Epic Games, creator of video games including "Fortnite," has raised $1B at a valuation of $28B. (more)

Decentralized finance (commonly referred to as DeFi) is a blockchain-based form of finance that does not rely on central financial intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks to offer traditional financial instruments, and instead utilizes smart contracts on blockchains, the most common being Ethereum.[1] DeFi platforms allow people to lend or borrow funds from others, speculate on price movements on a range of assets using derivatives, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks, and earn interest in savings-like accounts.[2] Some DeFi applications promote high interest rates[2] but are subject to high risk.[1] By October 2020, over $11 billion (worth in cryptocurrency) was deposited in various decentralized finance protocols, which represented more than a tenfold growth during the course of 2020.[3][2] As of January 2021, approximately $20.5 billion was invested in DeFi.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_finance

The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although initially developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealth, fighting games, MMORPGs, and other RPGs. With its code written in C++ (CPlusPlus), the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability and is a tool used by many game developers today, with it being source-available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine

Valve software platform

combo of VR and AR (more)

make of Unreal Engine and Fortnite

Fortnite is an online video game developed by Epic Games and released in 2017. It is available in three distinct game mode versions that otherwise share the same general gameplay and game engine: Fortnite: Save the World, a cooperative hybrid-tower defense-shooter-survival game for up to four players to fight off zombie-like creatures and defend objects with traps and fortifications they can build; Fortnite Battle Royale, a free-to-play battle royale game in which up to 100 players fight to be the last person standing; and Fortnite Creative, in which players are given complete freedom to create worlds and battle arenas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnite

activity that is a Project Oriented hobby or non-primary way to Make Money (Portfolio Life). (more)

aka Filler: Filler is material of lower cost or quality that is used to fill a certain television time slot or physical medium, such as a music album. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(media) (more)

Packy McCormick: The Value Chain of the Open Metaverse. Some of the most fascinating work in tech is being done rebuilding the underlying structure of the internet and the economy, and I’ve wanted an excuse to dive in. We’re going deep on Web3, NFTs, and the Metaverse. (more)

Digital Autonomous Corporation or Decentralized Autonomous Corporation or Distributed Autonomous Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Autonomous_Corporation (more)

Chris Dixon: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy. The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” This is one of the main insights of Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. (more)

GeForce NOW (NVIDIA) Streaming Comes to iOS Safari. GeForce NOW transforms underpowered or incompatible hardware into high-performance GeForce gaming rigs. Now, we’re bringing the world of PC gaming to iOS devices through Safari. (more)

How tweet threads cured my writer's block: Twitter as a medium for sketching (more)

Packy McCormick: The Dao of DAOs.: all of those people who were tweeting and Clubhousing about NFTs are on to the next: DAOs. (you say that like it's a good thing) (more)

Crucible is creating agents to keep the metaverse open. Players will be able to log in with a Crucible agent once. They verify themselves and create avatars that can be linked back to the real identity. Brands and creators can then sell items direct to the player, and players can get passwordless access to games and access to secure communications. This “direct-to-avatar” approach means that players don’t have to buy items through an app store, or inside just one game. That means Crucible’s tech is built for the post-app-store world. (more)

GDC Summer 2020: Roblox, player-generated content, and the ‘metaverse’. Roblox VP of Product Deepak Chandrasekaran held a skill-building talk at GDC Summer 2020 this week titled Building the Metaverse through User Generated Content and the Cloud, but in true, the panel primarily was about Roblox (more)

Jonathan Lai: Meet Me in the Metaverse. There are many competing visions for how we’ll build the Metaverse: a persistent, infinitely-scaling virtual space with its own economy and identity system. Facebook Horizon is an ambitious bet that it will be realized in VR. Epic Games is doubling down on a game-centric approach with Fortnite. But the most exciting part about the Metaverse is not its scope or infrastructure, but its potential to reinvent the way we interact with our friends and loved ones. (more)

Ben Thompson: The Roblox Microverse. Roblox isn’t a game at all: it is world in which one of the things you can do is play games, with a persistent identity, persistent set of friends, persistent money, all disconnected from the device that you use to access the world. That is the transformational change. (more)

Hal Koss: What is the Metaverse? A Complete Guide. *The metaverse, broadly understood as a persistent, shared virtual realm — like an evolved, more-immersive internet — is no longer just fodder for science fiction. (more)