructure that is our our Alpha right the the the MVP and then from here this there's all gravy right there's so many unique opportunities for uh upgrading that experience we have nft gating coming um Avatar customizations right so you

mentioned that the the basic unit of presence of Avatar is the video Avatar right it's the puck if you're walking around as your video feed so when people look at you they see your video but you can move around in 3D um and that's beautiful because you do really get this face Toof face experience but with the Avatar uh customizations that were rolling out you will be able to pick a 3D character instead right if you want to walk around as your you know game character or as whatever um so you could switch between those customize them so that you if you don't want to have video if you just want audio you don't need you could be a 3D character right so again all these things are going to be upgrades as people as we roll out more of the features Okay cool so the the the

obvious question is why is this being talked about on a blockchain podcast yep why is this on a blockchain uh because I mean so far you've talked about you know this this product that you know could be a web two product it could very much be just like a web two SAS product why what's the relevance of web 3 here yeah and I'll say it started out that way right I mean like again we weren't selling to like web the web 3 Community we were selling to like Capital Records and like a bunch of web two Brands um so it started off as a web2 SAS product um and in a lot of ways we want to preserve that element in the sense that we want to make sure we're building a product that normal

people will buy right and when we look at the list of people who are currently on our weit list or in our closed Alpha um you know one of our one of our closed Alpha participants is a um is an ed a remote education uh uh basically curriculum that um is working with colleges all over the country right so they're basically going to be onboarding people from uh remote education uh uh applications uh from universities all over the US right and this is just totally you know separate from the web three stuff right nobody who's coming in to Passage for their uh University class right is going to be worried about

crypto stuff and so for instance even within the closed Alpha people are paying through uh for their streaming time and their subscription uh via just a stripe integration right all the blockchain stuff is meant to be on the back end and I can explain why why blockchain for us as we got more and more into the digital landscape I think so many people have experienced this they've experienced like um investing a lot of time people inv more more time into virtual right whether it's investing money into games um putting money into applications that we're using to collaborate but there's no real sense of ownership whether it's like all the DRM stuff uh with like um content platforms like Netflix right it's like

I'm paying for this uh these movies these films I bought a video on Amazon Prime right not even like my subscription but like I bought this movie right for 12 13 bucks um but if I don't update the app or if I don't you know if I if I don't download the app then I can't I can't watch it right there is this sense where people are like more and more of our stuff our our our collaboration our life is digital and we own less and less of it right so there's that's that's been a big I think a big um rough point for people in this transition to more and more digital content digital collaboration is there is a greater lack of ownership that's why blockchain is important to this app

but for us we want to um not simply push people onto the virtual we want this to be a collaboration between virtual and and physical we want this to be something people can integrate across physical events things like that but in that sense we want to preserve as much of the real world ownership as possible in this process so um the biggest application for the passage blockchain which is a cosmos SDK chain layer one chain um that's been uh you know producing blocks for uh over a year and a half now and has been the token's been public since August last August um the biggest utility there is owning your digital

assets so uh right now we have on the marketplace assets for several game ecosystems the strange Clan game ecosystem and the waa verse uh chihuaha uh ecosystem and woof woof exactly exactly and the the um th those assets the goal is that you own your digital experience right so those gaming communities want people to own their characters um but we've also launched actually we have um a few collections of Avatar customizations um which again we're rolling out in the closed Alpha um and level customization so unrel engent assets that people can own on the blockchain right owning the 3D data um actually having something tangible

tangible data that has some type of inherent value um on chain that's the goal right one of some of the other big things that we're pushing for that I think are are revolutionary um but but still kind of in the future uh we've been working on a relationship protocol where you actually own the relationships that you make in passage so whether it's followers or friends these are an asset on the blockchain that you could theoretically take to another platform so those are the things that are really important I think uh for integrating blockchain and the value of blockchain in passage um there's a really really unique Synergy between the passage platform and the passage chain which includes the passage Marketplace passage open source developments um and they

both offer really unique value proposition for ownership of digital assets and then utility a place to use those digital assets but the beauty of the blockchain is that all those assets because you would own the 3D data it's not just usable on Passage technically you could take those assets and Implement them somebody somewhere else somewhere could build a platform that is compatible with um passage relationships passage uh 3D assets so that you can use your characters or your um your your different level pieces on a different platform right and that's the goal that's the goal of real ownership is that it's not just usable on our platform but that it's just a a relevant asset anywhere that you are U using your

Digital Life yeah interesting why why build this as a as a full-fledged Sovereign Cosmos SD chain I mean you know like you could conce conceivably build this as an L2 or um like you know build it using partial set security I mean are there reasons sort of technical reasons why you need the full sovereignty of the app chain the validator set like are the validators providing Oracle data or you know something like that no absolutely yeah yeah so um the biggest part of it is just having um flexibility right in terms of like I I would say there is

there there is a unique sovereignty right to having a distinct layer one chain your own validator set um I can't really get into all the technicals because I'm not as like Well vered in that but the general idea just being that um even at a blockchain level we are passage is not by any by any means right now um anything novel right we're pretty close to vanilla Cosmos SDK chain right so um but in terms of the fruition of this keeping uh our options open keeping us as agile as possible um the amount of uh customization and optimization that we can do specifically for 3D and this is what I think is

really unique about passage is that there are so few other people um integrating real ownership of 3D assets there's a lot of like you know heyy you own your character right but really you don't what you own is like permission in a permission system um to have access to a permissioned asset through your permissionless asset so your permissionless asset gives you permission in a permission system to use this character right so absent the game the permissioned game you own nothing right you just own you know a couple of numbers on a blockchain so for us the goal is really ownership of the 3D assets themselves that you

know the the raw binary data of the fbx the textures the the elements that go into the 3D asset the rig um the animations that all of this stuff would actually be owned by the end user and I I can't speak you know entirely on the technical side what goes into optimizing the chain for moving and leveraging the type of data um for building out you indexing for this type of data and things like that again oracles and stuff like that that would allow people to um use this data across different ecosystems but that's the goal right is that we really do want to innovate in this space and it requires a certain amount of of sovereignty to do so to make sure we can optimize for what is a very Niche UK case but also wildly relevant in a world where um people are

interacting digitally more and more often okay cool um so you you guys recently announced a um I guess a partnership with aosh and from my understanding um a lot of the 3D rendering in passage is being done on the AOS Network can can you explain yeah you know how you with AOS and how it's um better than you're using centralized servers or or other sort of computational resources yep absolutely so um one of the things one of the decisions we made from the outset right we've it's it's really wild how little we have compromised on immersion or

accessibility I mean in some ways this is just as accessible or more accessible than like YouTube Google meet it's one click and you're in right I mean it is dead simple um and then immersion we have the best possible Graphics now you go and look at something like uh the games strange Clan wah wa like they can be more stylized more cartoony but then you look at some of the environments like dii dojo and it can be extremely realistic all within the same game engine so no compromises there well you have to compromise somewhere right and the compromise for us has been one our sanity in building out this wild system but then two uh cost right it is more uh computationally expensive to host these

experiences than anything else right I mean I remember when I used to think when we were first doing passage I used to think that the video hosting was expensive like doing the whole webcams um but then we're still rendering everything in the browser so your computer was burying the comp comp ational cost not us uh that was early on in in passes when we were launching you know our event with Amazon for instance um but um that doesn't even uh the computational resources of of video feeds um doesn't even you know shake a finger at uh uh the computation of 3D worlds right I mean we're talking each user on passage occupies about half of a GPU now these can be anywhere from like

commercial for for those who care commercial gpus to high-end gpus so like we have a good range of cost um depending on we'll basically have right now it's it's all one tier of GPU that you're getting when you jump into passage but eventually we'll probably have like tier one and Tier Two Worlds some worlds that require a little more GPU power to run um so that people can get the most out of the the hardware um but so so it's not like the most expensive gpus that we're using for passage but you're still occupying half a GPU which for anybody who hosts a website or whatever like you know that like maybe you use a couple CPU threads for your website for the whole month for all your visitors right um the computational demand of passages is Big

right uh imagine you got to use half of this big glowy monster for every single person you need one of these for every single for every two people who are going to be in an event so that said it can be expensive uh to run now we our belief was basically that um and this was this was you know four or four years ago that we started building this um so our belief was that it's okay to compromise on price that can be the compromise because this is the one thing that will change fastest right and I think we've been affirmed in that people's ux journey is not going to be expedited it's going to be slow and people are not going to adopt a new user experience quickly but the price of Hardware will adapt quickly and it has I

mean I believe we've seen as much as a 60% drop in GPU costs um from the the time that we were building this in 2020 um so we've worked with both gcp Google Cloud as well as uh AWS right we've used a bunch of different uh uh Cloud Solutions uh passage is cloud agnostic we can leverage any architecture um but point being we've seen the best and the worst pricing in Cloud compute and it's gotten way better since 2020 because again there's been a lot of push for um GPU infrastructure for you know Ai and for all sorts of different applications that said it's it's still relatively more expensive than any other

kind of Hosting uh so this is where Akosh comes in Akash is the first really open market for gpus right I mean in terms of people offering gpus for uh real world product use you've got aure Google Cloud AWS that's it three people right there's like three people competing with each other and so it's a little bit of a rigged Market right you can't really call this an open market uh but what akos does it allows anybody all over the world to contribute GPU compute to their um decentralized Cloud Marketplace and anybody can buy it and the relationship between provider and the um the the person leasing the

hardware um is governed by smart contracts right the beauty of that is there's censorship resistance um there's a bit of security just in terms of infrastructure it's actually more reliable in a lot of ways than a AWS has been down at times when AOS wasn't um so the up time is better but then um there's a lot of advantages to a cost but the biggest advantage of having an open Marketplace is true price Discovery right the the cost of a GPU the same GPU on aosh versus AWS is I mean up to 10 times cheaper and for us personally we've seen cost reductions integrating a cost of of 70 up to 70% for the gpus that we're using and gpus you can get it

on a c you just cannot get on AWS because there's so little availability and you've got to go through a whole Pro a permissioned process to get approved to get these gpus all that nonsense with aosh in one day in one hour you can have your developer you know get your your akt and set up your your lease and you're you have access instant access to Hardware that isn't even available anywhere else but for a price that's 10 times cheaper so that's wild that's super wild um and we've been using that so we've been building putting more and more of our systems onto aosh um and how's that been like I mean what's the what's the integration experience I know you're not you're not you know on

the technical side but how easy is it to integrate with a c and leverage those resources for what you guys are doing yeah I mean I would say easy right I mean okay it's becoming easier and easier depending on your use case because there's more people building tools for leveraging a c computer compute uh so you know you can go and launch a a WordPress website on aosh in just a few clicks using some of their uh Native tools built by teams like cloudm right um so it can be stupid easy um now I am biased because we have some really smart developers um our CTO is is brilliant um and so I'm I I definitely we're definitely skewed on the side of

being highlevel developers so you know for just your kind of average run-ofthe-mill full stack Dev there might be a learning curve um you've got to be able to work with um kubernetes there's some contain containerization stuff you have to understand but the beauty about a cost is it's built for scale right now that does make it in some sense a little bit more complicated than it could be but for people who have big Enterprise applications is perfect um there's so much really really good architecture um built into the aash network so yeah I would say uh any barrier that's there for your kind of run-of-the-mill full stack Dev um is a good one right it's one that's going to

uh create sustainability and scalability so yeah I say overall Dev experience is phenomenal you know the community is phenomenal there huge open source community building around AOS everything on AOS is open source so really really easy to contribute to development a lot of people building tools for aosh so I mean jump in the disc and you'll get your questions answered stat I mean really really great community building around that so that really helps uh develop developer adoption cool no I mean it's it's a great use case I think also for akos to you know akos I think has made this sort of pivot into the GPU uh Marketplace um you vertical we had Greg on several months ago where we we talked

about this uh you can go back and listen to that episode if you're interested yes he's brilliant uh yeah absolutely and um uh and and this is just another use case I think that demonstrates uh just how powerful a c is as a Marketplace for compute oh yeah not only for use cases outside of crypto but use cases in crypto as well yeah we didra a booth takeover of the aash booth at eth Denver and um it was so easy to sell people on this right so we're talking to people about AOS and they're like oh you're from AOS like no I'm from passage and we're saving 70% on our GPU bill boom sold right like it's just wild in terms of um anybody who understands the need for GPU resources can immediately see

the value proposition um so it's an easy sell and um yeah we love having those conversations because it's been huge for us and we're just trying to move more and more of our services uh or you know infrastructure stack over to aash so right now we have a little aash button in the dashboard where you can launch an event on aosh versus AWS and it's it's my favorite feature so far because it's kind of like the instantly save money button so you guys recently announced this passage Elite product yes can you talk more about that what's this passage Rel so passage as a platform you know the first thing we we hear when people jump into passage yeah I've done hundreds probably close to a thousand Demos in passage um

over the last four years right and the first thing I hear is like oh could you do this could you do this like people have so many ideas ideas when they come into passage and all of those things are real and legitimate I mean there's applications again from gaming to live streaming to conventions to Enterprise sales there's a bunch of really unique applications for different types of collaboration Community Building whatever and P I've heard it all medical field right like health and fitness and they're all phenomenal ideas because passage just makes virtual collab collaboration easier it brings an immersive 3D experience to people who never could have had that type of experience because they're not a gamer they don't have a a gaming PC or whatever um that said uh we have to

start somewhere and passage Delite is the beginning it is really the kind of the first product offering from the passage Suite of products um that is meant specifically for you know uh it's starting with this Enterprise and education use case these are the biggest immediate demands in the market we've seen verticals that have um you know just really big uh total addressable Market but also very very narrow and specific right it's a very clear value proposition with a huge audience that's already paying for these tools slack Discord telegram teams whatever it may be like people are paying for tools to collaborate zoom and um passage does all of those things better in terms of communication collaboration being able to interact

with your team being able to pull people in from outside your team right being able to do a sales call and passage for a premium product that you can actually demonstrate in three dimensions so it it it serves a unique Enterprise need for teams that are collaborating uh Educators that are bringing people you know salesperson is kind of like an educator right so there's a lot of overlap between the Enterprise and education use cases that's what we're addressing first Elite describes a very very distinct set of features that passage is offering now over time passage will grow to become a social platform I really do believe that's that's part of how it would develop but it can't start there because the social platform is always limited by this Network effect right if you don't already have a network of millions of

people then then there's no use in this in in passages of social platform because I'm not going to find any of my friends there right I'm not going to find necessarily the people I want to follow um so first passage is something that people use um for Enterprise for Education content creators can use it right so it can still be a Creator platform but you are speaking to your audience not necessarily to a public open social platform right right people come to passage to interact directly and that's what Elite is over time as we have more and more Elite users Elite groups teams creators collaborating with their Community whether it's your team or your your followers whatever it may be um then we can start to connect those

communities into a larger social network right but that's something that's going to happen over time and basically the way um we're we're rolling this out uh the the MVP the the first product offering um is kind of narrow and focus and that's the lead right and IT addresses some really specific use cases in terms of collaboration that's kind of what dictates what features are rolling out first so where do we go from here what's the road map and what are some exciting things that people can expect from passage maybe you can give us some uh some passage Alpha here oh 100% so for one I mean by the time this this drops I mean you will be seeing uh basically showcase es uh so okay so on

Tuesday the 18th um we'll be showcasing some of our very first closed Alpha users people who are leveraging passage right now who have been onboarded into the platform and are using it paying for their streaming um using the whole Suite of of tools to to work with their team go check them out check out those use cases uh we've got again people from education to Enterprise web 3 uh educators communities who are using this in the closed Alpha and if you identify with one of those use cases jump on the wait list right because what we're doing is we're pulling people in from the wait list during the closed alha you know we're we're looking to connect with people who have a unique Synergy early

on who can help in kind of this early phase of of development and adoption uh before we open up to the public right we're trying to bring in the people who are have the most possible Synergy with the current feature set so that we can make this everything it needs to be for the public launch uh and a right so that's the goal right now uh check out what we're putting out I mean we're we're putting out videos I mean over the next two weeks we'll be showcasing all of our current closed Alpha users so check those out uh follow along and you're going to see something that Sparks an idea Sparks an interest Reach Out jump in the Discord connect with us because we're looking for more people to pull into the pipeline we currently have 3,000 to 4,000 people on

the wait list we have not yet opened up up um kind of like a uh filtering process we we haven't like opened up applications yet um so so you can jump on there or jump in the Discord um you know to get a more direct connection to us and we'll start pulling people in we'll we'll open up applications and we'll pull people in you know one group at a time based off of the Synergy that we see right so it's a little bit of a handpicked process initially it's permissioned sorry guys not permissionless um but we're working towards that so we can make this everything it can be um and if you want to be a part of that process if you want to help this look like your use case if you see something that's exciting to you to your team to your Community Reach Out

you can get involved cool well looking forward to seeing those um those use case demonstrations and also maybe getting my hands on on this Alpha heck yeah yep we'll get you we'll get you in give it a try I think there's like some things that we've been thinking about doing maybe doing some content in there or oh yeah hosting some events who knows you there's like all sorts of uh uh of ways that I think we could use passage so yeah Lex thanks for coming on oh it's my pleasure brother always a pleasure to chat and uh super excited to get you in