The MetaGravity Investment Thesis
May 12th, 2022
1 Quintillion DNOs (Dynamic Networked Objects) consisting of billions of humans, trillions of AI beings, and quadrillions of digital assets. That’s the Metaverse.
The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.
The Metaverse is best understood as ‘a quasi-successor state to the mobile internet’. This is because the Metaverse will not fundamentally replace the internet, but instead build upon and iteratively transform it. The best analogy here is the mobile internet, a ‘quasi-successor state’ to the internet established from the 1980s through the early 2000s. Even though the mobile internet did not change the underlying architecture of the internet – and in fact, the vast majority of internet traffic today, including data sent to mobile devices, is still transmitted through and managed by fixed infrastructure – we still recognize it as iteratively different. This is because the mobile internet has led to changes in how we access the internet, where, when and why, as well as the devices we use, the companies we patron, the products and services we buy, the technologies we use, our culture, our business models, and our politics. The Metaverse will be similarly transformative as it too advances and alters the role of computers and the internet in our lives.
Based on precedent set in Web1 and the mobile web (Web2), we know that an infrastructure build-out needs to occur prior to the emergence of hyperscale applications. Web1 needed TCP/IP, HTTP, and the web browser. Web2 needed cloud compute, cloud storage, mobile hardware and mobile application marketplaces. We find ourselves in a similar stage relative to the Metaverse today. It is early and the investment opportunities lie in infrastructure.
The primary infrastructure challenge of the Metaverse is a networking problem. In the broadest sense, “Networking” is typically defined as “the provisioning of persistent, real-time connections, high bandwidth, and decentralized data transmission by backbone providers, the networks, exchange centers, and services that route amongst them, as well as those managing ‘last mile’ data to consumers.” While we will ultimately need to see improvements in all aspects of this definition of networking for a functional Metaverse, MetaGravity is focused on the network routing of in-game information to and from external servers, which syncs player interactions and allows for world state persistence.
Normally, the way developers go about distributing a hugely parallel virtual world, and routing information therein, is by dividing the world into a grid. At any given time, players inhabit little sections of that grid and move from section to section. Each grid section corresponds to a dedicated server. Communications between players’ computers and the grid servers provide responsive networking for actions that take place between players in a particular grid section, but not between separate grid sections (separate servers). If there’s only one person in a grid, and they clap, servers only need to send a network message back out to one person. If there are two people, one clap generates two clap messages. If there are four people, one clap generates four clap messages. If there are four people, and two high-five, that requires different messages to each player. Third parties that saw player-A clap player-B’s hand need a different network message than player-A and player-B. The network message growth becomes exponential based upon the number of players and the complexity of their actions. So, by the time you get to 100 players, there can easily be well over 1,000 different messages going out due to a single action. This exponential increase in network messaging runs up against bandwidth constraints and makes concurrency with a large number of players in a complex environment incredibly difficult.
The problem gets even thornier when players can interact with players in another grid section (on another server). In a racing game, this kind of rendering works pretty well and isn’t as difficult to do. The car driver will be in one grid section and may be moving on to the adjacent section, but in a predictable manner. This kind of movement is something that a player’s computer can keep up with, and AI can help smooth the grid transition. But, as an example, a sniper in a combat game is harder. If a player is on the top of a mountain with a high-powered sniper rifle, and they look through it, they can see somebody that is miles and miles away in a completely different, non-adjacent grid section. Now you’re not only having to communicate simple network traffic between these grid locations, but you also must deal with the rendering coming from a completely different machine.
This is why only 100 users are allowed in a Fortnite battle royale game. So much data must be collected on each player’s relative location and movement, and then it is passed to the server and synchronized with all the other users in the same grid. Now if you try to do this with 1,000 users or 100,000 users in the same grid, the networking bandwidth requirements become too much for the Fortnite infrastructure.
If you take away a lot of the computing power and beef up the 3D graphics requirements with a virtual reality environment, then pack the electronics into a wireless, portable and compact device like the Meta Quest 2, you could fit only 16 users in a grid. The difficulty of inter-grid networking scales accordingly as well. That’s not much of a metaverse.
The good news is that broadband penetration and bandwidth is consistently improving worldwide. Compute is also improving and can help substitute for constrained data transmission by predicting what should occur until the point in which the ‘real’ data can be substituted in. Both advancements will help developers increase the number of users that can inhabit a grid and improve inter-grid networking, but these gains will be incremental. A clean re-think of network routing of information is required to achieve a world-scale Metaverse environment with millions of concurrent users.
Yet, we find ourselves amidst a shift to the Metaverse, set to produce trillions in value and host billions of users/players within digital realms deeper, more engaging, and bigger than the largest games or social networks of today. Current attempts to build Metaverse experiences rely on two key technologies:
Web 3.0/Blockchain: Slow but secure and decentralized
Game Engines (Unreal, Unity): In-elastic, non-scalable 3D engines
Game Engines (Unreal, Unity, CryEngine) offer complex graphics rendering but use a single CPU core game/simulation and offer modest parallelism. The impact is poor scaling virtual world simulations.
Spatial Partitioning Engines (Hadean, Improbable) recursively subdivide virtual worlds, distributing compute based upon users’ spatial proximity. This is a partial solution. The impact is severe synchronization overhead limits, which impede world-size and world complexity. This technology can be used to hold a virtual concert with thousands of users, but is limited in its ability to scale more complex virtual world applications such as Fortnite. Hard physics edge cases cannot be overcome using spatial partitioning. Improbable has raised nearly $1B since launching in 2012 and has only been able to achieve 10,000 concurrent users in a single, very simple, virtual world instance
MetaGravity’s vision is to connect a network of parallel digital universes at data center-scale, each underpinned by MetaGravity Engine - a world-first massively parallel, scalable 3D engine that runs on distributed infrastructure at data center scale. Instead of utilizing the traditional grid approach, the MetaGravity Engine parallelizes virtual worlds in a proprietary way, thereby minimizing overhead and delivering >1000x world size and complexity.
By building on the team’s past learnings using a non-spatial way to think about partitioning virtual worlds, MetaGravity introduces a metric that is sensitive to frequency of, or likelihood of, interaction rather than (as is the case with spatial partitioning) absolute Euclidean coordinates (x, y, z).
The MetaGravity Engine integrates readily into existing “creation” engine tooling (Unreal, Unity) to leverage existing virtual world developer communities. Access to the MetaGravity Engine is offered via a decentralized L1 (Layer-1) blockchain called Graviton ($GRAV). Users build and deploy virtual worlds which run transparently on data-center grade infrastructure paid for by consuming $GRAV coins (gas).
MetaGravity also has an in-house game development studio (MetaGravity Studio). There are four primary benefits of this strategy:
MetaGravity Studio serves as a tech demonstration showcase. It’s first title will be ‘Edge of Chaos’, a play-2-earn persistent MMO.
A successful title drives early velocity for the $GRAV token and network utilization.
Having the first game deployed on the network be an in-house title mitigates early tech risk and allows the team to iron out bugs before onboarding third-party developers/studios.
A successful play-2-earn title represents a potential multi-billion dollar exit path in and of itself.
Edge of Chaos is designed to support millions of players and AI characters. The world is nonlinearly behaved, giving rise to emergent effects and events. No two realms (shards) will ever be alike. A blockchain economy drives the game. There is an in-game currency ($DUCAT) used to acquire primary resources that can be turned into valuable in-game NFTs. We believe Edge of Chaos will be an important first step in showcasing the value of the underlying MetaGravity technology.
Anyone who knows Gravity Fund well is probably sick of hearing this, but we are thesis driven (in this case Metaverse infrastructure), and we seek to identify tier-one teams building tier-one technology under our theses.
Solving this exact Metaverse networking problem was a major thesis focus for Gravity. I have been looking for a solution to this problem for no less than eight years.
MetaGravity’s team consists of deep-tech serial entrepreneurs and innovators who have consistently broken world records for the biggest multiplayer worlds and fastest real-time compute technology.
MetaGravity’s tech is a clean re-think of the networking problem that doesn’t retread the pitfalls others have faced, and there is exactly one team in the world capable of building it.
We believe MetaGravity has the potential to become a crucial component of the Metaverse infrastructure stack, and we couldn’t be more excited to support the MetaGravity team in making this vision a reality.
