Cyber’s founder wants to build the 'Art Blocks of metaverse architecture'

NFT devotees often argue that owning digital art is no different, conceptually, than owning a painting or print. But physical art can be displayed and gazed upon in grand settings.

Generally speaking, NFTs cannot. 

Not, that is, until the recent emergence of galleries every bit as virtual as the art they house.

While the jury is still out on whether these showrooms will play a pivotal role in the future of NFTs, one platform developed by a startup called Cyber has managed to capture the imagination of some of crypto art’s best-known collectors.

Launched in February of this year, Cyber currently boasts 140,000 monthly active users, including both creators and visitors, according to founder Rayan Boutaleb. The majority of those have come in just the past two months.

The platform lets artists construct and sell virtual showrooms, which themselves take the form of NFTs. Collectors can then mint these and later trade them on marketplaces like OpenSea.

“The idea is to build kind of an Art Blocks of metaverse architecture,” says Boutaleb, referring to the platform that auctions off high-priced generative art. 

Building structures in the metaverse

Art Blocks has been one of the big winners during a hectic summer for NFT trading. Indeed, many Art Blocks pieces can be found hanging in Cyber’s most popular galleries.

High-profile collectors including 6529, Krybharat, VonMises, Deeze, fvckrender and jdh are using Cyber to flaunt treasure troves of virtual art. The pseudonymous collector Vincent Van Dough, who has spent more than $20 million on NFTs, has had a link to his gallery pinned to his Twitter timeline since mid-August.

As with Art Blocks, candidates for Cyber’s curated collection must be vetted and approved by a group of experts before being sold.

It currently costs 18 ether (or $56,000) to purchase a Cyber space named Temple, for example, from one of its 32 owners — one of whom is Van Dough. But there are also more affordable and even free galleries for collectors less flush with cash.

Within the galleries themselves, collectors simply connect with their crypto wallet of choice and can then begin selecting from their cache of NFTs. Cyber supports pieces traded on Ethereum, Polygon, Tezos and Klaytn.

“We’re trying to implement as many chains as possible,” says Boutaleb. “For a lot of people, Cyber was the first time they could get all their assets from multiple chains in one place.”

Rooms for improvement

Not all collectors are convinced by digital exhibitions. The pseudonymous generative art expert and collector Artnome, for instance, doesn’t see the appeal.

“My most unpopular opinion? I don’t really want to see my NFTs (or anyone else’s) in a 3D AR/VR [Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality] gallery,” he said in a tweet on October 1.

Van Dough disagrees. “I think of Cyber as one of the most important companies to emerge in the NFT space this year,” Van Dough told The Block. “As our lives move more and more to the digital realm, expect to see people become more interested in showing off in the virtual world than the physical. Cyber’s galleries provide the perfect setting to do so.”

Tyler Hobbs, whose signature Fidenza pieces adorn many of the biggest collectors’ showrooms, offered a more measured take. 

“Right now, I think the Cyber galleries are some of the best looking,” he said. “However, I think there is massive room for improvement. I’d love to see more architects and video game environment designers taking a proper crack at it. The results could be amazing.”

The concept of the metaverse — introduced by Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash and popularized by other popular novels from the genre, like Ready Player One — refers to a virtual reality space in which users can interact with each other via avatars.

For Boutaleb, showcasing digital art is just the start of a grander effort at metaverse-building.

“What people buy is what they see. At the moment, they’ve been buying galleries for the utility of showcasing their arts,” he says. “But we have a bigger vision than just stopping at galleries.”

Boutaleb says what comes next for Cyber, will be driven by community demand. 

“One thing that I can say for sure is that people have been asking for some sort of multiplayer interactions,” he says. “Having avatars and walking around the spaces. And one hint I will give is that people have been asking for a way to connect different galleries together.” 

This more incremental pace of metaverse building — as distinct from the growth of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, such as the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland — is what Boutaleb describes as a bottom-up approach. It might also be described as pragmatic, and it seems to be one of the reasons Van Dough is so bullish on the company. 

“I think the current mental construct most people have of a metaverse is like that seen in Ready Player One,” they said. “I think that we’ll see far more niche metaverses gain traction before something of that magnitude is ever viable.”