The term metaverse has exploded in popularity over the past couple of months, and companies like Facebook have decided to rebrand and focus on building it, unleashing an awkward corporate gold rush to build metaverses.
However, the metaverse won’t belong to any single company, much like the internet before it. Instead, it will be composed of sprawling permissionless networks of users and user-owned content and assets that will be represented as NFTs.
Currently, NFTs are synonymous with collectibles or art, but when everything that one owns digitally becomes represented by an NFT —game items, certificates, identities, achievements, and purely digital real estate— the challenge will be to find something specific in clusters and clusters of digital items. Imagine looking for a video on YouTube without using the search feature. You’ll have to browse millions of videos before finding the one you’re looking for. And even with the search feature in place, if YouTube didn’t index videos based on their content, you’d have even more trouble looking for a song based on something like a portion of the lyrics. As we move closer to that future, the amount of issued NFTs will grow exponentially, and finding relevant items and assets will become an exponentially harder problem for users.
Armada approaches discoverability differently. We think that it’s the entry point to the world of NFTs, and that if it’s done poorly, the initial user experience will be bad. One way to think about it is by analyzing how platforms like OpenSea are doing it, then reason by analogy.
OpenSea’s approach to NFT discoverability is skeuomorphic. In 1994, some websites tried organizing the web by listing every website in existence under one index, while letting the users browse by category, in a Yellow pages fashion. This made sense at the time, but it rapidly became obsolete as the web grew exponentially, and search engines quickly replaced the directories. We think that NFTs — or items you own in the metaverse — are headed the same way. It still makes sense to just list all of them now, but it will become unscalable sooner than you think.
What if there was a way for users to comb the metaverse for relevant content and items in the same way that Google is used to search for relevant information today? Considering that on a technical level, an NFT is merely some information entered on an immutable database in a standard format, it makes sense to index all of these databases called Blockchains to be able to find NFTs easily.
That’s what we’re building; Armada is the search engine for NFTs, and our mission is to organize the metaverse.
We want to offer a very simple search experience, with the only user input being natural language. You’ll be able to search for things like
“rare orange bored apes” or “cheapest blue portrait NFTs”
“How many rare NFTs does vitalik.eth own?”
“Who owns the most punks?” or even “my rare NFTs”.
This is what Armada is capable of today, but imagine what it will be capable of doing in the future. You’ll be able to browse ownership and interactions in the metaverse like you browse information on the Internet.
We want to organize the metaverse, starting with NFTs, and if this is something you’d like to help with, reach out!
We haven’t launched yet, but you can join the waitlist to get early access!