“We’re not Facebook”: Building a truly decentralized metaverse

venturebeat.com:

Presented by STARL

Cryptocurrency has taken center stage in the emergence of the metaverse. Developers are announcing, and sometimes launching, metaverse spaces powered by a blockchain economy. These projects come pre-loaded with hype around the ownership creators are given, and how much potential there is for users to – somehow – gain great piles of cryptocurrency riches. But these are too often pay-to-win scenarios where developers are seemingly trying to wring out as much profit as possible from the communities they’re creating. It makes the promise of a decentralized metaverse feel less like a future virtual utopia and more like yet another offshoot of late-stage capitalism.

“The original vision of crypto is to cross borders, to give access to all. We’re trying to do that with the metaverse too,” says Moe Larson, concept creator and project manager of the STARL Metaverse Project. “But the burden of proof is on projects like us to show we can be an example in the space. We want to be able to determine who the real builders are, from the people who are just trying to take value out of the space.”

Larson, a cryptocurrency holder and developer, is one of a core group of formerly skeptical cryptocurrency traders who came together to launch the STARL Metaverse project: a graphically rich, beautifully designed interactive 3D universe based in space and filled with games, virtual worlds and communities. It’s also a hub for virtual social interaction and expression, and trading and collection assets within a digital economy, backed by the unique STARL token, all created by a group of strangers from a broad variety of backgrounds and across the world. And the goal is to be the absolute best and truly decentralized metaverse