A Metaverse for Social Impact? My Interview with the Creators of Bit.Country
As an academic researcher on emerging technologies such as blockchain Artificial Intelligence, I was introduced to Ray Lu and Shannon Christie, two of the co-founders of Bit.Country, through Dontrail Coltage, the Chief Information Security Officer at Ternio. I name-drop as I quickly found that the Polkadot ecosystem has a very inclusive feel - one that I have yet to experience in the technology, industry, or academic spaces in which I operate. Given I wanted to perform a case study on Bit.Country due to a lack of empirical case studies within academia, I reached out to Ray to see if he would be interested.
After agreeing to set aside an hour, I reviewed the Bit.Country white paper and all of the presentations I could find on YouTube to ensure I was prepared like I was priming for a job interview. Once Ray started the Zoom recording, I outlined my thoughts based on my research. But after Ray and Shannon’s introductions, my approach went out the window as their vision is much deeper than any other metaverse, in my opinion.
When both Ray and Shannon shared their stories, it was evident that this virtual world will be built to empower, influence, and to create a sense of community and inclusion — something I am tirelessly working on in the United States. The statement that stood out the most was when Ray noted, “our metaverse is a highway for happiness and goodness.” For me, it is my understanding that the Bit.Country metaverse will instill the morals and values we all should live by in the real world.
One of the primary questions I had for Ray and Shannon was will their metaverse follow a governance structure similar to that of Polkadot? Although the governance structure of Bit.Country pays homage to the vision of Dr. Gavin Wood, they take it a step further to incentivize users for acts of social good within the metaverse and decentivizing users for negative behavior through the means of slashing.
Although there are many features within Bit.Country I can discuss, the focus of this article is to look beyond the entertainment and gaming value. With this discussion providing me with a sense of therapy on a Sunday afternoon after a grueling week, I see Bit.Country providing a similar means of therapy for users as well. As the users will be exposed to others from different backgrounds, cultures, and nationalities worldwide, my takeaway from this interview was this project was created from Ray and Shannon’s purpose for Bit.Country.
As I create programs and speak a lot about organizational citizenship and social responsibility at international conferences, Bit.Country is more than a virtual world. Bit.Country demonstrates the quadruple bottom line in a virtual world that MUST be transferrable to the real world for us to have a sustainable future. Circling back to the objective of this post, I came off of that Zoom call viewing a metaverse built on the blockchain as something that can not only positively impact the Polkadot ecosystem, but can harness the sharing economy I spoke about on the TEDx stage in 2019 and accelerate the Web3 movement. Please let me know your thoughts and stay tuned for the upcoming academic peer-reviewed journal article. This article will dig deeper into how the metaverse and Polkadot could lead to harmony, democratization, inclusivity, and opportunity in the physical world.
