Luke: [00:00:00] From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist Podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Ltz, VP of business operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting brave browser and search engine.

Luke: Now powering AI with the Brave search. API. You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Yael Yardi, who is a co-founder of Decentral Land and the executive director of the Decentral Land Foundation, leading the organization’s efforts to build the decentralized virtual world in the open.

Luke: Metaverse driven by passion for blockchain, YMO began building open source Bitcoin tools in 2014 and later co-founded Casa Voltaire. Which help incubate major projects like Decentral, land, open Zeppelin, hard hat, and moon. He’s also deeply engaged in the AI revolution in how intelligent systems capable of problem solving, learning, [00:01:00] and adapting will shape work culture, and the dynamics of virtual world.

Luke: In this episode, we discussed how they’re providing more bandwidth for human connection through socially rooted virtual worlds, unique use cases for creators and businesses to leverage online worlds balancing decentralization with the need for governance and moderation ethical concerns with AI and social virtual worlds.

Luke: And now for this week’s episode of The Brave Technologist, Yael, welcome to the Brave Technologist.

Yemel: How are you doing today? Thank you so much, Luke. I’m doing fine. Thank you for having me here.

Luke: Yeah, definitely. Decentral Land’s been around for a little while, but, but just to kind of set the table, like for the audience a bit, let us know a little bit about your journey.

Luke: Like how did you find yourself at Decentral Land and, and what got you kind of excited about working at the company?

Yemel: I. Well, I have a background in software engineering. I have been in decentral from the very early days. I’m actually one of the co-founders and writers of the white paper, but this was like 10 years ago.

Yemel: 2014, I decided to invest my career. I. In [00:02:00] the crypto space. At that time, all crypto was only Bitcoin, working in open source software, creating libraries for people to craft transactions, build applications, indexers wallets in Bitcoin. With my friends at the office, we have this recurring conversation of.

Yemel: How blockchain technology can be applied in other aspects of life. For example, recording ownership of digital assets or assets in real life. We discuss about land ownership, and then we came into the idea of building a decentralized virtual world that use a blockchain as the ground truth for ownership.

Yemel: We believe it was a, an amazing idea and also an interesting sad box to, test all these technologies before. To real life. I believe that decentral was one of the early projects that kind of implemented the NFT standard. Actually, if you go to the definition of what an NF Tran is, one of the examples.

Yemel: So very early on I [00:03:00] helped. Throughout, like the initial phase to 2017 and then rejoined the organization two years ago as executive director of foundation. So leading innovation now at the foundation.

Luke: No, it was such a like exciting time too. in 2017 you had all these people thinking about, okay, what are ways we can, you know, tokenize use cases and things like that, that it kind of scaled up.

Luke: You mentioned it was kind of an experiment when you started. At what point did you start to see this kind of go from, okay, there’s more to this than just the experiment and we really want to turn this into something special here? Like beyond the experiment. Like what, were there certain things that kind of.

Luke: Happened that were signaling events to that, or, or how did that kind of evolve?

Yemel: Well, I think the tipping point was finding a big amount of people who believe this project was amazing and they wanted to collaborate like the, we build the first prototype of Theran that was a web base to the grid of the [00:04:00] map you mine plus of land on the web browser.

Yemel: And you can just assign a color to the. To the parcel. It was an experiment. It got some attention. Second prototype, we fork the Bitcoin network, like the node, build our own blockchain and also build like a 3D Explorer unity, like a very basic definition of an aesthetic scene. So you can create like 3D models and place them.

Yemel: But now actually running code in this second prototype, we got a tour from. London and he explained the project way better than we could at the time, and like in a day we. Hundreds and hundreds of people who join our slack looking for ways to collaborate. And I think that was a tipping point on like, okay, let’s scale this from a hackathon project into something real.

Yemel: That’s where we got the motivation because of the excitement of the public.

Luke: Awesome. There was like a, a bit of a, like a metaverse kind of moment for a while [00:05:00] there, but really like metaverse is so much more than kind of a meme, right? I know we’ve been, we’ve been working together on a few things with you guys, like, and it seems like, you know, you could do everything there from meeting with communities to events and all sorts of other things.

Luke: Like is it hard when you, you kind of have the metaverse people have a different mindset of what that is what it actually could be? Or, or how much are you guys adapting, I guess, to the bigger trends that are happening and what is kind of the value? Prospect for users or, or what are you guys to kind of grow the base a bit more?

Luke: I think, you know, in the months ahead. Hmm.

Yemel: Well, I think many questions there. Sorry. Regarding the metaverse, we have been starting the discussion about the after reading, no. Snow Crash Ready Player one. And also at that time, Facebook bought Oculus. Mm-hmm. Which was like the, I think, number one company building VR headsets for us.

Yemel: That that was kind of a kickstart as well. Like, okay, this is. The cell phone is not the ultimate computing platform. There is [00:06:00] a trend of like the integration between human and computers. We will eventually be plugging into a computer and being experienced a more immersive internet. Those nos already talk about metaverse, so I think like we, we jump into the idea with a strong belief that open source is what made.

Yemel: Internet great and amazing. We have been seeing in the past decade a shift towards centralization, like if there is a new way of computing platform and a new way of experiencing internet. That world needs to be building on open standards and that’s our taking in the metaverse. Even though we, we don’t say that we are a metaverse, like metaverse, I like to say like the internet, the metaverse.

Luke: Right, right.

Yemel: Okay. Compilation of so many experiences that you can have. We are just one piece in like this ecosystem, building it on open standards actually get the network effect of, of the [00:07:00] internet. So then we have like this hype cycle of the metaverse as a word that gets into the mainstream parlance after Facebook changed their name to meta after Covid.

Yemel: I, I think like most population hold one main topic to be discussing at the same time. I think that was an effect of the pandemic, like everyone is talking about the same time, the, the same thing if it’s like the pandemic itself or like, bull market or like ai. So I think like we got a lot of attention, eh?

Yemel: Mm-hmm. During pandemics and after that. And then the market meets, like the expectations of the mar market meet the reality. Like they, they were hoping for something similar to what you see in Ready Player one movie. I believe that hardware is not there for like offering that kind of experience, even though like socializing online is something that I have been.

Yemel: For ages, like from ERC chats to right. Like so many [00:08:00] ways, like discord nowadays, decentral provides something different, like a spatial way to connect with others. And I think the value proposition is to actually have a truly human connection through a computer and like, can we provide more bandwidth for human connection?

Yemel: I have the point, the hypothesis that that is becoming more. More of a needle in these days. Mm-hmm. While AI is growing and all the content now is like easily generated, all the conversations that you have online are as synchron. Yeah. Like you are interacting with content that was produced sometime ago and maybe by machine.

Yemel: There is a deep needle of human connection and knowing that you are talking with a real person on the other side. So we are like, in order to bring new people. I think that was part of the question as well. We’re oiling down on that basic human need of connecting with others like this. The social aspect of what.

Yemel: Keeps the community [00:09:00] moving. And I believe that’s our biggest moat. Like what’s the difference between different decent and other platforms. We can talk about the ideology with the open source and many other stuff, but I think the community we have gathered along the years and they are here because of the values, the technology, and the other people as well.

Luke: Yeah. No, it seems like too, I mean, I’ve been playing around, I, because it was one of those things where when there was a web-based experience, I was like really into it back in the day too. And then I’ve, I’ve been able to kind of spend some time in too, as we’ve all been working together a little more recently, and there’s something to it where communication, especially like virtual communication between people has become very flat.

Luke: Like 2D you know, it’s like in this podcast, right? Like you’ve got one, one view of you, like, you know, and one view of me we’re talking to each other, but. There’s something to that element of being in decentral land and being able to like track the movement of a person and you can kind of gesture in different ways and stuff that it, it’s feels more like a real, like, you know, it’s a, virtual experience, but there’s just gestures in certain elements of it that [00:10:00] are, are there, that aren’t there in typical virtual communication.

Luke: Right. And I think it’s gotta be challenging. How do you kind of communicate that? Let’s unpack like decentral end a little bit, just as folks might not be familiar with it. So is it basically kind of this space where you can have different projects come in and set up different areas to meet or, or things like that?

Luke: Let, let’s walk it through. For someone who maybe never even heard, had heard about Decentral End before.

Yemel: Yeah, totally. So decent. Super short is a virtual social world. It’s mostly community driven, so everything that you can see and experience has been built by our community. That goes by like the virtual space, but also the different digital items that you can use in your avatar.

Yemel: So you create your avatar, pick a name, customize how it looks. You can also purchase more closes and just. Start roaming around. And what will happen eventually is that you connect with someone else. Maybe they’re doing an event, maybe they’re projecting a film and they’re doing like a watch [00:11:00] party.

Yemel: And then you start engaging with a community. We have many communities inside the Centron, and each of them, they have their interest. Main interest maybe is around music or art. So I think you, you find your way in the community and eventually be part of something bigger.

Luke: That’s awesome. And, and how is it attracting builders to the space?

Luke: Is it part of it kind of growing different spaces within decentral end? Like, and how are you do that? Like are there like developers, toolkits? Are there special breed of developers? I’m just kind of trying to give a a thousand foot view for folks who might not be familiar with this.

Yemel: Yeah, totally. So we have a Genesis city, which is like the, the main city, the metropolis of the central is created by 90,000 parcels of land.

Yemel: Each of them has an owner. You can purchase land or you can rent land, or like if. You get involved in the community, you may get like a free lease as well. Maybe a landowner is looking for a creator to host [00:12:00] an activity or an art piece aligned with a topic. Also, we have an integration with ENS, so if you have an ENS name, you also have access to like your.

Yemel: Private world, kind of an isolated island in which you can build and test your ideas and people can teleport to that island, but it’s not connected to the metropolis. Like if you want to get the, all the benefits of the adjust sea to. Another parcels and all the food traffic you may get getting land access to a land that would be ideal.

Yemel: We implemented these isolated versions of worlds to lower the entry barrier for any creator. Like if you have an ENS name, which is. Super common nowadays. Mm-hmm. You can already start building regarding the tools to build. We have a a no no code approach and you have to download the creator hub. You can create a scene and start drag and drop in some assets there, and you can publish into your.

Yemel: Your [00:13:00] world on land, but also integrates with like actually coding so you, you can open Visual Studio Code or co or if you are now in the web coding trend. Since the is open source, there are so many examples out there of how to build content. AI is catching up very fast. If you want to create, you need maybe some skills on like 3D modeling what least, like being able to download assets online.

Yemel: Maybe you want to code in JavaScript or type script for the logic of the particular scene. Yeah. And then I think it’s up to the creativity is the limit.

Luke: That’s awesome. Yeah. So like a whole new canvas kind of thing for for people to build spaces. What are some of the most compelling use cases that you’ve seen beyond just basic social interaction?

Yemel: Well, hey, I mean, social interaction is quite broad, so maybe like making new friends and roaming around or building your own community. We can say that social interaction. Other approach to [00:14:00] that is like team building, like if you already have a community that they, they know each other. There are so many companies that are remote, maybe they struggle to find an activity they can do with like 20, 30 people online.

Yemel: So team building is another use case. Then for the, the creators, I think like it’s an ex, as you said, open canvas for build new experiences. If you also, you can create like digital assets and sell it on the marketplace. So for many. Creators, it’s also like a revenue stream. They take part of their time in building new collections and sell it into the central marketplace.

Yemel: And they not only get the fees from like the primary sales, but we also give the creators a part of the fee of any secondary sale that is processing our marketplace that that’s actually interesting to continue. Revenue line of a collection, you already mail. And I think like for companies or [00:15:00] grants in general, they are doing activations in decentral, looking for like maximizing the time spent via a user.

Yemel: Like mm-hmm. If you want to get to the big numbers of views, probably you should go with like Instagram or like a social media platform. But if you want to get like 30, 40 minutes of interaction, like real engagement of a user, I think decent or this. Immersive experience will, will make it. We see many brands looking for like how we can build something that is memorable how, how we can launch or.

Yemel: Include something in our launch party doing an experience in Centra, and it’s quite different way to set, aside from, from the company mostly is if the product we are doing is community based or has a strong focus in in in your users. I think those are are compelling use cases other than just socializing and making friends.

Yemel: And then I think like if [00:16:00] you are a techie person, like and you like to Tiner Central, and since it’s a O open source project and all the stack is very well described, we have seen many people who just jump because they find this is a place in which they have a say they, they come prototype a project, then actually submit it to a governance platform, maybe.

Yemel: Yeah. Make a change in the product. So. The, the very small 3% of the population that has the, push for making a change in this world, they, they can find a, a home in the central. And this is a place that we welcome everyone who wants to have a say and actually get their hands dirty. They may get a grant to build their prototype.

Yemel: So I think that’s like a, a place for innovation. It’s, that’s the other one.

Luke: Yeah, it seems like, even was it last week or the week before you guys were doing like a fashion week or like events or things like that too? Right. That seems really interesting.

Yemel: Yeah, we just wrap up the fashion [00:17:00] week, which was a, a big event that we host a few of them through the year.

Yemel: We have like music festival in last November fashion week now we will have a land party that is towards gaming and multiplayer interactions on, in Theran. We have smaller ones like, prompt the career fair. And for us it’s a, a way to bring together like a lot of creators for a particular theme.

Yemel: Like for Fashion Week, we, we collaborated with many art designers and communities online who were investing in digital art. Uh, Some universities as well. We make an open call, curate all the participants and organize many. Panels and talks. Yeah, build a, like a four day event around all this content.

Yemel: And also a really nice place, like a meeting point for all the community to gather and [00:18:00] see what’s new. For the centralization is also like a, a moment to showcase what’s new in the, the project, like the new features are there, how, and always raising the bar on what can be built in this.

Luke: That’s awesome.

Luke: Yeah, I mean, it’s one of those things where like decentral ends a rare breed of a project that’s been in this space for long enough to have like gone through some pretty, you know, severe events that have happened and still building despite that, like there’s not a lot of, projects that have been able to kind of.

Luke: Evolve and find fit and, and continue to iterate and, and build and, and re-release and, and, and all of that. Like what have some of the challenges been that, that you all have seen as, as one of those few teams that can say, Hey, we’ve been around since, you know, 2017 pre and are still building and releasing new things now.

Luke: Like what have been some of those challenges that you’ve, you’ve, you had to kind of iterate and learn through?

Yemel: Wow, so many. I think like the first big challenge was the [00:19:00] scalability of Ethereal network.

Luke: Mm-hmm. I

Yemel: think that that was the first one, and we moved to Polygon Network as a solution, like the main smart contracts.

Yemel: In decent and are hosting Ethereum like the Land Smart Contract, mana, the marketplace, the names, but for example, for the user generated content, like all these digital assets a creator can create and sell like animation for your avatar, like a T-shirts, those kind of stuff. We all, we meet in Polygon and sell it there and it has been working well since then.

Yemel: Understanding the right timing for the innovation when the pain is real. Understanding when you need to move. Because for example, now we have so many change out there, like use mm-hmm. Rollups and uh, new uh, layer ones, some technologies called layer zero. And I don’t believe they are solving a problem for us right now.

Yemel: Like there [00:20:00] is no pressure as hard as we had before, like. Okay. Fees in Ethereum are crazy. We cannot like sell t-shirts with these fees. Right? Right. So, understanding when is, when the problem is real and your problem, and then jumping into that of innovation. I think that’s the first challenge.

Yemel: Otherwise, you, you will get pitched to move your technology to another chain or implement this technology or another. And maybe that’s not moving the needle. Another challenge is like moving away of Web3 as like the main user. Web3 is like the core techno, the core of our technology for a asset ownership.

Yemel: However, for example, asking every user to have a, a wallet in order to experience centra for the first time, that was a rumor. Like, we were missing a big part of the market there, so, yeah. Since a year ago, we, we slowly introduced social login that has a, [00:21:00] a non-custodial wallet behind the scenes that makes you a first class citizen.

Yemel: You can hold any NFTs and transact online sign messages, but for that user, most of it is kind of transparent. I think that was also a big win. The removing part of the cryptos land to be more appealing for a mainstream audience. I think we have the, the blessing if we compare Thera with other crypto project that our use cases.

Yemel: Pretty wide is mainstream. Like it really applies to so many people compared with, I don’t know, a defi project. Like if you are building a central X exchange, okay, you know your audience. But for us, like it’s like a DJ wanna be who like. Once a DJ at parties at home while their kids are sleeping right, or they say creator in the middle of the w that it’s pretty far from society, but they, they want to like [00:22:00] find like-minded people.

Yemel: So I think like understanding the audience and lowering the entry barriers, removing the crypto sl of course is part of the. The end game, you know, like you, you will get into the, the ideology and the tools and why this is different, but no need to make it on like the first screen. So that, that was a challenge.

Yemel: Then the centralization, eh, has been another important topic, like from the getting the right balance between ideology and pragmatism.

Luke: Mm. Yeah,

Yemel: because like for us it’s like super important. It’s in the name, you know, the fair enough, fair enough. Yeah. But it came with, with its own cost. It’s not free.

Yemel: Like Yeah. A centralized version is of course, like probably faster. Like it lets you iterate easier, like it may scale better. Going with [00:23:00] a fully decentralized approach leads to, I don’t know, some inefficiencies. So understanding where is the line in which things we it. This is completely decentralized and for us it’s like.

Yemel: The identity layer. Okay. That’s decentralized. Like anyone with a private key can create their identity and own stuff. Here. We, you don’t need our permission to access decent, so that’s number one. Then asset ownership store in the blockchain. That’s great. Then we have a decentralized network that stores the content of the world and, and it’s replicated, you are sure that if you deploy something, something to Thera will be there permanently, forever, or at least while the network is running. But we cannot, like, take it down or, like censor part of the content. So that’s great. But then for example, for the communication layer, we started with a peer to peer protocol for like broadcasting the messages between the peers and that that didn’t really escape.

Yemel: We end [00:24:00] up with like using open source technologies and we have one cloud service that is using live kit technology. Yeah, basically there is one central server in which you connect and you can see other people online and rely the messages more efficiently. So that for us. Centralizing in one main, main solution for networking.

Yemel: Makes sense. But the we’re mitigating the risk by holding up open standards and open source code. Nice. I think that that was also another challenge internally in the company. You know, the culture, like they always take the hardest. Solution for everything. It’s like, damman, this is not necessary.

Luke: I know how that, how that goes, you know.

Luke: Well, it is one of the pros of working with like principal people too, like on this front, and especially building too is, is where like, you know, I kind of like that. And even though it could be a little more challenging sometimes than, and it seems like, it’s really fascinating to hear this.

Luke: Too, because there’s a lot of what we deal with at BRAVE too, that that’s similar in a lot of ways to, whether it’s like [00:25:00] around privacy or, to what you’re dealing with, with decentralization and like, so finding solutions that fit and, what are the key parts of this to be the purest on, you know, and then, how can we scale it by using other services that maybe are less?

Luke: Critical to the overall experience, but are important enough to have, you know, a centralized service behind. And then if you’re gonna do that, do it in an open source. It’s a lot of thing, the trade-offs. Right. And like, and, and then a lot of considerations. And just to kind of another part of the decentralized discussion, which I think, you know, might be worth getting to a little bit on, on the governance side, right?

Luke: Like with the organizations too, that’s another part of that, right? Like maybe we can Yes. Break down. How does that work with decentral land? Decentral

Yemel: has two main entities. The central foundation, that’s a, like, the company I run whereas 70 people, most of them are engineers. We’re basically the protectors of the brand.

Yemel: We hold the brand rights on this. Physical world. We do marketing all the, the assets like the Twitter account, the website. We also are in [00:26:00] entrusted of the security of the platform since we have the, main assets and we do software development and innovation. Then we have the other entity that is the decentralized autonomous organization that both companies were like kickoff in 2020.

Yemel: both receive. The same amount of funding, like a 10 year vesting contract each. We are independent in funding, but the DAO is the one who owns the critical smart contracts in the blockchain. So any change to the land registry changes to the marketplace. Changes to the names and many other critical things are managed by the data and any changes there need to be approved through a governance process.

Yemel: And we also have like draw the lining, which like, okay, this is part of the protocol, so any change of the in this part needs to be, needs to go through a governance process. And the responsibilities [00:27:00] are mostly like. Protect the smart contracts and like long changes in the cent if you want to issue more land or if you want, we’re having, having this conversation of like, I lost my private keys.

Yemel: How can recover my land? Should we modify this land Smart contract to allow someone to like get their land back and, okay. Should we have like a committee that can recover land? Recover is a nice name to Expropriate land as well,

Luke: right? Right. Like a community

Yemel: voted no there, like, okay, this may start as a well intended idea, but in long term this can degenerate so many bad things.

Yemel: So I think the, DAO is a place that all the, the different weaknesses of the along the years come to there and have a voice and discuss about the, the long term. The Dao also is the one who, eh, collects all the fees from the platform, like all the market fees. [00:28:00] So they, they get this revenue stream and.

Yemel: With the best in con, the treasury, they already have, because of the vesting contract and all the revenue that gets from the user economy, they invests in strategic projects and building content inside the platform. So the value that leveraged our community to building more content inside the Tran, I think we, we have a nice split of responsibilities.

Yemel: We, we work together, definitely, maybe. We build a new kind of experience and then allow scales that into like actually having communities using it more and more.

Luke: That’s awesome. As somebody that’s been in the space and for, you know, back in those 2017 days, I think you all are a real standout in the fact that, you know, you’re still building your, you’re finding market fit.

Luke: And I think it’s really timely too, where we’ve got times now where the event circuit for real life events is. Become so commercialized and so expensive and like people just want to get together in, in different [00:29:00] ways. And a lot of the approaches that you’ve outlined here have been great. Like you can figure out a no-code way to kind of build a space and get people to go meet there and, and kind of bring the essence of what.

Luke: You know, bringing people together is kind of all about without them having to like, worry about it, killing their budget. You know, like it’s just a, not a lot of outlets for that, that are really immersive and fun, you know, these days. And, I really love that you guys have like, stuck to your guns and like, you know, really care focused on the things that are super important and while really trying to keep a laser focus on that market.

Luke: Fit piece and, finding that. And yeah, I, I hope stoked that we’re all working together too. If people want to, you know, get involved with Decentral and try it out, how can they do that?

Yemel: Yeah, well just go to decent.org. You will find like a big button to unload the Decent and Explorer, our latest version of decent desktop base.

Yemel: So you can run it on Windows or Mac and basically log in, create your avatar, and jump in and try to find a party out there.

Luke: Awesome. Awesome. And if people [00:30:00] wanna follow any of your work or anything you’re putting out there where would you recommend they, they check you out online?

Yemel: They can follow me on Twitter or X.

Yemel: My handle is YML Jardi, like my name and last name altogether. And also they, they can follow the central also on socials.

Luke: Awesome. Awesome. Well, Yael, I I really appreciate you being grateful with your time and coming and sharing with us today. Love to have you guys back to like, as you bring new things to the metaverse and, and get more things out there for people to check out and to check in on things.

Luke: But yeah. Thanks so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

Yemel: Thank you so much. Look, have been a pleasure.

Luke: Alright, we’ll talk soon. Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist Podcast. To never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the Brave Browser, you can download it for free today@brave.com and start using Brave Search, which enables you to search the web privately.

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