Landvault 2.0: A new dawn

It’s been just over a year since we operated as a builder in the metaverse under Landvault. Today, we announce a major brand overhaul and some new products.

It’s no secret that 2023 has been a difficult year for the metaverse. Demand from brands for most platforms dwindled, affecting our business. The era of hype is gone, and failing to see real utility, most companies dropped their metaverse plans to focus on the buzzword of the year - AI.

In a previous blog post, we detailed what that means for us. Luckily, being well-funded, we were able to take time and think about the true utility of what we’re building. We spent the last few months repositioning the company towards client demand and building our tech stack.

So, what is Landvault 2.0?

We believe the word metaverse is tainted with a lack of clarity (is this related to Meta? Is it VR?) and a bad reputation due to crypto scams. It’s hard for people to relate to what the metaverse really is. For the past few years, I’ve been using the analogy of the ‘3D Internet’. It’s more relevant than ever as we are making a push to build experiences on the web for maximum accessibility, as opposed to walled garden platforms. That is what the metaverse is: a 3-dimensional internet powered by real-time 3D technology such as Unity or Unreal, as opposed to HTML.

This will enable richer, more immersive experiences that currently, the internet cannot provide. The ability to visit a hotel in 3D before you book it, to try on a pair of shoes virtually before buying, or to attend live events you cannot go to. The 3D internet will feel more natural, more logical, and overall provide a better user experience. It won’t be for everything, but a lot of things on the internet will be better in 3D. Real-time 3D technologies become the new fabric of the internet.

Similarly to the jump from pictures to video, the jump to real-time 3D will redefine online engagement for the next generation. And most of all, it’s already here in the form of video games - which are played by 3B people every day, or 40% of the world's population. So the 3D internet does not require new consumer behaviors. And technologies like AI or devices like Apple Vision Pro are also catalysts to make this shift to 3D happen even faster.

This new internet is going to need tools to build, publish, and monetize the content - just like the current version of the internet. From WordPress to Figma, Canva, or Google Ads, these tools are the billion-dollar companies that we know today. The new phase of the internet will also create billion-dollar category winners - and it will all happen within the next 5 years. 

This is what Landvault aims to be. We’re building infrastructure for the 3D Internet - a range of tools from AI-assisted creation to monetization, which will be released later this year. Ultimately, we want to make building a business on the 3D Internet as easy as creating a website.

Why are we doing it?

With all the negative press about the metaverse, it would have been easy to call it quits. Many other companies in the space have quit, out of necessity, but also to find a ‘cooler story’ to sell investors. We haven’t.

We are convinced that the fundamentals driving the growth of the 3D Internet have never been stronger. These are 1. gaming technologies becoming mainstream beyond just games, and 2. the blockchain. The former provides the ‘immersive’ aspect (the user experience) while the second enables a new digital economy.

Let’s face it - the current internet works, but it’s broken. User data is tracked and harvested all over the internet. Most sites are basically data mines that are sold to advertisers. Because of the business model, clickbait content is favored over meaningful content. More content, more eyeballs, more data, more revenue. On social media specifically, a lot of the content is created by bots, and AI is going to make it even easier to create unoriginal and wasted content. The internet is all about quantity as opposed to quality, driving traffic at all costs, and while it enables us to connect like never before, it also makes us feel more isolated and less relevant. Lastly, far from its roots as a decentralized protocol to share information, the internet became a winner takes all environment. The humongous wealth created by the business model of farming eyeballs is basically shared between 5 mega-companies, as opposed to the users and creators who are populating it. 

The blockchain gives us a chance to rethink the internet, in favor of the creators. Using the blockchain, assets created can be minted and verified on-chain, which enables creators to sell them (fully or fractionally) and financially benefit from their creation. Business models powered by tokens create a digital economy accessible worldwide. The blockchain also powers a more private, more transparent internet, less focused on harvesting data and selling it to advertisers. Due to this, we believe that the blockchain has the potential to redistribute the wealth of the internet, from a handful of large corporations back to the creators.

This is why we have never lost the conviction that this space is poised to change the future of the internet. A 3D Internet where user experience is paramount, and where data belong to its users. A 3D Internet that ensures:

Less ads, more content 
Less tracking, more privacy 
Less bots, more personality 
Less automation, more creativity 
Less monopolies, more communities 
Less addiction, more desire 
Less width, more depth

This is long overdue because in effect there hasn’t been progress of this magnitude in the fabric of the internet since it was created in the early 90s. The 3D Internet will be the largest seismic shift that has ever happened to online technologies, and it will create category winners on a scale never seen before. That is what the convergence of gaming tech and blockchain can create. And this is why we exist: to build a fairer and richer internet.

Our focus

We’re also excited to get back closer to our roots: building tools empowering creators to be successful. Initially in games, now for the whole 3D Internet. Over the next few months, we’ll roll out our new products, fundamental building blocks of the new 3D Internet:

• Create: a tool to build 3D worlds 10x faster with our AI assistant

• Publish: a tool to publish 3D content on the web or on any device

• Monetize: a tool to measure and drive ROI from 3D worlds

• Matera: a protocol to tokenize your 3D world to secure assets and unlock new monetization

Of course, we remain the largest builders in the metaverse, so who better than our own internal team, Landvault Studio, to use these products? Every client build will now be based on our infrastructure, so we can create better, richer, faster worlds for our clients. Until eventually our clients can use the tools themselves - which we’re internally calling the ‘WordPress moment’.

But we’re still far away from this moment. Today, we believe the early adopters are in the Middle East. Governments and companies there have a high sense for innovation, and are continually pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with web3 technologies. We relocated to the UAE earlier this year to test the market, and have built an incredible pipeline very quickly, with 90% of our 2024 revenues expected to come from the region. We’re now doubling down in the region - opening offices, relocating some of our team members, and hiring locally before the end of the year.

To mark this announcement, we’re releasing an updated website and logo. A clean, modern, enterprise-ready font and logo which represent our company better - not just as a web3 metaverse builder, but as a tech company building the foundation of the 3D Internet.

To wrap up

Despite the negative sentiment surrounding the metaverse, we remain steadfast in our mission. We know that the convergence of 3D gaming technology and the blockchain holds the key to the 3D internet: a richer and fairer internet.

Through our tech stack, products, and clear vision of a 3D internet, we’re poised to play a key role in the creation of the internet’s new dawn. 

We’re extremely excited about the road ahead of us and we hope you’ll come along for the ride. 

For now, you can register your interest in our new products by visiting app.landvault.io.

Thanks for reading
Samuel Huber, Landvault CEO