“It [OASIS] was the dawn of a new era, one where most of the human race now spent all of their free time inside a video game.”
This line from Ernest Cline’s instant bestseller “Ready Player One” indirectly sets the context for the metaverse. There was once a time when AI was the technology buzzword and now, its metaverse. Every tech company wants to directly or indirectly be part of this metaverse but not every company sees it the way Dutch startup Odyssey does.
For Christel Sieling, co-founder of Odyssey, a Dutch foundation established in The Netherlands, metaverse is not a product. The startup is building Momentum as a 3D social action medium for digital societies. If Cline’s OASIS allowed people to escape their real world with a VR device, Sieling and team’s Momentum could help people build digital societies.
A pivot from hackathons to metaverse
While it is difficult to explain the idea of a metaverse, Sieling says they began building Momentum in 2020. From 2016 onwards, Odyssey ran the biggest blockchain hackathon in Europe, as part of an innovation programme centred around solving complex societal challenges using emergent technologies like blockchain. They did the Dutch blockchain hackathon in 2017 and saw a total of 55 teams participate and support from over 30 partners, including ING, APG, the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, and the Dutch Agency for Identity.