EP - 25

When Fluf World meets Ledger: Get Metaverse Ready w/ Aaron Mcdonald

with

Aaron McDonald
Fluf World Cofounder

Jan 25, 2022

On this special holiday episode of The Ledger Podcast, host Mo Sayed welcomes a visionary at the forefront of the metaverse, Aaron McDonald, the creator of FLUF World and Altered State Machine (ASM).

They delve into the intricate world of FLUF World, its innovative approach to digital identity, the ambitious Altered State Machine project aiming to democratize AI for avatars, and a groundbreaking collaboration between FLUF World and Ledger to drive decentralized education.

“Users taking back control of the most important and valuable commodity in our future digital society; which is their own data” – Aaron McDonald

Key Highlights:

Aaron McDonald’s Metaverse Imperative: User Control and Experience

Aaron McDonald, with over 20 years of experience in the tech space, including the mobile revolution and early crypto adoption, explained his pivot to the metaverse. His interest was ignited by the idea of . He became excited about the prospect of creating a world where applications and infrastructure could be owned by communities instead of corporations.

“If we didn’t manage to onboard the masses of society we didn’t really solve the problem” – Aaron McDonald

He defines the metaverse as a more immersive digital experience where digital stuff gets much more intertwined with people’s lives, both in terms of presence online but also the connectivity between the physical world and the digital world.

FLUF World: Dynamic Identities Beyond Static Avatars

Moel Syed noted that FLUF World, launched in autumn 2021, leverages NFTs as a “cultural door” and probably the main crypto on ramp in the future. He observed the shift from DeFi’s technical jargon to the engaging visual appeal of NFTs.

The genesis idea behind FLUF World was to create a dynamic asset that could move with you, that could evolve as you evolve, and it could evolve as culture evolves.

This dynamic nature allows for greater collaboration and co-creation with content creators, making it possible for users to change the content based on interactions.

“Metaverse Ready”: Avatars as Content Channels

A key differentiator for FLUF World is its “metaverse ready” status. Aaron explained that this goes beyond just having 3D models for virtual worlds. While providing various formats (voxel, low-poly for Decentraland, high-quality physics for animations) is essential due to current interoperability challenges, the true innovation lies in the avatar’s ability to be infused with other content and interact dynamically.

Aaron outlined key use cases already emerging:

Media Personalities: Metastars creating music, engaging with fans, creating content and monetizing that content.
GameFi/Metaverse Mergers: He cited Tyler Ward’s thesis that the metaverse will dissolve silos between finance for gaming for media for social. He sees avatars becoming useful for everything people do in society because everything they do in society will now exist in the metaverse. This includes things like engaging with a bank teller to buying insurance or hosting a movie night.

The Burrows: Evolving, Engaging Metaverse Spaces (and Snoop Dogg)

Aaron criticized existing metaverse spaces as often boring and dull places with lots of empty space. He believes worlds should evolve with communities, rather than simply being launched with vast, empty land.

“Humans are lazy, they’ll buy the land but no one builds anything and if they do it kind of has to be maintained and so over time you end up with kind of ghost towns”. – Aaron McDonald

The Burrows concept proposes a tiered engagement model: starting with personal, small spaces, progressing to multi-party and then group spaces, and finally expanding to world spaces. This structured approach aims to foster a “content rich environment” that consistently offers activities and connection opportunities.

Beyond social interaction, the Burrows are designed as spaces for events to happen.

This includes broadcast in for streaming content to thousands of individual spaces simultaneously, creating a large audience, and streaming out, like Clubhouse for the metaverse.

Altered State Machine (ASM): Democratizing AI for Intelligent Avatars

Aaron introduced their AI project Altered State Machine (ASM), which aims to democratize access to AI and provide avatars with intelligence, emphasizing the need to bring AI out from behind a curtain where consumers lack control.

He explained that intelligent avatars combat lifeless metaverse environments by offering engaging activations and bring ownership into play-to-earn gaming.

ASM’s protocol is designed to connect to any kind of avatar, separating the form from the brain for interoperability, simplifying development, and paving the way for much more advanced things like a digital human.

Major Announcement: Decentralized Education with Ledger

Aaron and Mo announced a collaboration with Ledger to create a community-driven content series on metaverse security and digital assets.

Ledger’s significant investment, over $100,000 in FLUF and Altered State Machine NFTs, serves as a prize pool to encourage the FLUF community to create educational content.

This content will be released by both communities to educate users on security options. Ledger sees this as the beginning of decentralized education, leveraging communities, and chose FLUF World for its metaverse ready assets.

Key Insights on the Future:

Aaron McDonald

Hardware Transformation: Aaron foresees an interesting battle in hardware, with current mobile platforms (Apple’s “walled garden” and Google’s “surveillance mechanism”) being unsuitable for the metaverse.

He predicts opportunities wide open in the hardware space for someone to come and build something that’s genuinely taking the principles of personal content ownership and data privacy into a hardware proposition.
Continuous Security Evolution: Developers, engineers, and entrepreneurs must continuously introduce new solutions to make it simpler for people to understand what’s going on and also to prevent attack vectors from happening. Education is equally vital to inform users about risks and mitigation strategies.

Watch the full episode here:

Reading List

Learn more about these topics mentioned in the episode, or explore our library of articles on Crypto, Security, and Regulation on Ledger Academy