“It [OASIS] was the dawn of a new era, one where most of the human race now spent all of their free time inside a video game.”
This line from Ernest Cline’s instant bestseller “Ready Player One” indirectly sets the context for the metaverse. There was once a time when AI was the technology buzzword and now, its metaverse. Every tech company wants to directly or indirectly be part of this metaverse but not every company sees it the way Dutch startup Odyssey does.
For Christel Sieling, co-founder of Odyssey, a digital native foundation established in The Netherlands, metaverse is not a product. The startup is building Momentum as an open source metaverse stack for the Web3 community. If Cline’s OASIS allowed people to escape their real world with a VR device, Sieling and team’s Momentum could help people build digital societies.
A pivot from blockchain to metaverse
While it is difficult to explain the idea of a metaverse, Sieling says they began building Momentum more than six years ago. In 2016, they started an innovation programme centred around building services using blockchain. They did the Dutch blockchain hackathon in 2017 and saw a total of 55 teams participate and support from over 30 partners, including ING, the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, and the Dutch Agency for Identity.
For five consecutive years, they built blockchain services through this hackathon format. The last offline edition that they hosted was attended by 1,500 people from over 30 countries and focussed on solving complex social challenges with blockchain technology. Sieling says Odyssey has been active in the Web3 and blockchain space from the start but COVID forced them to pivot.
Unable to do the hackathon due to lockdown, they decided to build something themselves. “That we should build a place where you cannot only talk or chat or click or scroll but we should build a place where people can come together, where all the projects, the people and the action is. And that’s how we decided to build Momentum,” Sieling says about the pivotal decision in 2020.
To build Momentum, they first went to a gaming studio in Amsterdam, but the studio didn’t understand the idea. So, Sieling says Odyssey, co-founded with Rutger van Zuidam and Stefan Kunst, hired a Unity developer and started building Momentum, which is described as a platform allowing “digital societies to create, build and scale together in an open source decentralised metaverse network.”
An engine agnostic metaverse
Facebook, which recently renamed itself Meta, has somehow claimed the idea of a metaverse. Sieling says this is similar to claiming the internet but aims to answer Meta’s closed approach with an engine agnostic metaverse. Currently, Momentum is being built using Unity but they do plan to transition to an “engine agnostic metaverse.”
With its stack fully open source and repositories also fully open source, Odyssey has an opportunity to build a metaverse that is, in Sieling’s words, “interoperable and not dependent on any specific engine.”
When asked if consumers will need to buy hardware like a VR or AR device, Sieling says they see the potential of such devices but it’s on its roadmap. The team at Odyssey wants to build the technology stack that allows people to build their own worlds in the metaverse and experience it through easily available devices. It’s a bold challenge and Sieling says it is akin to creating “nuance in your own story.”
Finding talent remains a challenge
Metaverse as a concept is still evolving and until the industry reaches a common definition or framework, the idea of finding talent suited to the industry will also be a challenge. Sieling says they are looking everywhere to find the right people.
“[We are] using all sorts of different networks and channels. I think the biggest challenge in finding good talent is finding talent that fits your company’s specific culture,” Sieling says. “I think finding the people that just click,are highly motivated to make it work, and also embrace what you’re trying to build is difficult,” she adds.
Odyssey is currently a team of 20 people but unlike many other startups, it doesn’t have a target headcount. “Our goal is to build something that matters and is embraced by the community,” explains Sieling.
She says hiring will happen based on need and not based on growth. With the platform being open source, Sieling says Odyssey also stands to benefit a lot from the community. She says the focus is to have a core team that is strong in execution while also expanding its open source community.
Multiple milestones in short timespan
In the two years since pivoting from blockchain to metaverse, Odyssey has a lot to show in terms of milestones. With focus on the Polkadot and Kasuma ecosystem, it has launched Kasumaverse. It has introduced a World Builder for creators to build, but it is currently limited to its team. Sieling says the goal is to make this World Builder open to anyone interested in building their own world.
“Metaverse is not just a product but a place full of activities and opportunities,” says Sieling. To make this a reality, the Odyssey team has built support for on-chain and off-chain activities like staking, parachain auctions, governance, and gatherings.
All these activities are designed like a plug-in so when users build their own world, they can select which plug-in or activity to allow. “It’s a bit like WordPress for the metaverse,” says Sieling.
Thirdly, they are developing a token that will act as a social network layer connecting people, activities, and the world into one functional layer. For financial activity, there is a Kusama token in the Kusama network but Sieling says they plan to offer similar support for other tokens.
Rise programme offers 360 view of challenges
Odyssey was one of the nine startups and scaleups to join Techleap.nl’s batch 7 of the Rise programme. It is also unique with its focus on Web3 as opposed to Web2 technologies. Sieling says they had a good connection with Techleap and were notified about the programme.
The co-founders then looked it up, did some research, and saw a “huge opportunity to be with other tech companies from the Netherlands.” She says as a startup founder you cannot learn alone and the Rise programme allows the opportunity to learn with your peers in the industry.
“We really love the approach of the Rise programme where you talk about the challenges with your peers and other entrepreneurs who are in the same boat,” she says.
Since metaverse is still in its early stages, she acknowledges that some startup founders find it difficult to understand. She describes Web3 as a platform that eliminates the middlemen and all the transaction fees associated with them in a decentralised manner.
She says “metaverse is the next version of the internet” where people move from only clicking and scrolling to being present together in a different environment. Sieling says Odyssey’s work is one interpretation of this metaverse and it will take at least five to ten years for the metaverse to reach a state of maturity.
Multiverse becoming a reality
With so many milestones under its belt in such a short time, Sieling is clearly focussing on building a larger story with the community. When asked about future goals, she says they are looking at showing the multiverse within the Momentum metaverse platform.
“I hope that I can show you the multiverse with a number of different worlds that people have created themselves, where people are connecting and doing all kinds of things that I could have never imagined,” she says.
She adds, “I hope we’re going to see these protocols develop as well in the coming years, like the email protocol or the HTML protocol, which enable everyone to be in the metaverse.”
Catch our interview with Paul Down, Head of Sales at Intigriti.
