Transcript
Speaker: This is HSBC Global Viewpoint, your window into the thinking, trends and issues shaping global banking and markets.
Speaker: Join us as we hear from industry leaders and HSBC experts on the latest insights and opportunities for your business.
Speaker: Thank you for listening.
Speaker: Hello and welcome.
Speaker: I'm Sin Itan, Product Manager, Digital Data and Innovation at HSBC Security Services.
Speaker: Today, I'm joined by Sebastian Borget, COO and co-founder of The Sandbox, as well as Rajiv Tumala, Director, Digital Data and Innovation at HSBC Security Services, to talk about the metaverse, what is it, what kind of opportunities will it bring, and what does it mean for financial institutions.
Speaker: Thank you both for joining me today.
Speaker: Thank you, Sini.
Speaker: I look forward to a very interesting conversation with Seb yourself.
Speaker: Thank you as well.
Speaker: I'm really looking forward to a great conversation with Rajiv.
Speaker: Thanks both.
Speaker: So, Sebastian, let's start with you.
Speaker: Perhaps we can begin with what exactly is the metaverse and what do you think are the core elements to a metaverse?
Speaker: Well, you see the metaverse is essentially this myriad of virtual worlds where you as a user can access through an avatar that is a 3D representation of yourself and becomes your new digital identity.
Speaker: You can access more social, more immersive, more fun, more creative type of experiences.
Speaker: And unlike what we've seen before, because so far what would be mostly like a virtual world, the main difference
Speaker: is that you as a user will truly own that digital identity, will truly own all your content, whether they are wearable, they are equipment, they could be content you created yourself or content you own as you engage through those experiences, your virtual land, your virtual houses, even your currency.
Speaker: And you can use in any of those virtual worlds that content without having any constraint to transfer it from one to another.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great definition of the metaverse.
Speaker: As you pointed out, the key difference is really the ownership of your identity as well as your digital assets in various metaverses because of the interoperability.
Speaker: I think this definition of the metaverse could possibly evolve in the next few years and it'll be interesting to see how it goes.
Speaker: But of course, foundational elements would largely remain the same.
Speaker: If we go along the lines of exploring the elements of the metaverse a bit more, Rajiv, perhaps you can share some of your thoughts on how you think digital assets and possibly services like decentralized finance tie into the metaverse?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's interesting to look at digital assets, right?
Speaker: So if you purely start to look at this from a financial services perspective,
Speaker: digital assets are simply a newer and better way of representing assets.
Speaker: As we move from paper to dematerialized assets, we're just moving on to a different form of representing assets.
Speaker: What Metaverse brings to the forefront is a fact that you can start to represent a lot more physical objects in a virtual world.
Speaker: You can start to own them so much
Speaker: The type of assets one can own is going to explode.
Speaker: There will be more ownership rights like digital identity, yourself in multiple virtual worlds.
Speaker: And with more ownership rights, these ownership rights are going to be modeled as assets.
Speaker: So what digital assets are going to also allow then is going to be interoperability.
Speaker: There's going to be multiple virtual worlds in metaverse and you want to move
Speaker: these ownership rights across different virtual worlds and the tokens or the digital assets are going to make that value transfer or the ownership right transfers possible across these worlds.
Speaker: So I think that would be a primary use case.
Speaker: I mean, the functionality that we are looking at is interoperability.
Speaker: So it is going to be an interesting process
Speaker: few years, I think, because there's going to be an explosion, right?
Speaker: Explosion of different kinds of devices, different kinds of assets.
Speaker: And we have to actually look at, you know, how these things come together, what kind of interoperability can be achieved as well.
Speaker: But I think the decentralized finance concept or the digital asset concept is going to be a foundational infrastructure, I think.
Speaker: that is going to allow this system to thrive and survive.
Speaker: So I think based on what Sebastian has explained about the metaverse and also what you have just described, clearly I think we're alluding to the fact that there is a distinction between a decentralized metaverse versus a virtual world that is built for Web2.
Speaker: So Sebastian, given your experience in building both Web2 virtual worlds and also now in the sandbox,
Speaker: What would you say are the key opportunities the metaverse can bring that exceeds what we can already do in Web2 today?
Speaker: Yes, there is clearly a differentiation.
Speaker: What we're talking about on one side, in the case of Web2, they are like centralized wall garden economies where one platform, one operator of the platform essentially is providing
Speaker: to their users a virtual world where they can engage with an avatar, etc.
Speaker: But essentially, these users do not have the possibility to take that avatar and connect with it on other virtual world.
Speaker: They don't have the possibility to exchange with other users their assets, not even transfer it, not even sell it.
Speaker: They might provide marketplaces, but the marketplace
Speaker: but they do not let users sell their older digital assets on external marketplace as well essentially they also do not have like they have a centralized way to manage a currency if if there is one in place where that currency and its exchange rate is actually being defined by the operator of the platform rather than the free market on the other side what web3 is trying to
Speaker: to provide and what we've been putting a lot of effort on at Sandbox is to really start from the user first and the community first, meaning that we've built Sandbox around providing the possibility for users to have the full ownership of all the content that contribute, that constitute those virtual worlds and also
Speaker: the possibility to truly benefit from the values the users provide for their activity, whether they are creator or they are just users or players.
Speaker: Meaning that the time they are going to dedicate and invest into the various activities that are part of those worlds, into the sandbox,
Speaker: is actually valuable and that time can also be turned into a revenue stream as all the actions you do, all the content you might collect or earn is also a token on a blockchain that can hence be sold on a marketplace, even an external marketplace to the platform.
Speaker: We also see, and there was a very good explanation of interoperability, the possibility that even once I'm no longer interested in spending time with my avatar or all the content I made in one of those digitalized virtual worlds,
Speaker: I absolutely can take them and use them eventually into another world and developing this whole metaverse with one idea in mind, again, to provide an environment where people can be more creative thanks to this technology, but more importantly, can benefit the most from all the values they bring, meaning like they keep 95% of the revenue they generate from selling their content.
Speaker: They can sell all the content on any other marketplace if they want.
Speaker: And that's also a big disruption, a big shift versus the rest of the industry.
Speaker: The fact that users are stakeholders in the growth of this virtual world, whether they are participating in the creator economy or just engaging, as we discussed before, meaning that it aligns the incentive between the platform and the user.
Speaker: It's a win-win strategy where if your community grows, they bring more users.
Speaker: users are also the first to benefit from that effort of growing the community.
Speaker: Yeah, I really like the idea of aligned incentives, which is something that I don't think the Web 2 has really presented the opportunity to the creators especially.
Speaker: So thanks for that, Sebastian.
Speaker: Rajiv, any thoughts to share on how the metaverse is making a tangible impact on the economy of intangibles?
Speaker: The redeeming factor of the last three decades is primarily the rise of the intangible economy.
Speaker: Traditionally, economists have been looking at how capital is invested and what do firms do with that capital.
Speaker: Do they buy plans, produce physical goods.
Speaker: With the advent of Internet, again, Web 2, in the 1990s, the idea of the knowledge economy came through.
Speaker: And metaverse is primarily taking the whole knowledge economy into the next level, right?
Speaker: And the firms that are going to operate in metaverse, they're going to spend 90 to 95% of their capital on intangibles, right?
Speaker: product platform that position a firm to compete in the markets that deal with intangibles.
Speaker: The organization capabilities are geared towards creating intangibles.
Speaker: So I think, you know, on a whole, the metaverse is also about creating, you know, goods and services for the intangible economy.
Speaker: And we touched upon digital assets, right?
Speaker: So I think this is the first time in the history of mankind, we are going to be provided with tools,
Speaker: that can produce non-revalrous goods.
Speaker: That is multiple people can use the same thing simultaneously
Speaker: without any penalty right that is basically a redeeming feature of digital assets but at the same time you can also make a digital asset that can be revalorized that is you can actually code a particular asset in such a way my own identity that if i am the owner so me only i can use that particular thing so you can now create a non-revalorous asset or a revalorous asset for the first time uh and
Speaker: You can make it durable or perishable.
Speaker: That is, a particular digital asset can be only used once and it can perish after that, or you can make it a durable asset.
Speaker: And the marginal cost of doing all this is going to be extremely low.
Speaker: And what is this going to give is an opportunity to creators to create all of these things.
Speaker: So what we will see, again, from the intangible economy perspective is you're sort of going to
Speaker: allow people to create many different kinds of experiences, assets associated with that experiences, different constraints.
Speaker: And I think it is going to lead to an explosion of innovation.
Speaker: Not all innovation can scale or will scale, but it will also give opportunity to creators to experiment and innovate a lot more.
Speaker: And, you know, some things will fail, some things will succeed, but, you know, the experience of running an experiment and the cost of doing it is going to become even lower than Web2.
Speaker: And that's basically what I think is going to be special about in metaverse, right?
Speaker: So you're sort of bridging the physical and the real world as well like never before.
Speaker: And what I'm hearing is it's not only incentivized activity, you know, we also have incentivized innovation.
Speaker: Now we have been discussing this from a user perspective.
Speaker: How about we flip the picture and think about from the perspective of the service providers to the metaverse.
Speaker: So maybe Rajiv, if I can start with you, what do you think the metaverse means for financial institutions as service providers?
Speaker: And then also, why should they care and what would be the key difference to services in the metaverse?
Speaker: It's going to be an explosion of opportunity.
Speaker: So first, we have to look at what kind of use cases do we have in metaverse.
Speaker: I do think there are two distinct segments in the metaverse.
Speaker: There's going to be a large number of users who are going to chase immersive experience.
Speaker: And there's going to be a large number of either creators or firms or builders that are going to these immersive experiences.
Speaker: And financial institutions are going to have to embed themselves into the experience creation part.
Speaker: They need to basically come in to enable the creator economy, the build economy of the metaverse.
Speaker: That is both a challenge, a threat, and an opportunity, right?
Speaker: A lot of activity that needs to get into metaverse is at a micro level.
Speaker: This is largely going to be driven by user interactions that are seeking immersive experience.
Speaker: So first, you know, from an immersive experience part, I think it's going to touch different parts of users' life, right?
Speaker: So retail, gaming, music.
Speaker: You know, all these are going to be immersive experiences.
Speaker: And the firms that are going to create these experiences are going to sort of transact with these users many times over, right?
Speaker: It's not good.
Speaker: And they're potentially going to sort of have a lot of transactional charges, which are really, really micro.
Speaker: And financial institutions have to be able to support these micro activities there.
Speaker: And they have to now start to look at
Speaker: compliance at this micro level, payments at this micro level, and maybe lending and borrowing at this micro level.
Speaker: So that's going to be the opportunity that the financial services institutions are going to enable.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's definitely advantageous in moving fast and even trying to experiment, although perhaps, you know, in the mind of financial institutions, the Web3 and the metaverse space hasn't quite reached critical mass, right?
Speaker: But we have seen, though, rapid growth recently in the number of users of the metaverse, I think especially in the past few years.
Speaker: So I believe the sandbox has crossed 2 million in users, but in the minds of many, it has not yet reached
Speaker: mass market adoption.
Speaker: Sebastian, how do we make the metaverse more accessible to a more diverse audience?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Well, actually, we already passed the 3 million registered users, but you're right that even though that Sandbox is one of the largest now decentralized virtual world, it's still very small in comparison to the Web2 centralized platform, which boasts hundreds of millions of users, if not more.
Speaker: Which means that we have a great avenue for growth and a great avenue for growth is going to come, in our opinion, mostly from providing interesting content first for people to want to engage to the metaverse.
Speaker: So that's really cool.
Speaker: Rajiv, do you think financial institutions have a role to play as well in making the metaverse more accessible?
Speaker: So this is primarily about come for the content and stay for the engagement that different brands have, right?
Speaker: So that is going to be the primary theme for Metaverse.
Speaker: So now the question is, how can financial institutions play a role in making that accessible, as Seb was pointing out, right?
Speaker: So ultimately, what matters is the ease of use, convenience, and of course, right?
Speaker: So the user experience matters.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: How financial institutions can help enable that is, again, going back to my original point around being able to support that micro activity and how do you enable those micro experiences?
Speaker: How can you add value to the user activity rather than trying to extract value out?
Speaker: In some ways, being able to support the activities at a very, very small scale, but being able to support high volume of those activities is what the financial service institutions can do to make Metaverse a bit more accessible.
Speaker: The challenge, again, is around letting this technology mature enough because sometimes, and as you correctly pointed out, it has not yet become mainstream.
Speaker: It's a super high niche.
Speaker: That is because, again, right?
Speaker: So...
Speaker: how does one participate in metaverse how easy it is to sort of access it you know sometimes it could be as simple things as like do banks have enough lending for hardware that individual users have have to buy in or you know what kind of credit models are the firms that are producing these hardware getting there's going to be some financing element to it right so there's going to be some amount of this that you have
Speaker: to take.
Speaker: There's some amount of micro-activity, micro-compliance that you might have to actually provide.
Speaker: So all these, this is in some ways infrastructure, right?
Speaker: It is not just the financial services organization, but it is also the metaverse builders that have to come together to create a conducive environment for adoption.
Speaker: And that's where
Speaker: I think the financial institutions have some role to play.
Speaker: And as you already know, there's a bunch of institutions already experimenting, trying to learn what the metaverse is about and how they can add value to the users in it.
Speaker: So more such behavior is required, if any.
Speaker: And I also think that one of the value that financial institutions can bring is to basically bridge that trust gap.
Speaker: Because some of our clients might not be seasoned users of the metaverse, or they might be pretty new to the Web3 ecosystem.
Speaker: So at least in the initial days, I think you would agree with me, the financial institutions do have a role to introduce clients as well to the metaverse and Web3, as well as to reach that trust gap.
Speaker: Yeah, the trust gap is a very interesting thing, right?
Speaker: So that is the role you, for any new things, right?
Speaker: You know, there's always going to be a gap and known brands, right?
Speaker: So, and that is probably one of the reasons why a lot of brands coming in, into Metaverse and there is an incentive for the brands as well, right?
Speaker: So they sort of close the trust gap.
Speaker: But your point around incentivized for innovation is also interesting, right?
Speaker: So how are financial institutions themselves
Speaker: incentivizing their customers or incentivizing the staff to sort of participate and learn about metaverse right again you know that's the key because the barrier to access the entire tooling for metaverse is going to be you know potentially much lower as i was mentioning and that would support a large number of small niches and that's if financial institution can enable a significant number of very small niches
Speaker: you know there is there's value in them right they can today you have different segment of customers that we serve like you you go after business banking you have you go after local large corporates i think there is going to be a segment of clients and customers that are going to serve the metaverse customer and their requirements would be very different from you know a small to medium enterprise that we do and requirement going to be what is the what are the kind of financial products that they're going to look at and these are going to be all intangibles right so
Speaker: And you and I know that valuing intangibles of a specific company is going to be extremely hard.
Speaker: And that's some area that we need to sort of understand how to evaluate the value that a company in Metaverse is adding to the user.
Speaker: How do you provide a meaningful valuation to that particular service?
Speaker: That is where I think, you know, financial institutions would have a role to play in making it accessible.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Maybe one thing I'd like to add as well to this is like, well, as you're going to see a growing number of users spending time from a couple hours a day to sometimes more engaging, sometimes learning, sometimes working, socializing with your avatar to decentralize your trail road sandbox.
Speaker: Those users, they are typically not the kind of users who are working into a bank branch or like usually like interacting with financial institutions as our parents have been used to do.
Speaker: So when those users who spend most of their time or a good portion of their time into the actual world, engaging with other kinds of experiences, this financial institution that are also part of that same virtual world that interact in it, offering value, offering experiences, making it a cool, fun place where they want to hang around.
Speaker: Even if they do not buy the financial product, they do not hold their asset immediately.
Speaker: Over time, if those institutions start offering services such as, for example, like, hey, you know all the NFTs you earn, all the tokens you earn as you spend time as a creator or as a player to decentralize the virtual world, now you can host them with us.
Speaker: We recognize you as a revenue stream and we can go even further.
Speaker: We can provide you a loan so you can buy your next character, you can buy your next land.
Speaker: And because I can see that you have acquired a trusted reputation in those environments, all of that on blockchain.
Speaker: So it's fully transparent.
Speaker: then I believe those financial institutions will be the big winner because they will have shown that they are really where it matters for the future, for that generation.
Speaker: Yep, indeed.
Speaker: So maybe one final question to you, Sebastian.
Speaker: We have heard about what the Sandbox has done in terms of creating experiences as well as attracting users by lowering the barriers to entry, providing tools for creators.
Speaker: providing entertainment as well as multiple types of experiences across gaming, e-commerce, finance, and also building this community that is incentivized to perform activities on the metaverse.
Speaker: So this is all that the Sandbox has done.
Speaker: What is in store for Sandbox in the future and what is your vision?
Speaker: I see there will be millions of jobs created in the metaverse.
Speaker: Some of those jobs definitely will relate to the creator side, whether like you're an architect, fashion designer, game designers, level designer, house designer, interior designer, all of those are already existing jobs from the real world, but they're also existing jobs in the metaverse.
Speaker: And we're seeing thousands of artists, people with those different skill sets, as well as
Speaker: hundreds of builders studio who specialize in one or the other of this area.
Speaker: There are many other jobs and we want to
Speaker: make sure that Sandbox is a viable option for anyone to enter.
Speaker: Not the only option.
Speaker: Our goal is not to be like a winner takes all kind of situation like we've seen.
Speaker: If not, what would be the meaning?
Speaker: Like what would even make sense to take your asset from one to another?
Speaker: On the opposite side, we work hard to even bring to life the NFTs from a lot of other web-free communities.
Speaker: So we add value to them.
Speaker: We allow to have a place where they can socialize, interact.
Speaker: crates, but also more recently, People of Crypto, which is a very diverse and inclusive collection for support of women in Web3 or LGBTQ plus communities in Web3 as well.
Speaker: Because ultimately, I feel like we have this unique chance, all of us, to make the metaverse a more inclusive place, to correct the mistakes
Speaker: world, whereas there's a lot of inequalities based on where you're born, what your social statutes, what your parents, education you receive, unequal access, chances of access to opportunity, all of that.
Speaker: Actually, just to conclude, I think we can make things right by being right from the beginning, more inclusive and reward all the contributors that contribute to make this place, the one where we all want to spend time.
Speaker: Yeah, that sounds really exciting.
Speaker: You know, the opportunity to create something from scratch and create something more equitable for everyone.
Speaker: So it sounds like there's a lot of things for you to do, Sebastian, and I can't wait to see what the sandbox has in store for the future.
Speaker: And Rajiv, just to wrap up, what do you think the metaverse will look like in five years' time?
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: You know, we are probably hurling ourselves
Speaker: into an entirely new economic system, economic paradigm, largely powered by intangibles, right?
Speaker: So running in still in parallel,
Speaker: supported by the DeFi infrastructure, the distributed ledger infrastructure, a lot more number of assets.
Speaker: And that's primarily what an ardent supporter would predict, right?
Speaker: A parallel, entirely parallel.
Speaker: The economic system that is more open, inclusive, and there is healthy governance, but that's largely done by the community.
Speaker: But at the very least, right, you can basically say that we are in the midst of a technology evolution that would lead to a new kind of compute environment.
Speaker: Experiences have to be the number one consumable pattern.
Speaker: And everyone else is basically competing to provide that, including financial institutions.
Speaker: Yeah, indeed, predicting the future is difficult, but I think it's clear that the time is now to innovate and experiment and also figure out what value our organization can bring to our customers in this new world.
Speaker: So thank you so much, Sebastian and Rajiv, for your insights.
Speaker: But that's all the time we have for today.
Speaker: It has been a really fascinating discussion into the future of the metaverse, both from a world builder as well as a service provider perspective.
Speaker: So thank you.
Speaker: Thank you very much for having us.
Speaker: My pleasure.
Speaker: Thank you for having us.
Speaker: Thank you for listening today.
Speaker: This has been HSBC Global Viewpoint, Banking and Markets.
Speaker: For more information about anything you heard in this podcast,
Speaker: or to learn about HSBC's global services and offerings, please visit gbm.hsbc.com.
