First AMA with Wize Blockchain Chairman

The following are the key points of the first AMA with Wize Blockchain chairman Ed Ow on October 12th, 2022. The full recording can be found on the Discord channel: https://discord.gg/PTcWKDqEer

Host:

Hello everyone, and thanks for joining the AMA event. Ed Ow, the chairman of Wize Blockchain, is with us today and will be answering your questions. Hello Ed, can you please introduce yourself?

Ed:

I’m Ed, the chairman of Wize Blockchain. I would love our CEO Tim to join us too, but he’s not here today. To give a little intro of myself, I am a serial entrepreneur and founded multiple companies in the past before, including a B2B startup that I sold. Later on, I worked with many different IoT and robotics companies doing tech consulting, then evolved into building my own agency, Edison’s Co. It’s a premier agency that works with over 50 major clients such as Lyft, HTC VIVE, TVBS (a media company in Taiwan), Wells Fargo, Home Depot, etc. And at the same time, I also started a company called Fulldive. Fulldive is a consulting company for tech. Fulldive doesn’t only consult but also makes its own applications, including VR software with over 15 billion downloads and a browser with over 2 million downloads with excellent user ratings.

Now I’m focusing on Wize Blockchain, one of the most exciting projects I’ve taken on. And I’ve always loved the NFT world.

Q: What is Wize Blockchain?

Ed:

Before Wize Blockchain, I was the co-founder of one of the most exciting NFT projects, Phanta Bear. It’s the project that jump-started the Asia NFT scene. In that project, I learned that NFTs need to have a space to exist. One of their major problems is that they had nowhere to host their NFTs.

Some lands, like Sandbox, Decentraland, etc., wish to host these NFTs, so they have a space to live and grow in the metaverse. But I found out that these different metaverses are almost like their own little world and little game. The definition of a metaverse is the word “meta,” which means to encompass all things. To encompass all things, you need to be very fair, you need to be a DAO, and you need to be a very open-minded company. The problem with the likes of Facebook Meta is that they want to be a monopoly. They want to take over this entire world and call it their own.

That’s not what Wize Blockchain wants to do. We want to be open and fair to bridge all the other metaverses together.

How do we do that? We’ve come up with several concepts. One is AR lands which are unheard of right now. But in 2023, Apple will release its first AR glasses, and we believe AR will be a mind-blowing future, but nobody’s tackling that right now. The second concept is the ability to switch from AR to VR.

These lands have generated such interest from prominent companies worldwide, and we are engaged with US companies like Vive. They will invest more than a million in over 5% of our lands. On our behalf, they are involved with many other partners like Bandai Namco, Square Enix, and other companies. In addition, some top celebrities in Asia are also going to be joining us. We can not say it yet, but this guy worked with us previously on Phanta Bear, and he will hold land in the middle of Times Square in New York. He can upload a virtual concert in Times Square, and people can join from anywhere by opening up an app we will release as a demo in December.

We are also going to be DAO controlled. When you own our lands, you have the right to vote and decide on ordinances on how the land will grow and how to utilize it. For example, when you start owning land, you can make money off rent in the future, and people will upload their content on your land. You can also sell the land away. Many major companies will start using AR to promote their own company as a form of advertisement.

I think this is the real future for the metaverse, and that’s what Wize Blockchain is right now. In terms of the NFT projects, it’s going to expand. And there are going to be a lot of exciting opportunities in the future.

Q: Can you get into Wize Blockchain without headsets?

Ed:

Headsets are coming out in 2023 from Apple, and we will be prepared to get in talks with them. We will also have an AR app on the phone for both iOS and Android. By December, we will have the Android demo app out first. People can own a location on the map, and you can upload your memories, photos, and videos.

You can also view it in our VR Room. With every land you purchase, you have your own VR Room, and you can upload your content to your room and access it through a web browser or our AR app. AR is a place for people to share their memories and upload their NFTs. It’s just the beginning.

We have spent a lot of time developing our backend. We have our own Wize Blockchain chain, which is proof of stake. You can create coin economies with our chain. You can also create your avatar with our creator and upload all forms of avatars in GLP or VRM. Our vision is to provide open scripting so people can make their own games on these lands that are interoperable between VR and AR.

Q: What stage is Wize Blockchain currently in? Have you acquired any customers?

Ed:

We’re currently working with many influencers and celebrities who are already interested in purchasing our land, including top-tier celebrities such as Bruno Mars. That’s one way we’re growing. Another is that we have companies that want to buy the land, including HTC Vive, that have committed millions, as we mentioned earlier.

Q: How could you invest in Wize Blockchain?

Ed:

Right now, we will give out free lands to grow our Discord. If you purchase with our NFT chain is even going to be free of gas fee at the beginning. Our NFTs chain is also transferable to Ethereum, and it’s going to be vetted by hundreds of companies. You can still purchase our land on Ethereum, but you have to pay the gas fee.

You can also connect with different wallets, like Metamask and Coinbase. We will soon be able to connect with Vive wallet too.

Q: Is there any upcoming milestone dates we can expect?

Ed:

Mid to the end of October, we will show a demo of what the lands look like. We will also show which part of the land is reserved for people like companies or celebrities. The first land will be in New York, and the next city we will open up for sale will be Las Vegas because we’re preparing for the upcoming CES. During CES, we want to show all sorts of AR assets at this place, and we will have our own booth.

Around mid-November, we’re going to release from our test net chain to have a public chain. ACC is going to be in, and Vive will be in full support of that, along with many different companies. On a side note, our CEO, Tim Chen, is the previous Senior VP of the entire engineering company in Cosmos. Cosmos is the foundation that created crypto.org. So we are more of a tech team than an NFT company. Our vision is to create something like Ready Player One, that movie where anybody can upload assets, avatars, spaces, and people can live together in this metaverse, and we believe that we can make that happen.

Mid-December, we’re going to launch our lands and commit to our first sales. Maybe by the end of December, we’re going to show the demo of a fully functional demo of the AR app too.

Q: What will our future lives be like with the metaverse?

Ed:

I think some books answer this well, like Snow Crash and Ready Player One. I was part of the Vive consulting team while they were talking to Steven Spielberg, looking for funds to make the Ready Player One movie, and I remember Vive offered the vision together to them. What Wize Blockchain wants to achieve is similar. We want to build something like Ready Player One. You can upload any avatar, combined with AR and VR, to bring them to real-life utility.

For example, when you’re wearing your AR glasses and walking down New York City, you can see your AR content floating in the background. You can see ads from companies that they put in their 3D space or even games that shift between virtual and reality. Let me paint it in another way. Walking down Central Park, you can see an Apple store in the middle of the park because Apple purchased a part of that property, but it’s actually a 3D Apple store. You go in, robots are running around, and there are games that Apple setup. You can see their phone, and you can also pick it up with your hands virtually. If you want to buy it, just press purchase, and the same day, it’s shipped to your house by a drone.

I believe AR will be the future, and I know AR lands will work because it’s similar to the intranet domains. For example, if you and I both go to google.com, we would see the same result. If there were thousands of different servers that all host google.com, our world would have been disunited, and it wouldn’t be the internet anymore. Similarly, I think that one day, there’s going to be one form of a layer of land that will unite all lands in the form of public domain.

Q: How much would the land cost?

Ed:

I don’t want to release exact pricing to prevent pump and dump schemes. In fact, nobody in my team knows precisely, either. Some companies specialize in buying a ton and then dumping it.

But to offer a little more insight, there will be around 2,500 lands at the beginning, so there is scarcity, but it will expand later as the map expands. It is very easy to earn free lands in our Discord early on. For example, by inviting a couple of friends, you can get free tier one, tier two, or tier three lands. My prediction is it’s going harder to do so later on when our Discord grows. I think that’s my prediction.

We have a tier system judged by how expensive those lands are in real life. For example, Central Park is a landmark land and a much higher tier because everybody wants it. In contrast, the outskirts of the Bronx in New York are lower tier because fewer people walk through there.

Q: You mentioned there are companies already buying lands in Wize Blockchain. Can I choose to purchase lands close to them?

Ed:

Big companies like HTC will mainly invest in top-tier lands like fourth-tier or fifth-tier. So if you want to be next to big companies, it’s guaranteed to be in the middle of the city, which would also be high-tier lands. So you should be able to earn tier three lands for free by participating in Discord activities, which will put you bordering these big companies. You can even try to earn tier-four or tier-five lands for free, but that would take a lot more effort and participation.

Q: Can we choose which plot to purchase, or is it randomly assigned?

Ed:

If you do our event in Discord and earn free land, it is randomly assigned, so that’s fair. If you purchase land, you can choose where you want. If you get a whitelist, you will have a whitelist to buy the lands you wish to.

Q: Will there be tools for users to develop their lands?

Ed:

We will have an uploader so people can upload any form of avatar, whether in GLP or VRM format. We will also standardize the dimensions of your avatars so they fit in our land. For example, suppose you upload a giant avatar as big as a building inside our dimensions. In that case, we will shrink it down automatically so that you can walk normally in human size inside the city. In addition, we’re also building off Blender and other open-sourced tools to have building creators or furniture creators, etc., in the future.

Q: If companies buy the majority of the lands, will it mean they can control the community by having more share in DAO our lands?

Ed:

DAO will be determined by how many people purchase the land. So the lands that are not yet purchased are part of the DAO. Simply put, when people buy more land, they have more power. I did some deep research on DAO, and I believe the fairest form of DAO is a combination of your individual right versus how much you own of that particular NFT ecosystem.

Ed:

Thank you so much for joining. As you all can tell, I believe that this company has the makings of something very explosive. Let’s do what we can to make this vision a reality. I need all of your help, and I thank you for your support. Hopefully, you’re always with us. Thank you.