The battle for the metaverse has begun. How you interpret this statement is part of the war. Through corporate glasses, the metaverse is an augmented consumer space where virtual experiences can be dominated, codified, and coined. A new era of walled-gardens, a web3 in name alone.
In the minds of the builders, the true potential of the metaverse is the ability to create the exact opposite. By enshrining principles of decentralisation and interoperability at the core. By making sure that true ownership exists in the metaverse for all users. By giving the citizens of the metaverse the freedom to choose the metaverse they want to inhabit. Univers aims to be the architecture of the metaverse. For Univers, the plural – metaverses – does not exist. If the metaverse is not one complete thing, with porous borders between experiences, then it is not a metaverse at all.
KuCoin Labs Incubates Univers
KuCoin Labs shares this vision. The global cryptocurrency exchange’s incubation arm has been integral in bringing several projects to maturation and success. Like Univers, it believes there is only one metaverse, and it’s up to crypto users to define what that space should be. KuCoin has thus taken Univers on into its incubation programme, to provide their marketing, business development, and technological prowess to help make Univers the architect of the metaverse it plans to be.
“KuCoin Labs aims to enhance Web-2 entrepreneurs’ understanding and adoption of Web-3. KuCoin Labs is advising Univers Network in various aspects, sharing knowledge regarding Web-3 community incentives, technical structures, business strategy, marketing orientations, fundraising, as well as go-to-market plans, etc,” stated Lou YU, Head of KuCoin Labs.
What is Univers?
Univers is a blockchain, metaverse, and game-development SDK underpinned by a choice-based DeFi economy that connects developers and users and gives both of them a stake in and a vision for the metaverse they want to build.
It plans to help the metaverse connect, to espouse the values of interoperability and ensure that builders right across the blockchain world aren’t just building their own separate houses, but rather a whole city of experiences that users can interact with seamlessly and can choose where to place both their value and time.
That’s a lot to unpack. So let’s break it down.
What is Choose-to-Earn?
Univers is built on a Choose-to-Earn DeFi mechanism. It’s a game mechanic, a governance tool, and a financial instrument. Developers can stake liquidity in order to source market research, technical advice, and voting from the Univers community. Those users help govern, advise, and bring developer’s visions to life, earning rewards for doing so. It’s a hyper-focused way of collecting data from a reliable sample set of crypto-native citizens.
A user’s choices are permanently saved on the blockchain, and can form the basis of historical datasets that can be used by projects to build the metaverse the right way. These datasets are ethical, transparent, and agreed upon by all as part of participating in the Choose-to-Earn economy and earning $VRS token, Univers’ native token.
Univers SDK and Univers General Format
In tandem with Choose-to-Earn is the Univers software development kit. This SDK helps developers build their games and virtual worlds on the blockchain easily, and be assured they can connect seamlessly to an ongoing population of virtual experiences that create the new metaverse together.
A project builds the game, connects its wallet and gameplay to the Unreal or Unity SDK, which connects to the Univers SDK that acts as a consistent communication layer to the server-side proxy and the blockchain itself. It provides tools like player authorization, saving and reading data, and contract execution, so that projects can focus on making their game or metaverse experience the best it can be.
The goal is to make blockchain game development easy, and to ensure smooth communication between different experiences, just as the metaverse should be. The Univers General Format (UGF) will unify game engines like Unreal and Unity with the blockchain, it will be the foundation on which infinite experiences can be built.
Univers’ blockchain SDK will also help designers with tools like crypto-wallet log in, in-game NFTs with staking, breeding and marketplaces, P2E leaderboards, and more. Univers is the architecture and the foundation. It wants to minimise the pain points of making games for the blockchain so that the best developers aren’t put off by the knowledge-gap, and provide blockchain games with white-label functionality so they can focus on what makes their game unique and special, and not slave away on the tired old problems that Univers has already solved.
Best of all. By using the Univers SDK, and benefiting from the Choose-to-Earn economy of users, these new experiences will be intrinsically connected, both on a human and on a technical level. It means that games built with Univers will espouse the user-centric mission that’s at the heart of the project, and will be fully interoperable. Long term collaborations will exist in this ecosystem that have the ability to define the shape of the metaverse to come.
KuCoin Labs and Univers Want to Build Better Worlds
KuCoin Labs’ incubation is a massive show of faith in what Univers is attempting to do. The metaverse needs infrastructure. It needs to not fall into the grip of centralised providers. It is not just a tacky layer of VR or shoddy token mechanism bolted onto old web2 experiences. The metaverse is a chance to create a new world of ownership economies in the virtual world that serve users and lead to collaborative, decentralised projects reaching their true potential. Univers, by creating its multi-purpose SDK, and a fully fledged DeFi Choose-to-Earn economy that helps developers make the best choices for their project, has the ability to make the metaverse the best of all possible worlds.
