Mission

Power a thriving economy of fulfilling, connected metaversal communities.

M²'s mission is to unlock the potential of a global metaverse economy that enriches the lives of as many people as possible. Accomplishing that requires us to solve several key problems:

1. There must exist a technical foundation that supports new experiences consumers want, overcoming existing limitations in concurrency, interactivity and accessibility. This requires breakthroughs in networking, rendering, audio technology, bandwidth compression and more.

2. These experiences need to be able to add value to each other through seamless technical interoperability of people, goods and services.

3. An economic framework is needed which allows many parties, technology providers, content creators, metaverse operators and individual users to all be motivated with appropriate incentives to contribute value and be able to create credible investable businesses without value solely accruing to the underlying network. The network should be an enabling utility and not a monopolistic gatekeeper.

4. A governance approach that is practical, business orientated and brings confidence to all network participants that their interests will be protected while also decentralizing appropriate parts of the network to bring the benefits of resilience and stability that the best web3 projects have.

To motivate the proposed structure of the network, solutions and technologies described in this document, it's worth briefly looking in more depth at some of the key goals above and what challenges need to be overcome to accomplish them.

Differentiated high-scale Experiences

The key to unlocking the metaverse's potential lies in offering valuable, engaging experiences beyond existing games and online worlds. This point cannot be underscored enough. The success or failure of many metaverse endeavors boils down simply to whether they offer new and useful experiences relative to alternatives. Although there are many facets to better experiences, we believe the most successful projects must support large-scale virtual environments, such as concerts, sporting events, and bustling social spaces, while connecting to real-world value. These are especially important for practical metaverse use cases which are relevant to many real-world industries.

Achieving this vision requires technology which facilitates not only a large number of people but complex interactions among thousands of users in dense environments. These visually rich, interactive, and accessible experiences must be persistent and connect to real-world meaning, empowering communities, businesses, and brands to expand their reach.

A key indicator of a virtual world's complexity is "operations per second" (ops). Billions of ops are needed to create truly unique experiences that surpass what is currently available (experiences that sit mostly at thousands of ops) M² Origin aims to deliver this level of ops while bridging the virtual and real worlds seamlessly.

Easy-to-use tooling and low-cost experimentation.

• While there do exist successful platforms enabling users to create their own games and even to move between them, these tools severely limit the scope of what can be created. You also have some toolsets not being usable by a wide variety of creators. There is a tradeoff between professional tools and more accessible tools. The M² project aims to resolve this by enabling a wide variety of tools, game engines and languages to maximize the potential of content on the network.

• The M² project must significantly reduce the cost of building metaversal experiences, allowing small teams or even individuals to rapidly develop and deploy experiences for thousands of users. Not every project can justify the costs associated with creating an MMO, and a thriving metaverse economy requires the ability to quickly test and publish content. To achieve this, the M² project will introduce a simple, open-source, cross-world standard for defining and running metaverse content, drawing inspiration from the success of existing web technologies. Relying on straightforward, well-understood tools is a fundamental principle of the project. A free way to experiment and publish content will be launched concurrently with this document.

Connected and Composable Metaversal Objects and Experiences.

• Numerous valuable businesses and concepts, such as concerts, lectures, marketplaces or ways for celebrities to meet and engage with their communities in virtual space, can be great businesses but don’t make sense as stand-alone projects. Similarly, digital assets that only work in a single time-limited world or experience are economically unattractive to sell or own. Just like in the real world, great experiences and businesses depend on each other to thrive. As a simple example, it should be seamless to sell a t-shirt at a concert, have it signed by a celebrity and then wear it within another high-density social environment. This is beyond the scope of existing NFTs or game objects and needs a new solution which we describe later in this text. Fundamentally, a metaverse is a network of meaning that connects experiences together, making the rich composition of content essential for its value.

• A key challenge in making businesses and experiences add value to each other is implementing the notion of a Metaversal Object that is compatible with multiple environments and can move between them while retaining behavior, visuals and state. While NFTs provide a shared idea of ownership and can be part of the solution, they do not provide any way to describe in detail the behavior, visualization, dynamic state and other properties of objects in a way which can make them genuinely interoperable and composable. A new layer on top is needed, and the idea of a Metaversal Object is central to the M² project and essential to make possible many of the businesses we envision being part of a metaversal economy. Additionally, expecting all creators to build and rebuild content in many different environments is unrealistic. Metaversal Objects must be ‘write once deploy everywhere’ in their implementation.

• It is important to acknowledge that any solution which seeks to unlock a thriving multi-business economy cannot rely on a proprietary toolchain locked into a closed platform. This is because, in that scenario, any dependent business has its value capped and its ability to acquire investment capped since the platform it depends on can easily change the rules or compete with it

• The usual strategy in building a network is to prevent partners from leaving. The M² project takes the opposite approach, aiming to provide a lot of freedom in tools, technology and open-sourcing standards. This promotes network growth by incentivising contribution rather than locking in content.

Accessibility

• Accessibility is a crucial aspect of the metaverse, allowing not only those with VR headsets but anyone with basic computing hardware or mobile devices to access immersive experiences and contribute to metaverse content creation. M² aims to unlock opportunities for billions who cannot attend real-life events, meet their idols, or collaborate within large online communities. The project's technology approach focuses on optimizing accessibility, ideally through browser-based streaming or in low bandwidth environments, using native clients that support highly compressed traffic for a multitude of users. It's important to note that M² technology has also been designed and tested with VR and XR in mind, and when those platforms mature, users from both classes of devices should benefit from experiences in the network.

Incentivising and enabling a cross metaversal economy.

• As in the real world, the free movement of people between projects is essential to make many businesses viable or valuable that would not otherwise work. If people can move from a concert to a sporting event to a game and the creators of all of these experiences can economically benefit from the contributions they make, then suddenly, the immense challenge of acquiring users, retaining them and monetising them can be shared by many actors on the network and not the purview of a single company as is currently the norm. This division of labour is the key economic property we are trying to incentivise with the M² project.

• Achieving this involves not only technical feasibility but also establishing an economic framework that balances businesses' needs to "own" their users while incentivizing them to allow traffic across multiple experiences and enable objects from other environments to function within their spaces. The M² network aims to create a set of rules and incentives that effectively offer its technical capabilities at a low cost in exchange for enforcing value sharing. Additionally, M² seeks to provide specific incentives for network actors who create business value, even in unexpected contexts.

The rest of this document provides an overview of how M² intends to tackle these goals, the progress we’ve made so far and the phased rollout plan of this solution in conjunction with a community of early adopting builders and companies.