Early 2020s
Continuing with the near future…
µniverse exists in cyberspace. There is no single owner who decides, only rules that determine the actions. It is a two-sided marketplace, an exchange. It connects brands with their customers. Unlike the BigTech companies who play the role of intermediary and take a huge cut, µniverse simply enables a direct connection via its µ token as enabler. It lies at the intersection of three worlds: gaming, loyalty, and crypto.
MuDAO (Mu Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) was born in the early 2020s. As the crypto revolution was sweeping the world and attention was focused on the cryptocurrencies and their volatility, various entrepreneurs decided to look at Web3 and solve real world problems beyond finance. One such problem was the massive spending brands were doing on adtech – $400 billion annually paid to Google, Facebook and their ilk to connect with past, present and future customers. The dirty secret was that half of this spending was wasteful – going into reacquisition (churned customers who were retargeted and converted) and wrong acquisition (new customers who churned within the first few weeks). Marketers had few options, and so the arms race in acquisition via adtech continued at the cost of profitability for most brands. With pandemic-fuelled easy money from investors, spending kept rising. It was a land grab out there – the “land” being digital customers. And then almost as suddenly, the tap was turned off. Brands had to take a hard look at their expenses, and of course, marketing budgets were near the top (after employee salaries). An answer needed to be found. And thus came MuDAO.
With any new technology, it takes multiple hype cycles to draw in the investment into building out the new infrastructure. The Internet’s foundation was laid in the second half of the 1990s, and it was only over the subsequent two decades that real value creation happened. Second- and third-order companies beyond the initial pioneers built out the digital world as we know it today. Google was not the first search engine or even the second. Chrome and Firefox were not the first browsers. Apple’s iPhone came when a seemingly invincible Nokia’s market share touched 40% and Blackberry was seen as the next cool thing. Facebook was one of many social networks and definitely not the first. Netflix started life as a video tape mail-order company. Amazon started with books and today Amazon Web Services is the profits engine that enables it to keep investing in its eCommerce machine.
The bitcoin-blockchain revolution was born in 2008. It took the free money era during the pandemic to fuel its rocket growth. More importantly, the world of crypto attracted massive venture capital which in turn brought together the smart developer talent to build out the infrastructure for a new Internet – decentralised, permissionless, user run, automated, transparent and consistent. A new vocabulary emerged: blockchain, smart contracts, dApps, NFT, DAO, Ethereum, Web3. Even as the naysayers had their doubts, entrepreneurs started thinking about the transition from online to on-chain – just as their predecessors had made the offline to online.
It was into this world that MuDAO was born to solve the problems of attention recession, limited loyalty, and high acquisition costs – and in doing so reset brand-customer relationships.
