Imagine a place that always feels like home. Somewhere the waifs and strays of society, the alley cats of the dark, can find a place to belong. Whether it be by the fire of an inn perched upon a windswept mountainside, running in a golden green field splashed with buttercups, or in the penthouse of a starscraper, looking out across cosmic eternity with the select few you call your own.
The metaverse – and the rapidly evolving technologies of VR and the blockchain that enable it – will unlock many dreams. One of them will be to serve as a home to misfits those to whom the real world, and its social fragmentation, has little to offer. Plutoverse, the ‘Metaverse of Misfits’, is making them a home.
What Web3 is Truly About
The shape the metaverse takes is imperative to the experience, and access, it provides. You do not want a hyperreal echo of web2, where social stratification – and wealth stratification – denominate your access to web3. Despite the tokenized nature of blockchain economies, that is not the goal.
Web3’s true goal is to push the power and authority over the worlds that we experience, the worlds we – the user – builds, as far and wide as possible, and out of the hands of any one dominating entity, and into the hands of the citizenry of the new world. To open up the shared consensual hallucination that is our virtual world is everyone, and reward everyone for being a part of it. To create a new digital social structure that is superior in inclusivity, openness, and tolerance than currently exists. This is what can be achieved by removing power from the equation.
How Plutoverse is a Building Social Multiplayer Platform
Plutoverse wants to harness the opportunity of truly free open spaces to create ‘The Metaverse of Misfits’. Plutoverse is a web3 startup who sees the potential of the metaverse for what it truly is, a wide open sandbox where all can come together to create, play, share, and connect, where users can build virtual environments and create spaces where they be with their friends, strangers, and everyone else in between in a safe space where they can be themselves.
And the difference between that and some corporate game building online service? The people who profit are the users. The created worlds can never be censored except by the community. You can be who you want and express yourself how you want, and be rewarded for it. A space where misfits can come 24/7 and play, hang out, and build – earning real value for doing so – and have ownership over the things they and their friends create.
Why Avatars are Key to Web3 and the Metaverse
Crucial to all of this is your gaming avatar, the digital representation of your inner self, designed to be in most natural instinct of you, on show for all the world to see. Already in social worlds, there are straightjackets on how you present yourself, although we have – as a species – become better at exhibiting our true selves.
Truly custom avatars that act as you in the digital space act as a panacea to a lot of these problems. Your avatar will be the single most important filter for your social presentation as you go about your daily lives in the metaverse. Plutoverse believes players should have total agency over, and be rewarded for, their self-expression through their avatars. It should be easier, efficient, and more rewarding.
User’s digital avatars should be a second, more comfortable skin they use to wander the halls of the metaverse. To inspire this, Plutoverse has also partnered with NoFiltr, an influencer incubator, with the goal of producing virtual avatars of the world’s favourite influencers for the Plutoverse. NoFiltr has a talented stable of young artists and creators whose exceptional skills will run riot all across the Plutoverse, showing off their latest creations.
The Problem with Social Media in Web2 and The Importance of Communities
In web2 there is pressure, a need to conform, a need to stand out while conforming, a necessity in gathering likes, reactions, and comments that doesn’t always come – either for the individual or for the audience consuming their lives – from the right place. Like me and I’ll like you back. How do you know what’s real, what’s authentic, or indeed who you are? Those who went through their formative years through the blare, and glare, of social media, are most under siege from the painful metachatter of society at large.
Despite all this, social media has helped micro-communities form better than ever. The problem is those communities are at risk from the very platform they are built on, with the members of it always conscious that the platform they connect on could go out of business, change, fail, or stop them. In web3, communities will have licence to free expression. Plutoverse knows how essential that is, and it will encourage users at every step and provide them with the tools they need to build the platforms they want – all the while never having the authority to take those things away again.
The point is not lost on Co-Founder Prashant Sharma, who said ‘Creators…have always been about their communities – metaverses are natively built around communities.’ The start up is dead set on opening up web3 to those who might otherwise have nowhere else to go. The young team recently got a huge nod of approval from Jaynti Kanana, CEO and Co-Founder of Polygon, who has acted as an angel investor. Plutoverse’s fast-paced social gameplay would very likely not function-as-expected on older Ethereum architecture, so it stands to reason that the two founders see eye to eye on a lot of Plutoverse’s ambitions.
Plutoverse Building the Metaverse First
The metaverse is in its early stages. Already, in wider media, partly in thanks to the aberrations of Zuckerberg, the early dreams of the metaverse have dimmed in the public’s imagination. Yet don’t be fooled. Builders like Plutoverse are still – well – building. They are building social multiplayer platforms with no central authority, they are building kingdoms of self-expression, they are building a new societal architecture that is more harmonious, more accepting, and more involved for everyone. A society that works because everyone benefits from being kind, and no one stands to gain from being cruel. That is the power of a decentralised internet, held up on the pillars of the immutable blockchain, owned by the creators who make the world what it is – a home for all the misfits.