Zima Red ep 102: Noah & Ian - Parcel: Building The Platform For Experiences In The Metaverse

Primer: Join Noah and Ian as they share about Parcel — the first marketplace and platform built for virtual real estate users. Get the inside scoop on why they only focus on virtual real estate here.

Background

Noah

• Background in traditional finance as a proprietary trader

• Went on to become an internal consultant in the brokerage industry

• Came across Bitcoin in 2013

• Fell into the crypto rabbit hole in 2017

Ian

• Started crypto in 2017

• Graduated from college and just started out as a frontend engineer

• Put money into crypto and left it there

• Met Noah this year and learned that there was an NFT boom

• Created 15 art pieces and sold some of them

How Did Noah Get Started With Trading?

• During college, he started exploring and trading the financial markets

• A proprietary trader is different from being a trader at a bank/financial institution

“It's a very different role from trading at a bank or large financial institution. It's very much a meritocracy, like pure meritocracy, you eat what you kill.”

- Noah Gaynor

• The discretionary trading he was doing was starting to get out-muscled by algorithms in 2011

• Was in that role for a year before he had to find a more stable position

How Did Noah Learn About Bitcoin?

• Read about Bitcoin on TechCrunch

• Did not understand it

What Attracted Ian To Cryptocurrencies?

• Was attracted by the community of people pushing the ideology forward

• Have grown up through the 2008 financial crisis. Saw the wealth gap caused by it

• Was a frontend engineer and wanted to go deep into the tech

• Was working at a fashion tech startup and they had international payment problems. Saw Ethereum as a solution

“I told my parents about it. I told my family about it, everyone, and we all went in together. My mom actually made a Coinbase account before me in 2017 and started buying Ethereum with me.”

- Ian

How Did They Meet Each Other?

• Both of them did an accelerated 12-month MBA at Cornell Tech

• They bonded over VC investments

• Cornell Tech had a startup studio program. Each created their own startup but they kept in contact with one another

• The NFT boom happened and Ian observed this emergent virtual earning layer and brought it to Noah’s attention

Parcel

• The first marketplace and platform built for virtual real estate users

• Before Parcel, other existing NFT marketplaces were just generalist platforms

• Virtual real estate users start from buyers and sellers to property managers, architects, agents, and brokers

• Valuations for virtual real estate are fragmented across different platforms

• Generalist marketplaces don’t have maps to see where a virtual real estate parcel is located

Why Did They Choose To Focus On Virtual Real Estate?

• Saw the emergent digital life

• Virtual real estate is the basis for the experiences that they will partake in

How Do They Explain To People What They Are Building

• Uses a gaming analogy to help people understand

• Making it more relatable helps people to understand it (e.g. attending music festivals, hanging out with friends, going to an art gallery)

Why Is Parcel Better?

• Provides better contextualization for virtual real estate

• Provides better browsing and purchasing

• They have real-time price estimates

• New features will include information/education:

  • Info about neighbourhood

  • What significant landmarks are around it

  • What events are going on around it

  • Is there a community or culture in that specific district

• Will be offering financial services

• Will help service providers and participants in the Metaverse to make the most out of the Metaverse

How Does Their Appraisal System Work?

• Partnered with NFTBank for providing appraisals for the top 4 Metaverses

• Internally, they don’t foresee creating their own appraisal algorithm because of the shallow price history

• Will be paying attention to the community for feature sets in virtual real estate they look out for

• Could also come from sentiment analysis on Twitter

• Could also use a discounted cash flow model

How Could People Monetize Their Virtual Land?

• Billboards and ad space

• Renting/leasing it out

• Thinks that it will develop like physical real estate over time

• The biggest contributors to value in virtual worlds are probably things that we haven't thought of yet

• Spoke to an architect who moved from the physical world to the Metaverse. Laws of physics don’t apply in the Metaverse and he could come up with entirely new models/structures

Teleporting In The Metaverse And How It Affects Property Prices

• Kyle Samani from Multicoin Capital tweeted about how virtual real estate is going to be worth more than Times Square

• As there’s no physical limitations, you need to become the place where people want to go

• This is how value is brought to virtual real estate

How Do They Integrate A New Virtual World Into Parcel?

• Started off with Decentraland, Sandbox, Cryptovoxels, and Somnium Space because they had the most data

• Looking into Treeverse and Star Atlas

• Creating the custom map experience is difficult:

  • Each world has its own way they map out their land

  • Some worlds are 3D and have XYZ coordinates

• Communicated with the different platforms to try and understand how they structure their data

• In the near future, they will create custom forms for people to upload the information or provide a link to their smart contracts

What Is The Purpose Of Virtual Worlds?

• The Metaverse is just the evolution of the internet

• We already live in a digitally native world

“So I actually don't see it [Metaverse] as this revolutionary new thing. It's just an extension of, an iteration of what we are already doing in just a more immersive application.”

- Noah Gaynor

Is Today’s Metaverse A Necessary Step To Get Us To The Next Level Of The Metaverse?

• Blockchains creates incentives for people to develop these worlds

What Is Parcel’s Moat?

• Have first mover advantage

• Have great UX and design

• Have an engaged community

What Are Some Ways To Build A Thriving Community?

• Engaging with them individually and helping them to understand their product

• Get people curious about your product

• Giveaways are important to some extent

What Are The Most Difficult Things About Building In Web3?

Ian

• From a technical perspective, we are constantly learning

• Have to make some solutions manually because there’s no tooling for it

• Information overload from sifting through everything on Twitter

Noah

• Difficulty in scaling a team

Grand 5-10 Year Vision

• Going to do a lot of education, information, and onboarding

• Parcel having a huge presence within the virtual worlds

Single Favourite NFT

Noah

• An NFT named Harvey

• Ian created it and gifted it to him

Ian

• His Decentraland plot

• Previous owner was the Tara Digital Collective

• They were an early Metaverse NFT art collective

Most Controversial Thought On NFTs

Ian

• Don’t think that CryptoPunks and Bored Apes are that great

Noah

• NFTs will become the most valuable asset class in the world

• Traditional assets will become encapsulated within NFTs

• There will be a premium on culturally relevant NFTs

If You Could Improve Something In The Space

Noah

• Doing away with seed phrases

Ian

• Want people to be able to go on their phones, open an app, and play-to-earn on their way to work

NFT Ecosystem In 3 Years

Ian

• Exiting the era of non-utility NFTs

• Emergence of music NFTs

• Chainlink bridging off-chain data to on-chain

Noah

• People realizing that NFTs can be used to generate income streams

• Keen to see how NFTs interact with each other

All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. Summaries are prepared by The Reading Ape. While reasonable efforts are made to provide accurate content, any errors in interpreting and summarizing the source material are ours alone. We disclaim any liability associated with the use of our content.