Building the Infrastructure for the Metaverse: Interview with Phil Chen, Founding Partner, Race Capital & Chief Decentralized Officer, HTC

Phil Chen (Founding Partner, Race Capital & Chief Decentralized Officer, HTC) describes Metaverse as a point in time where people value digital assets more than physical assets. The Metaverse is the next-gen internet interconnecting with Web3 fundamentals (permissionless, borderless, etc.) and could be potentially bigger than the current siloed Web2 internet infrastructure. Phil believes chip/compute, deep-learning, public blockchain networks and storage are crucial pieces of infrastructure for the Metaverse and that we need a single killer Metaverse use-case (e.g. real-time foreign language translation) similar to media for iPod and step-counting for Fitbit, which transformed into products such as the iPhone and the Apple Watch. A lot of technological advancements are yet to be seen in edge computing which moves the compute from the cloud closer to the device/user and also in chip technology enabling decentralization by secure private key storage on the device itself.