"Just like you probably wouldn’t live in a house without a concrete foundation, you probably wouldn’t want to participate in a metaverse that isn’t built with an open blockchain."
I love video games. My love affair with pixelated adventures began in 1985 when I was 5 years old and my father brought home a used Commodore 64[1] intended to help my brother, who was in college at the time, with writing and printing essays. Shortly after, my sister learned how to copy games off the computers at her school. She would bring them home to me on a floppy disk, and what was intended to be a tool used to help my brother make his way through college quickly became my private space. There, I would pretend I was a cave explorer battling my way through spelling tests playing Cave of the Word Wizard[2], or schussing down the slopes playing Winter Games[3], or being an NBA star playing Larry Bird vs. Dr. J[4].
As time went by and the video game industry made huge technological improvements, my passion for video games grew. I won my first Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987 by collecting the most pledges for my elementary school's walk-a-thon fundraiser, and there was no turning back. From then on, I would spend hours sitting on the living room floor – face covered in Cheeto dust and hands sticky with grape soda – trying to get to the next level, find the next treasure, or master a new cheat code (gamers who have played the first Contra know what I'm talking about) until my father insisted I go outside and play.
Throughout my childhood and well into my adult life, I have used many different machines to
