An Interview with Aragorn Meulendijks of Your Open Metaverse

Today at CryptoNewsZ, we are in conversation with multi-faceted Aragorn Meulendijks, who is the CMO of Your Open Metaverse- the world’s first Layer 1 Metaverse Platform, allowing Brands, Companies, and Artists on its instant interoperability between their ‘Metaspaces/experiences creating the first real ‘Metaverse’ of persistent environments.

CryptoNewsZ: Hello and welcome to CryptoNewsZ Aragorn, it’s an honor to have you with us today. Our readers are keen to know what sparked your interest in the Metaverse crypto and blockchain?

Those are actually 2 distinct questions. My love for the Metaverse began when I was just a boy. Of course, at the time, I didn’t call it ‘metaverse,’ but it was just a young boy’s dream of a virtual world full of adventure. A digital future, inspired by movies like Tron and the Matrix, where we as humans could partake in endless adventures and experiences and explore our own imagination. It was this dream, fueled by my mother’s acquisition of a Commodore 64 computer for me to play with in 1989, that led me to have a passion for technology. Although I was never really the true engineering type, I was always an early adopter. Interested in new technologies, building my own computers, and experimenting with software. So naturally, when bitcoin first came around in 2010, I was part of those few early adopters.. I tried. It… mined some… left it on Mt. Gox and forgot about it… until it turned out I’d lost my precious hundreds of BTC. (which I’m now actually going to try and recover… but that’s another story.)

CryptoNewsZ: We are curious to know about what led to the inception of the world’s first Layer 1 Metaverse Platform?

Truth be told, I only came up with the term ‘Layer-1,’ but the true geniuses behind it were Daniel van der Waals, our Founder, and Jorrit Velzeboer, our CTO. Daniel started pursuing his dream of providing virtual spaces for meetings for businesses in 2012. At the time, people thought he was just a crazy nut. You have to keep in mind that, at the time, even Zoom didn’t even exist. Video calling was in its infancy, and here was this nutcase thinking we would meet in Virtual Space!

Daniel was visionary, but he wasn’t, like me, a true engineer, so he found himself one.. A brilliant entrepreneur and techy, Jorrit, our CTO. Jorrit set out to build the technical vision for a platform that would be able to allow the creation and hosting of events and meetings Daniel had envisioned… and that was the start of it. They then attracted Alex van der Baan, our CEO, who had the business prowess, experience, and network to help them attract the right people and money… and when they successfully closed the first Seed round, I was hired as the first or second employee along with Arthur our Unreal Engine Dev, to become the CMO.

CryptoNewsZ: Why is the metaverse such a revolutionary concept?

The Metaverse represents the start of a process that will ultimately represent a Paradigm Shift in how humans interact with each other and reality itself. Powered by the coming of age of a handful of extremely powerful and technologies that are all converging. Blockchain, Spatial Computing, and AI are the 3 core technologies, but there are others, all chipping in, like Human-Machine Interfacing, High-bandwidth wireless Data transmission, Network Load-balancing tech…. Etc. etc.

CryptoNewsZ: Can you identify the components of the modern metaverse environments?

Interoperability, Persistence, 3 Dimensional space, and Decentralisation of Data.
There are lots of projects out there right now calling themselves ‘Metaverses,’ but the truth is that there will be only 1 Metaverse, which will be the collective of all those projects that will be interoperable with each other and persistent in nature. They need to exist all the time, just like physical reality is there for us always, the bar at the end of the street exists, even if we are not in it, even if it is closed. The same goes for these experiences. I call them experiences rather than spaces because that is what the Metaverse represents.

Space is something that matters in the physical world, but not in a virtual world, as it is literally infinite there. So it will all be about the experiences we can have. Three-dimensional space is also important, the Metaverse is not perse Virtual Reality, as in reliant on wearing a headset, but it is by its nature 3 Dimensional and in the future possibly even 4 Dimensional, including Time as a dimension we can travel through in VR. Finally, Decentralized Data is important, because this is what will separate the real Metaverse from the fake metaverse, as it is envisioned by companies like Meta. The Metaverse represents an opportunity to take back control over our data and our privacy. Our digital lives can be ours again.

Aragorn, we at CryptoNewsZ thank you for sharing your wonderful ideas and insights into YOM’s ecosystem and wish you immense success in all your incredible ventures.