Autor Cointelegraph By Elias Ahonen

Robert Gryn is a serial entrepreneur who has built a high-tech Metaverse scanner which he hopes will act as a portal from our physical reality into the Metaverse.It is no secret that the physical world is beginning to merge with the digital, and that blockchain is serving as the arbiter of reality in many of these nascent metaverses. Gryn, CEO of MetaHero, is doing his part to make that new reality as real as possible, creating high-definition 3D scans of people, objects and animals that you may soon encounter in games, virtual worlds and NFTs.After spending a decade building European marketing company Codewise in Poland and even being featured on a Forbes list for the nation’s richest, Gryn left it all behind and moved to Dubai while building a solution with which he hopes to onboard the next billion people to the blockchain. Privacy worriesGryn excitedly lists the potential applications of his full-body Metaverse scanners for things like digital fashion: “You‘ll be able to scan yourself in your underpants, for example — it‘d be very easy to try on not only digital fashion but real-world clothing,” he says.But, this raises a serious concern. What if some privacy box is left unchecked or the system is hacked and I find my digital clone as the unwilling star of an AI-created adult video? Is this my eternal form? I got scanned into the metaverse by @Metahero_io at Dubai’s Future Blockchain Summit last October. #Cointelegraph article coming soon! @wdw_io #metaverse #HERO pic.twitter.com/ItPEjnMNw5— Elias Ahonen.eth (@eahonen) February 16, 2022Gryn recognizes the issue, admitting that “if ultra-realistic scans got leaked and someone manipulated them to be in some sort of pornographic scene, that would potentially be the beginning of the end for us.” For that reason, he stresses the importance of secure file storage and the use of security measures such as watermarks.Storing and managing high-resolution 3D scans of thousands of people is no easy technical feat, and it can also be a nightmare of privacy and copyright laws. The tech raises plenty of questions: Who can be given access to scans, how can they be used and how do royalties need to be set up? There are no easy answers. “We are going to have to hire small armies of lawyers to cover all global jurisdictions to figure out what we can and cannot do in any given jurisdiction,” Gryn says, adding that the management of “terabytes of new data on a daily basis” is no small challenge but one he is confident he will overcome.Rob Gryn has devised a high res portal into the Metaverse.Making the rich listOriginally from Poland, Gryn started out in an “eclectic kind of course” studying for a Master of Science in technology entrepreneurship at the University of Surrey in England from 2004 to 2008, where “each week, they would invite a local entrepreneur” to share their life story and answer questions about their business. One such presenter once told the class that of 100 people who want to start a business, only four actually do — and just one of them succeeds. Gryn recalls pondering how he could avoid the 96% fate of a “wantrepreneur” and strike out for real. After graduating, he continued with a master‘s in marketing at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He realized early on he was not cut out to be a corporate drone, during an internship at mobile network company Orange, where he received an employee number and access to the group‘s intranet on the first day. Browsing the boring corporate intranet all day, “it was very obvious to me that I don‘t belong there, and I don‘t want to belong.” As he began his second day, nobody came along to give him work, and during lunch, “I decided just to bail and never ever allow myself to be part of this corporate type of structure,” he recalls with a laugh. Stepping into the scanner feels otherworldly. Photo by MetaheroWith the exception of his two-day stint there and another minor internship, Gryn’s first job was one of his own entrepreneurial makings as CEO of Codewise, a marketing company which he founded in Krakow, Poland in 2011. Using technology to help manage the brand marketing of various clients, the firm has ranked among Europe’s fastest-growing companies for three years in a row. Each year, he remembers browsing the Polish edition of the Forbes magazine when they released an annual list of society‘s wealthiest, where he would “always be looking for someone young that made it in a country that does quite the opposite of facilitating entrepreneurship.” Later, undue bureaucracy and a post-communist mentality which he says is prevalent in Eastern Europe influenced his decision to relocate to Dubai which he considers more business-friendly.He made it, building the firm into “a 250-person IT company in the advertising technology space.” At age 31 in 2017, he was featured as the youngest self-made man on the Forbes list of richest Poles with a fortune estimated at about $150 million.But Gryn was not quite happy, describing that he felt as if he were living “in like a golden cage that I had built and the door was open.” He was suffering from burnout by 2018, and “I wanted the company to be out of my life,” he recounts.In 2020, he sold the company in order to start new.Discovering CryptoAfter moving on from the company he had spent a decade building, Gryn saw crypto as the rabbit hole most worthy of his newfound time and money. “I had always been crypto-curious, but to go fully down the rabbit hole you need quite a bit of headspace to wrap your head around it.” He came to an interesting conclusion. “Crypto is probably the most important technology of modern mankind that will level the playing field in every single possible imaginable aspect — namely giving people financial freedom,” he proclaimed. As he continued exploring the industry, he found most crypto projects to be “very crypto-centric,” and difficult for those outside of the industry to comprehend in any practical way. As he saw it, it didn‘t all need to be related to DeFi or even to money. Seeing the idea of cryptocurrency as still unapproachable to most, Gryn felt strongly that not enough was being done to “bring in the next billion people to crypto.” A task he reasoned would be best accomplished through the gaming and entertainment sector.[embedded content]For Gryn, mass adoption of “crypto” is about building “a more equitable future” for the next generation, he explains — convincingly enough, considering he brings up his newborn son as an inspiration for helping create a better tomorrow, something he says can pretty much only be done with technology. Brainstorming on a way to combine his capital, network and background as a gamer, he came to the idea of MetaHero — a project allowing anyone to create a 3D avatar of themselves in the Metaverse.Mysterious waysUnlike many entrepreneurs who brag of the endless hustle, Gryn describes himself as possessing a natural laziness inherent to all humans. At Codewise, he used unconventional business methods such as renting out office spaces which he could not reasonably afford in order to force himself to keep the business growing. One time, after signing the lease for a new space, he looked at the company balance sheets and thought “holy crap, if we don‘t double our revenue and profit, there‘s no way we can pay for this office,” he tells me.“I’m kind of an entrepreneur that just goes for it — puts on my blinders and just blocks out all the fear and uncertainty and just goes for it.”Another method for success is one he calls “conference-driven development,” in which “you book a very, very expensive conference or trade show a few months in the future — and then you promise to deliver X, Y and Z and even if that seems impossible, you make it possible.” This was apparently the case for Dubai’s Future Blockchain Summit, where, with me bearing witness, Gryn launched his scanner to great fanfare and amazement after only months of development. “I figured out quite early that if I put myself in the position where I have no choice but to succeed, then I will succeed,” he says with infectious confidence.Gryn scans himself, launching the scanner at Dubai’s Future Blockchain Summit . Photo by Elias AhonenThe scannerHe called up his friend “the Polish Elon Musk” Mariusz Król, CEO of 3D printing and scanning company Wolf Digital World, and suggested a partnership through which to scan our reality into the Metaverse. Król’s company has been “working on 3D photogrammetric technology for eight years,” and the entrepreneurs set out to build a scanner made of 200 Sony cameras, 1,500 meters of wiring and 20 computer units. When the team demonstrated their scanners, which are each capable of 150,000 scans per year to Sony, they were amazed, as “they didn’t even know that something like that could be done with their own equipment,” Gryn recalls.Here’s how it works: The scanned item, whether a human, cow or object, is placed in the center of the scanner. The lights shine from every direction to evenly illuminate every surface while the hundreds of cameras capture a simultaneous image from all angles. These are then spliced together by high-powered imaging software in order to create a realistic 3D image that can be inserted into any digital space, whether social media, a video game or the metaverse. It might be a perfect way for a performer to create a lifelike avatar in which to perform at an Animal Concert in the Metaverse, for example.“We‘re going to build the largest database of 3D scanned people and objects in the world,” Gryn explains, regarding his vision. He sees this as an important step for the building of the Metaverse, adding that creating a hyper-realistic “in-game character that resembles a human, with blemishes and everything” is a difficult and expensive task. “Once you build a database of hundreds of thousands of scan items and people, the use-cases for that are so limitless that sometimes it boggles your mind,” he says excitedly.Over four days at @dxbontheblock, we scanned over 300 incredible people, transferring them to the metaverse. We’ve also captured their impressions and opinions about this unique experience, to show all those who couldn’t be with us at the conference what it’s like to be scanned. pic.twitter.com/ydYqs3aRks— Wolf Digital World (@wdw_io) October 27, 2021As far as he knows, no comparable 3D scanner exists unless “maybe there‘s a more advanced one somewhere in a top-secret basement in Hollywood.” Especially notable, according to him, is the scanner’s speed which means “we‘re able to do scans so quickly that we‘re able to capture practically any animal and import it into the Metaverse — say, your dog”, Gryn explains.Metahero scanners are meant eventually to be available around the world, with scans payable in Hero tokens which were launched in July. The tokens exist on BNB Chain in large part due to high fees on the Ethereum network. While some have gone to investors, a portion is earmarked to provide incentives for people of various walks of life to be scanned as bonuses, in addition to the potential royalties they might earn from the use of their images.“1% of the total supply or hero token is dedicated to paying the first 100,000 people $1,000 equivalent in our token to get scans — you get paid to get scanned,” Gryn boasts.Though Gryn envisions a future where mass adoption of the Metaverse could see people earning their “livelihoods just based on their 3D avatars that they can monetize in various ways,” he admits that the future is not quite yet not when it comes to realistic Metaverse avatars. This is because today’s Metaverse applications do not support the high-definition available through Wolf Digital World‘s scanner. For this reason, “we‘re building technology to allow you to scale down quality because 16k is not going to be supported for the next maybe 5 or 10 years,” he says.“10 years down the road, the Metaverse will likely be almost indistinguishable from our everyday reality — something that you log on to and have your own space there, your NFTs, your artwork, your apartment.”

Robbie Heeger’s Endaoment has facilitated the donation of over $30 million of cryptocurrency to 243 different charities. These donations come from altruistic cryptocurrency investors who are also partly motivated by reducing their tax burdens to Uncle Sam and keeping more of their profits.Born in Silicon Valley, Heeger, now in his early 30’s, was exposed to entrepreneurship from a young age. Though he initially worked in big tech, he soon became so enthralled with blockchain that he dropped everything to pursue his new passion in 2018. This led him to create Endaoment, which he calls the first regulatory-compliant nonprofit built entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. The project allows anyone to donate one of over 150 cryptocurrencies to a charity of their choice and, in doing so, reduce their tax liabilities.Endaoment represents the latest generation of blockchain giving — but it is not the first. In 2017, a mysterious figure calling themselves Pine anonymously donated 5057 Bitcoin, worth $55 million at the time, to a collection of over 60 charities. These donations not only encouraged major charities to accept cryptocurrency contributions for the first time but also served to counteract the perception of Bitcoin being primarily used in dishonest or criminal activities. While the Pineapple Fund helped legitimize cryptocurrency as a medium of charity, it was by no means the first. As early as 2011, Bruno Kučinskasin created Bitcoin 100, an initiative to donate Bitcoin to charities that would openly accept BTC.Despite many charities‘ early exposure to cryptocurrency, few have continued to receive substantial donations on the blockchain and many even removed such donation options from their websites. The reason was simple on one level and yet complex by nature — taxes.Heeger has worked out how to make more money and make the world a better place too.EndaomentUpon graduating from university in 2012, Heeger accepted a full-time position with Apple where he first worked as a content publishing quality assurance engineer before becoming a manager of production operations. As his career progressed, his fascination with blockchain technology grew and in 2018, he “left Apple with this understanding that crypto was not just something that I could be tangentially interested in anymore — it was consuming.” Despite his experience at a major tech company, he saw himself as technically weak and took boot camp-style classes in solidity coding and blockchain web development.“I started brainstorming ways that I could take this new skill set and try and build something that would funnel crypto capital into non-profit organizations that otherwise would have had very little exposure to crypto,” Heeger recounts of his early days. One of his initial ideas was to create a “media chain” by which to verify news content and make it resistant to censorship.The brainstorming paid off, as he recalled how he had made it a habit to give away a portion of his Apple stock to a donor-advised fund each year because he “had stock that had tax obligations on it and I wanted to give that stock away without having to sell it first.” Charity can, of course, be more than simply selfless giving, as strategic donations can often allow for both individuals and businesses to reduce their tax burdens. While selling AAPL stock before donating it would have incurred additional capital gains taxes, giving the stock to a donor-advised fund allowed him to receive tax benefits for the entire value of the stock without incurring capital gains taxes, as charitable donor-advised funds are not liable to tax.“I had crypto that had appreciated significantly and I didn‘t want to sell it first in order to donate it. I thought ‘wouldn‘t it be cool if there was a donor-advised fund that took crypto’ and that was the seed that became Endaoment.”Heeger, now in his early 30’s, founded Endaoment in March 2019. Its core function is to provide a tax receipt in exchange for a donation of cryptocurrency. As a donor-advised fund, those making donations receive “advisory privileges” which means that they can suggest where they would like the proceeds of their cryptocurrency to be donated. In practice, this means that 99% of the time, funds go to the donor’s desired U.S. charity of which Heeger says there are about 2.5 million. The 1% of times when the funds do not reach the donor’s first choice of destination include situations where the grant recommendation “is to a hate group or an organization that‘s not in good standing with the Internal Revenue Service, or one that presents some conflict of interest for the organization,” Heeger explains.“Give us your crypto and we will give you a tax receipt that says you donated it to a 501C3 tax-exempt non-profit public benefit corporation called Endaoment,” he clarifies regarding the business model.Thank you for the bids on Grifter #659. One of three rats in the collection and without doubt the most pretty.All proceeds will go to the Grifter Fund in collaboration with @endaomentdotorg ?Check out all the auctions: https://t.co/hpSUANo3Dl pic.twitter.com/OJ5Ktei1QB— XCOPY ? (@XCOPYART) December 23, 2021Here’s how it works in numbersSuppose Fred bought 1000 ETH at $3 for $3,000. At $3,000 per ETH, he now has $3 million worth. Presuming a 33.33% capital gains tax, he would owe the government about $1 million upon sale, being left with $2 million for himself. Alternatively, he could choose to donate 250 ETH to Endaoment, which would issue him a tax receipt for the equivalent of the $750,000 donation — which would count against and fully cancel out his $750,000 tax liability when selling the remaining 750 ETH, meaning he would be left with $2.25 million, with $750,000 sent to the charity of his choice and zero going to the IRS. The talk of the IRS reveals a bottleneck: In order to maintain its status as a U.S. tax-exempt public interest corporation, Endaoment can only issue grants to 501C3 charities registered with U.S. authorities. This means that while many local charities outside the U.S. would not be valid recipients of donations, various international causes can still be targeted as many of the charities act globally.Endaoment offers ready-made advised funds that anyone can donate to. Source: Endaoment“We‘ve done a lot of work in Sub-Saharan Africa and Afghan refugee relief, and donations to organizations that do work in Europe and all over the world that just have US 501C3 entities that they use as fundraising vehicles for donors in the U.S.,” Heeger clarifies.Though Heeger notes that he “cannot solicit services to people outside of the U.S.,” people outside the United States have used the Endaoment software to make crypto donations for which they receive U.S. tax receipts just as any American would. Success in getting tax deductions in such international cases is far from guaranteed, and Heeger notes that not all countries issue tax deductions on the basis of charitable giving. Many users have asked about the possibility of creating tax receipts that meet the requirements of various governments, as the tax systems of many countries consider self-directed donations as societally desirable and therefore encourage them by granting tax reductions based on registered donations.“We‘ve seen people in Japan, in Australia, in the U.K. and in France come and use the site in order to effect impact — They have taken on the burden of figuring out how they prove the deductibility with their local regulators themselves.”Heeger sees many opportunities for future expansion including to charities in other countries which he believes would upgrade the number of options from 2.5 to over 7 million charitable organizations. It is clear that his mind has never left Silicon Valley, as he characterizes the project as a “minimum viable product that supports straightforward crypto giving of any crypto asset to any U.S. nonprofit as dollars.” The Endaoment model is fairly simple, for now. Source: EndaomentBorn in Silicon ValleyHeeger grew up in California’s Palo Alto in the early 2000s, which he describes as an intense and highly competitive environment where various parents of his classmates would “show up on keynotes for the iPhone or some Google service.” The setting made for an environment with lots of access to and encouragement to use and experiment with new technologies, with tech companies often using the schools he went to as testing grounds for new products.Driven by a passion for storytelling, in 2008, Heeger began studies in broadcast and digital journalism at the University of Southern California. He specialized in publishing technology, inspired by what he saw as a “disruption of the legacy media institutions by the internet” causing a change in the way people got information. He also grew interested in ethics such as the need to balance profitability and the journalistic duty of honest reporting. Soon, he found himself running iTunes’ social media channels as an Apple intern.“I really loved the triangle of business, technology and ethics, and having to try and find balance between those three key drivers — journalism had that in spades.”Throughout his studies, he worked for the campus TV news station, where he eventually oversaw 25 reporters and other staff as a multimedia director. In 2010, Heeger had “a real eye-opener” when he traveled to Tanzania to volunteer as an English teacher at a rural town on the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro through an organization called Cross-Cultural Solutions. Though he looked for teaching methods that would help the children gear up for their future in a competitive world, he saw that providing a Palo Alto-style education was a “challenge when you‘re trying to do work in a space that‘s chronically underfunded.”2021 was a breakout year for @endaomentdotorg, from major gifts ?, to #NFT powered #philanthropy ?, to fiscal sponsorships ? and beyond! ?Learn about the community behind nearly $30 million in #CryptoPhilanthropy in our full Annual Impact Report: https://t.co/OYAKGgFc3v pic.twitter.com/rd8OD3Nxuk— endaoment.eth ? ETHDenver (@endaomentdotorg) January 19, 2022Anonymous donorsOne case in which Endaoment is unable to issue tax receipts is when the donor is fully anonymous. Though anonymous donations can be accepted and Heeger notes that many “religions will say that the anonymous giver is the most righteous kind of giver because they don‘t expect anything in return,” only a very small percentage of donors fit that category. Heeger explains that there are various degrees of anonymity when it comes to donating such as whether the donor wants to be unknown to only the receiving charity or to Endaoment as well. When sending crypto from an address with an ENS name, for example, it may be easy for anyone tracking transactions to deduce who the donor is, though the receiving charity itself will not see such information. If funds are routed directly from an exchange, Heeger says that not even Endaoment has any way to figure out the identity of the donor. In such cases, he often checks with the organization to ensure that they are comfortable receiving anonymous money.In one example of semi-anonymous giving, the developers of SushiSwap donated $1 million SUSHI, with each donation being labeled as being from the SushiSwap core developers rather than from any particular individual.Journey to DAOIn the future, he says Endaoment will support complex investment strategies and international giving. These strategies would include the gauntlet of crypto-assets like NFT’s, vote-locked tokens and interest-bearing tokens. “You should be able to give whatever it is that you want to give and direct those proceeds to an issue that you care about,” he emphasizes.What Endaoment is not yet, despite the name, is a DAO. That is meant to change soon, however, as Heeger’s plan is that “people who are actively advancing the mission of Endoament are rewarded with tokens that give them membership, interest and oversight power over the nonprofit entity itself.” This would make EnDAOment a decentralized autonomous organization, which comes with the Web3 dream of leveraging a community to make happen what no small centralized team could ever do.Soon, Heeger imagines that it will be easy for anyone to become the next Pine, even on a much smaller budget, and create a fund through which they and others use to distribute their crypto wealth to charities around the world.“We want to democratize those philontrophic tools and make them as easy as interacting with a DeFi Protocol or as easy as transacting using MetaMask.”

As Ethereum gas prices rise, the chain that inspired Web3 is becoming gentrified, with high transaction costs pushing less wealthy users onto competing blockchains or scaling solutions. This means that many use cases are becoming unfeasible in the proverbial layer-one downtown, and suburban neighborhoods are being developed to allow for a cost-effective layer-two blockchain experience. Since getting acquainted with Polygon around the time of its launch in late 2019, Sameep Singhania has been an avid supporter of projects built on the protocol. In 2021, he created QuickSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX) serving the needs of the budding Polygon ecosystem.Singhania left a promising career as a software developer in 2017 to work as a freelance developer, only to find himself writing code for an array of blockchain projects in the DeFi and layer-two sector. Among the many projects he worked on, he spent 18 months with blockchain e-commerce site OpenBazaar, and served as lead developer for DeFi exchange ParaSwap.Polygon is one layer-two solution built on Ethereum, and it offers users lower fees when transacting on-chain. QuickSwap is Polygon’s primary DEX and functions as a heart of the network. A DEX for PolygonAfter working on perhaps dozens of projects on Polygon from 2019 onward, Singhania “realized that to grow the Polygon ecosystem, we need a DEX.” This was because while “99% of blockchain projects have a token,” listings on popular exchanges are not easy to arrange, and many users are not willing to create an account at an obscure exchange just to trade a particular token that is not listed elsewhere. A DEX can function as the central market square of a blockchain network, giving its users access to everything they need without having to venture to another chain.Singhania recalls being encouraged to create a DEX by Polygon’s co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, who put him in touch with Roc Zacharias, a marketer with Lunar Digital Assets. “That’s how we set up a team — we had developers, we had a marketing team, a perfect mix, and we launched the app,” he explains.The QuickSwap interface. Source: QuickSwapPolygon — previously called Matic Network, with MATIC remaining its ticker — is a layer-two blockchain. That means it’s a blockchain built on top of an existing chain. Whereas Lighting is an example of a layer-two, or L2, built on Bitcoin, Polygon is built upon Ethereum. As a result, Polygon-based tokens can be sent to Ethereum addresses, whose users can retrieve them simply by switching to the Polygon network on a DApp such as MetaMask.The oft-stated advantage of L2 solutions is that they are more nimble than their behemoth parents, allowing for faster and cheaper transactions. With Bitcoin transactions costing over $10 and taking approximately 10 minutes for the first of six confirmations, it is clear that transacting on the parent chain is not practical for everyday transactions in El Salvador, for example, where laborers can earn as little as $100 per month. Instead, Salvadorans use Bitcoin Lighting, whose transactions cost as little as 1 satoshi.Sameep Singhania wants to scale up crypto’s potential.The transaction costs on the Ethereum network are much higher, making it “unusable by the small users” who are effectively priced out of using DeFi solutions or decentralized exchanges like Uniswap. In January 2021, a “normal Ethereum transaction on Uniswap cost around $100,” Singhania recalls.“If I’m a normal user and I want to do a small trade, I cannot do it on Ethereum — the average transaction size on Uniswap is somewhere around $50,000.”“Polygon is there to scale Ethereum,” Singhania says, which has its pros and cons. He further explains that while “Ethereum is the most secure solution out there,” it comes at the cost of high gas fees and relatively slow transaction times.That’s not exactly desirable for an economy — smaller denominations of currency exist because not everything can be done with $100 bills. L2s are the answer for allowing smaller transactions on existing networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. On Polygon, users can exchange Ethereum-based tokens, NFTs, and interact with smart contracts cheaply. ?LIVE NOW: @mcuban, @hackapreneur, @CryptoRocky, @AaveAave, & @0xPolygonspeak on Polygon Power Hour!– @mcuban “People are probably a whole lot more active on Aave and QuickSwap on Polygon, than Ethereum L1 versions” – Mark Cubanhttps://t.co/99rGSoa04U pic.twitter.com/ySjxu049td— QuickSwap (@QuickswapDEX) June 15, 2021The pressing need for L2s is relatively new, because transaction costs have risen significantly in the past two years along with the blockchain user base. On QuickSwap, transactions between the over 23,000 available pairs cost only a few cents. “You can basically use QuickSwap to trade any ERC-20 token which has liquidity and exists on the Polygon network,” Singhania says. Fees are naturally paid in MATIC.Considering the savings, switching digital assets from Ethereum to Polygon seems like an obvious solution for many users. However, some activities, like the trading of six-figure NFTs, remain decisively away from the Polygonian suburb. Similarly, Singhania acknowledges that those making million-dollar trades have less to gain from Polygon. There are two primary ways to move assets to Polygon, according to Singhania: exchange withdrawals and bridges. “A lot of big exchanges like Binance support deposits and withdrawals on the Polygon network,” which means that the Ethereum network can potentially be avoided entirely. As for assets already on Ethereum instead of on a centralized exchange, they can be bridged, which is effectively an inter-blockchain transfer.“Both L1 and L2 applications have their own pros and cons and they both have their use cases — now it’s up to the user to choose which platform better suits their needs”Learning the ropesSinghania, 31, grew up in India’s capital, New Delhi. He had an early passion for coding since high school, describing the process of coding “like magic happening,” whereby “wonderful stuff” could be created with just a few lines of code. He followed his passion in 2008 to JSS Academy of Technical Education, on the outskirts of the capital, where he completed a bachelor in computer science and served as a campus IBM Ambassador.Graduating in 2013, he began his career in software testing and automation at Dell, but soon realized that he wanted to “focus more on development” instead of remaining a software tester, a role with less opportunities for creative input, for the remainder of his career. He made the switch to software developer in 2015 at Drishti-soft Solutions, where he worked on customer service software and organized web development training sessions.Still not quite settled in the role and in search of “something where I don’t get bored,” Singhania switched over to software freelancing in 2017. “When you do freelancing, you get to know a lot of people and learn about a lot of new industries and domains,” he recalls, noting that he was finally interested in his work. One of these new industries was blockchain, which he had previously heard about while working as a developer. “I again came across this blockchain and Bitcoin stuff while searching for a project, so I decided to give it some more time and do some more research — to figure out ‘what is this Bitcoin? What is this blockchain?’”By mid-2018, Singhania was a full-time blockchain engineer for a number of projects, including Akila Labs, Bitgrit, and Toptal, where he developed ERC-20 tokens and smart contracts for things like airdrops, token vesting and crowdsales. Notable among this was 18 months spent working with the decentralized marketplace startup OpenBazaar, “which was trying to build something very similar to Amazon — but on blockchain” using the peer-to-peer InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), Singhania recalls with excitement.Compounding knowledge“When DeFi was just starting” in 2018, Singhania worked as the lead developer and first employee of ParaSwap, an aggregator DApp which brings together multiple DEXs so that users can seamlessly trade cryptocurrency pairs which do not exist together on any exchange. All of this trading is done through Singhania’s smart contracts, which “handle millions of dollars everyday,” he says proudly, adding that the platform saw 3.3 billion dollars in volume in the past month.“That project allowed me to make an entry into DeFi — it basically introduced me to everything out there like Uniswap, Bancor, Kyber Network, because to build ParaSwap we needed to learn everything about DeFi.”With DeFi under his belt, Singhania encountered layer-two blockchain solutions while working on a dice game for one of his clients, a blockchain casino.He soon realized that “it was too expensive to do it on Ethereum” — even though 2019 gas fees were a fraction of what they are today. Something new was needed, and Singhania “started exploring for layer-two solutions,” he recounts. He first built his dice game on the now defunct layer-one Loom Network which shut down shortly thereafter, Singhania scouted out Matic Network, which was in late 2019 “very new and their mainnet was not launched.” Working with the Matic Network team, now called Polygon, Singhania got the dice game up and running, becoming acquainted with the Polygon network in the process.Ethereum dice games are not the first to suffer from scaling issues. Erik Voorhees’ SatoshiDICE, for example, was launched in 2012 and soon accounted for over half of Bitcoin transactions. With transaction prices increasing, making small on-chain bets on Bitcoin’s main layer has since become impractical..@QuickswapDEX has shown tremendous growth on Polygon PoS & has become the biggest Polygon-native decentralized application in terms of users, TVL, & volume.We’re offering them $1m in liquidity mining incentives to strengthen the platform’s liquidity?:https://t.co/Z3fb8BOCmw pic.twitter.com/gHN9ZL89U6— Polygon | $MATIC ? (@0xPolygon) September 30, 2021Onboarding the next generationNow that Polygon is a low-cost option to L1 and has a reliable DEX, Singhania believes that the next step in scaling the layer is to improve the user experience in order to make it user-friendly for millions of people who are new to cryptocurrency. As QuickSwap is a central point of the Polygon ecosystem, much of the responsibility falls to his shoulders.“The way that things are designed right now, it’s not for a novice —  it’s for a well-trained crypto user.”In Singhania’s view, the price of MATIC can be expected to follow the adoption of the Polygon layer. If the team continues to execute, “it is just a matter of time” as to when prices might begin a steady climb. One thing is clear: Singhania is no longer bored with his work and is “not doing any kind of freelancing because I don’t have time.”

Colin Fitzpatrick is a Dubliner based in Dubai who turned a bad time during quarantine into a business that promises to bring your favorite artists to a metaverse near you. His company Animal Concerts, which launches in January, is in the process of signing world-class artists to perform in the decentralized worlds of the Metaverse.Among the first to get the Animal Concerts treatment was Grammy-winning rapper Future, who performed at an in-person Animal Concerts-themed Halloween party in Miami, which was filmed in such a way that it can later be broadcast in the Metaverse. In this startling new land, there are no COVID restrictions nor travel bans, and artists can sell NFT memorabilia to fans with little overhead, investment or middlemen. Virtual concerts have already begun to appear, most notably Ariana Grande’s October 2021 performance in Fortnite. Around 78 million Fortnite users attended Grande’s show, with some commentators speculating that she was set to earn over $20 million from the virtual gig.Travis Scott pulled in $20 million for a Fortnite performance in 2020, and Ed Sheeran similarly took to the virtual stage of Pokemon Go in November 2021. When Swedish star Zara Larsson held a concert on Roblox, she earned seven figures for sales of “in-game items like hats, backpacks and sunglasses” which started at just $1.[embedded content]Fitzpatrick says that he is in the last stages of signing a concert with a top-100 Grammy-winning artist who I agree not to name. In preparing for the concert, she would “go into a green screen studio where she does our performance, and we record it and then we can essentially turn her into an avatar where she is properly in one of the decentralized blockchain-run worlds,” he explains, regarding the process of concert digitalization.Holding concerts in the Metaverse comes with a slew of advantages for artists, according to Fitzpatrick. Whereas streaming services like Spotify are reducing music revenues, Animal Concerts allows performers to earn 50% of the revenue from both ticket and NFT sales. With celebrities benefiting directly, they have a big incentive to entice their fans into the Metaverse, where many of them will encounter blockchain for the first time.FUTURE performing at MAXIM’s Halloween party in Miami in collaboration with Animal ConcertsA former DJ who has been passionate about music from a young age, Fitzpatrick points to a cupboard behind him where he keeps a box with “ticket stubs and flyers from gigs that I went to when I was in my youth.” For him, they are priceless mementos of his formative experiences.A changing industryJust as the idea of a Metaverse powered by virtual reality (VR) was gaining steam along with the explosion of NFTs earlier this year, Fitzpatrick realized the two could be combined to offer solutions to a struggling music industry, which he says has seen declining revenues with countless concert tours canceled since the beginning of the pandemic. The platform will soon allow people at home to stream VR-augmented concerts live and experience them as an interactive event rather than as one-sided TV broadcasts. NFTs can be given out as Metaverse-age equivalents of the ticket stubs in Fitzpatrick’s memory box. Colin Fitzpatrick sees the Metaverse as the ultimate touring destination.“With 360-degree cameras on stage, you can use a VR headset to get an immersive experience — like you are dancing on stage with your favorite bands, from your living room anywhere in the world. We want to enable you to enjoy the concert with friends by seeing their avatars,” he explains. The goal is to become the “Netflix of live streaming concerts.”“There’s been a lot of very high profile concerts already in various different Metaverses”. Fitzpatrick explains that virtual concerts are desirable from the artist’s perspective because they do not require travel and the number of viewers is not limited by venue size. There is naturally also an economic driver, as virtual venues do not demand the same amount of stagehands, security or other costly infrastructure, and also because the number of middlemen is reduced. With the view that different scheduled events are happening in various virtual worlds, the idea of the Metaverse as a reality consisting of numerous intertwined virtual worlds is becoming increasingly current.Animal Concerts is honored to be working with 15-time GRAMMY Award winner @aliciakeys as she plays at her One Night Only event celebrating the launch of her new double album “KEYS”.#KEYS #KEYSUnlocked #KeysOriginal pic.twitter.com/YhzDPiPXiJ— Animal Concerts (@animalconcerts) December 16, 2021What these metaverses have in common, whether games like Roblox or blockchain worlds like Decentraland, is that “they have a huge user base and they’re going to be selling digital assets in one way or another,” Fitzpatrick says. While most centralized worlds will require a user account, decentralized worlds allow access via wallet software, such as MetaMask. The major difference between centralized and decentralized worlds is their interoperability — items purchased in Pokemon Go cannot be transferred to Roblox, whereas NFTs can be displayed in a large number of different decentralized virtual worlds.“Today’s kids are used to purchasing skins — digital assets in games. It’s a very simple step for them to look to purchase NFTs released by their favorite musicians,” Fitzpatrick says.The need for a wallet can be a barrier for those who are new to crypto, Fitzpatrick admits. Similar to Beeple, who wanted to make sure his NFTs can be purchased by credit card, Fitzpatrick sees a future where virtual concert-goers have the option to “go to a website, putting in the credit card details and purchasing tickets and then purchase an NFT without worrying about a cryptocurrency.” In many cases, these NFTs could be combined with physical memorabilia, such as an NFT and a physical copy of handwritten lyrics by the artist. They might also be combined with virtual meet and greets — specifics are largely up to the artists.Dublin to DubaiFitzpatrick, 41, began on his path in 1999 when he began studying business management at Portobello Institute in his native Ireland. He immediately began doing freelance web design work, soon expanding to DJing and working as a nightclub organizer.  “I used to organize club nights and do festivals,” he recounts of his younger days.He chose the corporate path upon graduation, joining Dell as a relationship manager in 2002, and in 2006 took an enterprise sales job with Oracle where he spent five years until 2011. After about two years with Salesforce and HubSpot, Fitzpatrick returned to Oracle for seven years, which saw him rise through the ranks from a sales strategy manager to a leadership position in the “Multi-Cloud Ecosystem” unit, with the latter promotion taking him from Dublin to Dubai “to build new business here for them” in late 2018.Fitzpatrick discovered Bitcoin at around $100 in 2013, but he was “sadly persuaded out of it by a friend,” he recalls. He got back in the game in late 2016, however, becoming “a full convert” when the concept of blockchain clicked for him. Soon enough, he started chatting with another employee at Oracle who was interested in crypto, and “then we found someone else,” and it started to “spread like wildfire,” he recounts with a laugh.“Fast forward a couple of months — halfway through 2017, there was more cryptocurrency trading being done in the office than there was selling Oracle software!”Spending much of his time researching cryptocurrencies, he “wanted to go work for a blockchain company, but there was nothing in Dublin,” and “virtual jobs” were not as common as they are post-COVID, he explains. COVID wreaked havoc on Oracle. The company, despite having recently moved Fitzpatrick, an employee of 13 years, to a new country, “made me redundant smack bang in the middle of COVID, which absolutely sucked — it was just when the lockdown started,” he recalls with a hint of shade. “I was in big trouble” as almost no companies were hiring at the time, but Fitzpatrick managed to find work as a director of business development with Eastnets, “a local company who do payments and software compliance.”A year in, however, he quit. It was time to strike his own path as an entrepreneur. Fan tokens for musicFitzpatrick says that the average Animal Concert will cost between $10 and $30 to attend, with tickets available on sites like Ticketmaster as if for any event taking place in the “meatspace,” as some Metaverse proponents humorously like to call the physical world. Those purchasing tickets with Animal’s native token will receive discounts, “so if you want to buy with our token, it will be cheaper, so that’s an incentive to use our native token,” he adds. There’s always a token, of course, and the Animal token will also function as a governance token, allowing fans and artists to engage in interesting new ways, such as by “voting on which songs artists will play or what outfit they will wear.” Fitzpatrick believes that a highly engaged fan base is “sticky,” and will attend numerous concerts while purchasing artists’ NFTs. Those staking the token will be eligible for “first access to the hottest NFT drops, or you get free tickets to future concerts,” he adds.This model can be compared to the fan token phenomenon, of which Socios is the market leader. Socios has a tradeable native token which comes with various utility functions, and the fan tokens created by the firm for different sports teams gather more chatter from fans who seem to view them as akin to investments in their favorite teams. Such tokens can also provide sports clubs with massive liquidity, as they can slowly release them as fans open their wallets. Could Animal become the Socios of music?“We have a plan to create a token for each artist,” Fitzpatrick responds, explaining that each artist has a group of very loyal fans who would be sure to be interested in holding tokens based on their idol. Looking through the lens of NFTs, which are non-fungible tokens that cannot be subdivided, a fungible token can be imagined as a single, fractionalized NFT which represents the name, idea, or concept it pertains to. As such, “Ariana Grande Token” could quite possibly be expected to rise in value in relation to her star power, and investing in the coin of an emerging artist could prove fruitful. Just as with Socios-created sports tokens, music fan tokens could, in the future, function as a sort of quasi-share of the artist.Star power is sure to have a big impact on any future tokens, as Fitzpatrick agrees that fans “won’t necessarily care about the Animal Token, but they would care about the Ariana Grande Token.”