CoinQuora Interviews Liam Bussell of SolChicks

In an exclusive interview conducted at the Superverse 2022 conference, CoinQuora talked with Liam Bussell, Global Head of Content and Communications at SolChicks. He answered some critical questions about the metaverse and the crypto space in general.  Without further ado, please read the piece below:

Q: Do you believe that the Metaverse would be available for every single person on earth in a couple of years?

I think there are two things when you talk about the metaverse. First, there’s the marketing piece that a lot of people are now hyping. Facebook has changed its name to Meta because they want to be a Metaverse — this is sort of a marketing term. But if we are talking about the technology piece, what we’re talking about now is that we have the opportunity for the technology to actually bring people together.

You can have your neighborhood group on Facebook, you can have a blog, or whatever. There are no payments involved, there’s no interaction, there’s no way to transfer value. So,  blockchain being able to issue tokens allows the value transfer to take place.

So that’s the beginning of a Metaverse. For example, your local community network could have some augmented reality that shows you cool places around your suburb which you can look at on Google Maps. You can see some icons, which restaurants will take local currency, the local cryptocurrency, etc. So, I think it will grow and what I hope is that it doesn’t end up like social media, owned by three companies – it will be much more distributed. But, I think the technology exists already; now we just have to actually get it to work.

Q: If we’re saying that Metaverse is gonna grow, how do we ensure its purpose can be maintained without deviating?

I just did a presentation here and one of the things I covered was around Web3. In Web 2, which is dominated by Facebook, Google, and Apple, companies want to own the whole vertical integration. For instance, Google has Google search. They would then use Google search to show you ads. Then they have Google Maps which know where you’re going, so they can serve you ads. So, it all got corrupted by the revenue.

Once you are talking about metaverses, and they’re relatively easy to build, right? To spin up an Ethereum smart contract, you don’t need a lot of code or a lot of time — so that’s the beginning. As their skills are developing, development gets better and better. With these networks, you have a bunch of friends who like to collect comic books. You could set up your own little Metaverse where these comic books are all stored online and where your members could read, borrow, and swap them with NFTs. There’s always going to be someone who will try to become like Facebook, albeit with a more user-friendly technology.

Q: We’ve been hearing a lot about different kinds of cyber scams, do you believe that will be solved in the next couple of years?

People do more crime with US dollars than with crypto. If you’re in Venezuela right now, buying five tons of cocaine, you’re not paying in Bitcoin, right? — that’s the first thing. I’ve been in crypto for a long time. One of my oldest friends lost money on Mt. Gox, which was the first big crypto exchange. Other friends of mine have been involved with Bitfinex. There have always been hacks, but I think the hacks are getting slightly smaller over time.

Q: But what do we need, like a mental observation?

There are still a lot of rug pulls and scams out there. There are a lot of people who are involved in scams. This is because there’s not much regulation. It makes it very difficult for them to go to jail. So I think we need some regulation, the ability for you to know that if you live in one country and you engineer a scam, and then you move to a different country, the government can still pursue you and try to get that money back. But I do not think we need a heavy hand.

Q: So, somehow it’s going to be more universal than governmental?

I think there has to be some sort of basic agreement between countries about how we look at this digital money. This is really what we’re talking about: the transfer of value in a digital world.

Q: What makes SolChicks different from other games?

There are three reasons why SolChicks is different from other games. The first one is Play-to-Earn (P2E). So if you play the game, the things that you earn in the game –  the shards, the coins, the treasure – can be traded into CHICKS tokens, which can then be sold. So the things that you need to learn in the game have real-world value.

The second one is the characters in the game. In the future, potentially the monsters and the lands themselves will be NFTs. So these can not only have value in the game, they can go into other games, they can transfer — This becomes a Metaverse kind of opportunity. Finally, there could be many games that we can develop parallel to SolChicks. In these games, your character can vary from game to game. This is possible with blockchain.

About Liam Bussell

Liam Bussell is the Global Head of Content and Communications at SolChicks. He is also knowledgeable in Capital Markets and works with VCs and PE investors to take their firms to the next level.