A metaverse is defined as a wholly digital environment, accessible from anywhere. So, should we expect regional variations, depending on the location of the business creating it? Perhaps it is the non-geographical features of the metaverse itself, that will finally bridge the cultural gaps in the blockchain startup space — while NFTs offer an artistic pathway to understanding web3, for new audiences.

What might a distinctly European virtual landscape look and feel like? Something steeped in traditional arts and culture from the Renaissance, or sprinkled with a little Eurovision sparkle perhaps …? It’s an interesting vision to play with.

However, Neal Stephenson’s original metaverse concept in the 1992 novel Snow Crash postulated a single global environment which transcended any concept of physical location and was equally accessible to any user in any location, and indeed what we are presently seeing in the web3 space is arguably still a series of disconnected universes, rather than a single metaverse. Each of these is being built by teams of diverse humans, with their own expectations and backgrounds and cultural legacies, wherever they are in the world, and this includes language and governance traditions, as well as creative ones.

Europe has an enviable track record of tech startups as well as artistic history, and obvious stereotypes could easily obscure an exciting wave of homegrown startups doing fascinating things in the NFT and metaverse space. Many European-based projects are leading the way, for the rest of the world to follow.

In Europe, bears are the new apes…

Take Fancy Bears Metaverse, for example, operating as a DAO out of Poland. Co-founder Jakub Chmielniak has a powerful vision for their NFT 2.0 protocol, which creates interoperability between different NFTs through metadata, and allows user-level alteration of individual traits — functionality they are also developing for other providers, to enhance the value of the entire ecosystem.

“Say you have a Fancy Bear (or eventually, even an Ape), and you attend a conference with official merchandise — so you get an NFT of the official conference merchandise hoodie. And you can put that on your Bear or your Ape, and it carries utility as well, it becomes dynamic,” he explained.

Fancy Bears’ work is extending the scope and potential of NFTs with this additional functionality, and Jakub sees the value for all kinds of commercialization: “Festivals, conferences, all sorts of brands can use it as well.”

But bringing the vision to life can be more challenging, in a business environment less steeped in digital currencies and decentralized finance, perhaps, than in some other locations.

“NFT people are different to token people,” he reflected, considering how the creative potential (even of a cartoon bear) can help bridge that gap. “Once people own and customize their Bear in a unique way and understand they truly digitally own it, they get attached to them emotionally.”

“Right now it may be considered like a funny experiment, with cool animals attached to it. But like deep below, there’s technology that is being built, people that start to understand what can be done, how we can put it into real-life use. It’s the foundation of every single thing that then will be built on top of this technology in the future.”
Jakub Chmielniak, Co-Founder of Fancy Bears

Building bridges between cultures and virtual landscapes

It’s hard for new users to relate emotionally to a block explorer, and the visual aspects of NFTs build a bridge across cultures and languages. But as Jakub pointed out, the chasm to be crossed is significant, and brings particular challenges in the European environment:

“This space needs lots of education, and in Europe it’s more difficult because you need to educate in so many different languages. Many German people understand English. But there’s just a limited number of people that are super fluent in English. And when it comes to this technical stuff, and blockchain is technical, it just feels better when someone explains it to you in your native tongue. So this is a big challenge.

“In the States, they don’t have that problem. Understanding and education, for the growth of NFT’s, is absolutely crucial. This is like one of the big obstacles we need to overcome.”

Fancy Bears has already brought more than 500 people from Poland to the point of investing in their first NFT, and this may act as their gateway to further interaction with the blockchain ecosystem, and eventual onboarding to both the web3 space and the cryptoasset economy. Not only that, but the interoperability protocols that Jakub and his team are working on have the potential to truly connect the different virtual landscapes in existence, into a single unified environment, the real goal of the metaverse vision.

Of course right now everyone, from the world’s biggest social network to a growing range of DeFi startups is vying to be the backbone, the infrastructure provider, which will become the marketplace and on-ramp of choice for virtual world access. But the crypto creators are leading the way, because, while we may have had VR functionality of varying caliber for decades, until we had a way of exchanging persistent and verified value in the virtual space, the utility was curtailed. Some of us remember the Linden Dollars our dodgy Second Life avatars exchanged in the early years of the century, but they were pretty useless and illiquid, and the brands who ventured there now see it as an evolutionary blind alley. When you bring virtual real estate together with real currency is when things finally get interesting — whatever your culture or location.

Building a future in the metaverse, for brands and events

Luca Arrigo, Founder at Metaverse Architects would concur, working in Malta, as a 3D Modeling & Game Development studio for the metaverse.

The team design and develop for Decentraland, The Sandbox and all metaverse worlds, for a range of businesses from Europe and beyond. But given the non-geographical defining features of the metaverse, he is keen to avoid cultural stereotyping which could be detrimental to growth.

“There are key differences between how people work, in Europe, compared with America, or Asia. Sometimes European businesses are more guarded or softly spoken, perhaps concerned about someone taking their ideas — though the art and culture aspect is real.”
Luca Arrigo, Founder of Metaverse Architects

He is also concerned about the impact of the regulatory environment in Europe, on all decentralized finance development — citing the recent near-miss on the banning of proof-of-work mining as a shocking example of sheer lack of technical understanding, which creates all kinds of obstacles, especially in combination with structural fiscal challenges.

“The Euro-Tether will never exist, due to European Central Bank deposit laws and negative interest rates,” he pointed out, which would make it impossible to collateralize any peg. “There’s also strong lobbying of the European Commission and parliament from established corporations and traditional financial interests.”

Luca and his team are continuing to drive creative opportunities for his clients and respond to their changing needs, as they onboard them to the metaverse and make the commercial potential explicit.

“We are seeing the intersection of NFTs and digital real estate in the metaverse, as businesses seek to generate revenue,” Luca explained.

Beyond fun avatars and a virtual land grab, the next challenge is embedding utility.

“Metaverse Architects is creating smart objects inside Decentraland, such as ATMs which have been formed for direct transactions. This is essentially a fiat to crypto on-ramp,” he explained. “The reverse of an ATM: you give it cash, and it gives you tokens.

They’re also creating in the play-to-earn space, and indeed seeing themselves increasingly as a game development agency — superseding the 3D modelling they started out offering to clients, to focus on varied use cases. “We have a roulette machine, and a racetrack coming soon, which will allow players to entertain and compete with each other.”

Essentially the commercial upside is multifaceted, and it’s an entrepreneurial mindset which is helping Luca and his peers pivot to where the potential is manifest.

“Since we have quite a large landowner network [in Decentraland] now we are launching an advertisement network, that will allow people to rent billboards on a weekly basis,” he explained.

“And we launched Metaverse Events this year, because we know we have a lot of landowners who own land but don’t know how to develop it — while at the same time we have people who want to go inside the metaverse but don’t know where to find interesting content and live things going on. So we’re bringing the two together, and becoming the place where you can go and get assistance with NFT, ticketing, venue, rental, promotion, live-streaming and this sort of thing, which of course, are skills that Metaverse architects already developed.”

His team in Malta are, of course, collaborating internationally, and working for clients worldwide. “It’s quite a mix. I think the US is definitely a larger markets. But Europe is still an interesting space. And there are also a lot of people who live in Europe, who are not necessarily European companies, right?

“Malta has been good for some regulatory aspects, but banking has been a continual struggle. And I look at the rest of the world, and I am thankful that at least 10 unicorns came out of Europe, while some areas have zero.”

Art on the blockchain: NFTs unlock new pathways to culture

A disproportionate number of those unicorns have come from another small country, at the opposite end of European latitudes from Malta: Estonia.

Estonia has always punched above its weight on the technological front, from its blockchain-like digital government structure to its revolutionary e-Residency business programme. So it’s unsurprising to find Tallinn the home of Artano, a community-curated NFT marketplace on Cardano — a project which brings together founders from a range of European origins.

COO and co-founder Marija Skijevic is from Serbia, and explained that the vision for their ecosystem was founded on another fine European tradition: democracy. Their idea of community curation was to create a fair way of surfacing quality, between the extremes of totally open marketplaces where anyone can mint anything they like, and the highly exclusive and selective groups which are emerging to counter the quality issues this raises.

“In these the curation is done by a small group of people, it’s very difficult to get in. We decided that if the artists are going to be the ones driving this economy, they should be driving the platform itself.” Marija explained.

“So we got together a group of artists and curators and collectors, to form a council, in charge of curating all applications. It’s not the developer team who decide — it’s a more of a fair process, I would say. Someone who’s knowledgeable about art and lives their art and is also a creator, or curator and has worked with artists, these people who get to go over the applications and create this community curated, NFT marketplace.”

Eventually this governance will be formalized through a native token, but so far things are very new — smart contracts weren’t even available on Cardano until earlier this year. Even so, Artano has over 300 artists on the platform, and while extensively bootstrapped, they do have the support of an angel investor who is also connected to a gallery in Paris.

“He’s been really amazing,” Marija reflected, “and part of the Paris arts scene for 10, 20 years. His advice is invaluable for anyone new to the traditional arts scene, while others need to learn about the technical side.”

They were keen to build on Cardano, in order to create an accessible platform that does not depend on high gas fees and transaction fees — which helps to put NFTs and the whole ecosystem within reach of more participants, around the world. “I am in the Balkans, and people here can’t easily afford Ethereum fees,” she explained. “There are also great VR and CGI artists in South America and Africa, and we’re keen to bring in more global artists.”

Finally, Marija pointed out, one important value difference in Europe led to the choice of blockchain — sustainability.

“There is a much bigger trend in Europe than elsewhere, for sustainable solutions. And NFTs suffer from this general misconception, that they’re burning down the planet!

“So it’s really important for people to understand there are differences between different blockchains, between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake.”

The community of artists they are bringing together are helping to spread the word, as well as uniting the traditional and NFT creator spaces, and she sees a bright future for Europe at the heart of the creative side of decentralization:

“It’s incredible the opportunities that are opening up, and the impact that NFTs have had on artists lives in the past year and a half. And in Europe, galleries are opening up to collaborations, helping to bring their artists to the blockchain, and even host crossover exhibitions.” Marija concluded.

And while adoption may be slower overall than other parts of the world, as Jakub Chmielniak pointed out, this creates opportunity in its own right. “This market is just beginning. We consider being based in Europe an advantage, because Americans are less interested in what’s going on here, and the rest of the world — like Dubai, where there are lots of crypto investors living, with less connection to the artistic world. So from here, it’s easy to connect people.”

So, the future for Europe, in the metaverse intersections of web3, NFTs, and the crypto-economy, looks positive and optimistic. The myriad range of creative entrepreneurs approaching the challenges of technology, business and culture from their varied perspectives holds great promise, and we can expect to see ever more exciting outcomes emerging, from this already decentralized and diverse continent.

about the author

Maya Middlemiss is obsessed with the future and its unevenly-distributed social impact - the future of money, work, technology, and humanity. She is passionate about inclusion and education through effective storytelling, and believes all this stuff is far too exciting to leave it to the geeks. She enjoys spinning multiple plates as a journalist, author, podcaster, and remote work advocate, and to recharge offline she loves hiking and exploring her chosen locale in Eastern Spain.

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