In a short time we will have to get used to living our virtual lives

“What would be the use that the fans would give to a Virtual Stadium?”, a senior leader of a club in the Argentine Professional Soccer League told me a short time ago when I made him the proposal to invest in innovation of that caliber.

Imagen de Frank P. en Pixabay 

Whenever I am asked questions like these, I am reminded of the phrase of Ken Olsen, founder, and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation. He said in 1977, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

So, I told the manager that the virtual seats of the Virtual Stadium could be sold to fans, that the Virtual Stadium could be rented for brand events, that contributions from brands could be received through sponsorship of the Virtual Stadium, that marketing will never be what we knew, and that brands needed proposals like this to communicate with the new virtual inhabitants of the Metaverse, and that this was a very innovative way of generating genuine resources for the Club.

Still thinking…

It happens that we are facing a gigantic inflection point, and brilliant minds in their field of action (such as Ken Olsen at the time), would not be able to see the devastating power of this natural evolution of the Internet that is the Metaverse. Like the Internet and social media, the Metaverse represents the next great inflection point in technology that will declare the winners and losers of online business.

It is difficult to accept it for a highly structured mind, but soon, the human being will migrate to a new category in which it will be difficult to differentiate between the real and virtual worlds.

The fact is further magnified, imo, considering that, at the moment, the cryptosphere is totally tilted towards finance. Everyone, at the moment, thinks of the cryptosphere as a series of lending, staking, farming, earning interest, APY, and the like. It is quite logical that this is the case since its foundation is currencies, but we have to bear in mind that there is a big difference between economics and finance. And also a big difference between blockchain and cryptocurrencies. First, it is necessary that an economy works so that then finances can work well. Otherwise, we are still in the same trap that capitalism created, which results in a few having all the money (sympathetically called “whales”) and the rest survive.

Economics is a social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services in order to coordinate and plan the allocation of resources in the most efficient way, while finance could be defined as a branch of economics that studies money flows, financial markets, interest rates, and prices. Loans, investments, and other financial products depend on the conclusions of these studies. Without an economy, there is no finance, but without finance, there is an economy. The economy is the area of entrepreneurs and businessmen and women from all areas. Finance is the area of financiers.

That is why it is important that we care a lot about the economy, its models and the way in which these are going to develop in the Metaverse. Metaverse cannot and should not be synonymous with Facebook. If we leave the development of economic models in the hands of Facebook, we will create a huge swimming pool full of whales feeding on minnows.

Btw, META has already patented mechanisms to control web3. Let's not make the same mistake twice.

What I am going to propose in this post is a new way of doing business with UPLAND.

Despite many who still resist, we have been quietly abandoning the Nation-State model for quite some time, in order to fully evolve towards a new social contract. Now we are part of groups, which I call “counties”. We have a real-life with real geography and virtual life that is developing with new tools that are mostly still in beta, and that don't necessarily have the same geography. For example, the "Bitcoin county" is distributed throughout the planet, and those of us who have Bitcoin is part of that county. We have no government, no tax agency, no central bank, no parliament, in general, no such thing as a State, source of all corruption, wars, famine, and disease. We only recognize a consensus protocol and a distributed network of nodes that ensure the operation. We live in a virtual nation, the new model that the Metaverse is creating.

That is the proposal of the Metaverse, to develop a virtual life, as real as the real-life that we all know, with groups that have the same interests as us and with whom we can develop all kinds of relationships, including economic relationships. But this time, with the addition that, for the first time in the history of humanity, we are presented with the possibility, (thanks to the set of tools generically called web3 that act as an operating system), of building whale-proof, corporations-proof, and corrupt politicians-proof economies, relying on smart contracts and trustless and permissionless distributed database systems.

Now, UPLAND, created its Metaverse, long before this word became the public domain.

Uplandme, Inc. was founded in 2018 by serial entrepreneurs Dirk Lueth, Idan Zuckerman, and Mani Honigstein. The company is based in Silicon Valley and develops the UPLAND game.

I've been an Uplander for over a year, and every day I spend a good time in the app, that is, in the Metaverse. It's the only app I systematically immerse myself in every day. I am passionate about seeing city maps, and that must have to do with my predisposition to navigate cities and discover business opportunities in real estate. I wrote two articles in the two previous UPLAND contests organized by Publish0x, which, due to some error, surely by the jury, were both awarded. You can see them here.

I wanted to be Bob the Builder

Buenos Aires ought to be in UPLAND

UPLAND is making slow but steady progress towards building a very solid “county” in the Metaverse. Even though most of the business that can be done today in UPLAND is related to a sector of the economy that is Real Estate, (basically the buying and selling of virtual properties that represent real properties in 18 US cities), the underlying system of the Metaverse UPLAND is very consistent so that very soon much more elaborate business can be done than the “simple” purchase/sale of properties.

UPLAND's economy is currently based on two tokens, UPX and SPARK, which are two utility tokens that only exist within the game. UPX is used to buy properties, travel from one city to another, pay some event expenses, and the like. SPARK is used to build buildings. This is a recent proposal from UPLAND that allows you to rebuild the property that was purchased, and also build buildings, statues, cars, and other things that are minted as NFTs. SPARK is not spent but instead is wagered for the time it takes to complete the build or craft. As long as the SPARK is staked, the build will progress and when the build is finished the SPARK is restored.

The construction of a building in UPLAND is calculated in a unit called SPARK/HOURS. If a building costs 1,000 SPARK/HOURS, it means that if you bet exactly 1 Spark, it will take you 1,000 hours to complete the construction. If you bet 2 Spark, the same building will take 500 hours to complete.

Players in the UPLAND community have begun developing entire neighborhoods in the Metaverse and populating cities with NFT structures.

The UPLAND (county) Metaverse also allows a connection to the real world of fiat money. Through an agreement with Tilia Inc. from May 2020, UPLAND players can exchange virtual properties for dollars. Tilia Inc. is owned by Linden Research, Inc., the creator of Second Life.

Well, let's get to my concrete business proposal. The idea is to strongly develop the economy of an UPLAND city, introducing the commercial franchise sector. In 2020, it is estimated that there will be some 753,700 franchise establishments in the United States, outputting some 670 billion U.S. dollars and employing 7.5 million people. I think that is enough to consider it a good deal. The largest segment of the Franchise industry is quick-service restaurants, comprising over 241 billion dollars of the industry's total economic output, followed by business services with around 121 billion dollars.

Sounds like a good time to me for brands to consider expanding their franchises throughout the Metaverse. What they need is a business model.

I made this proposal in the UPLAND Discord group a few months ago, with very good reception, although the administrator told me that it was still early to think about this type of business. Time is a human construction, I never thought it was sooner or later for a business proposal…

My strategic rationale is to view UPLAND as a Layer 0 solution on which to build Layer 1 and 2 platforms for doing business in UPLAND's virtual Metaverse (county).

Both Master franchisors and franchisees will pay all their expenses and receive all their income in UPX. At the time of building their premises, they must also have SPARK.

FIRST STEP.

UPLANDME INC. creates a company within its Metaverse called UPLAND FRANCHISES INC., which aims to sign agreements with brands that sell their franchises, to sell franchises to any inhabitant of the UPLAND Metaverse. UPLAND FRANCHISES INC. sells Master Franchises for the entire UPLAND Metaverse. Buyers of a Master Franchise should dedicate themselves to searching for potential franchisees of the represented brands, within their city limits, and selling them the franchises of the brands with which UPLAND FRANCHISES INC. signed the agreement.

By associating a brand with the program, UPLAND FRANCHISES INC. (UF) must consider the following factors:

a) The payment of an Initial fee for 10 years by the brand

b) The percentage of royalties that UF will pay to the brand for the revenues of each franchise sold

c) The number of franchises that will be sold in the city, according to the number of inhabitants and the characteristics of the target

d) A price/cost relationship. At the moment, the virtual world is in full swing. The franchisee will not have the possibility to try several suppliers to manufacture his/her product, as he/she does today in the real world. So this relationship will have to be fixed in advance.

e) A minimum amount of sales that each franchise will have when it is opened, from which its growth will begin, basically due to investments in advertising.

SECOND STEP.

Anyone can purchase the Master Franchise from UPLAND FRANCHISES INC. for any city in the UPLAND Metaverse.

I will purchase the Master Franchise for Oakland, as soon as this business is launched, and build my franchise sales office on one of my properties in Oakland, CA.

UPLAND FRANCHISES INC. will charge me an Initial Fee of 500,000 UPX for a 10-year contract to sell its franchises in Oakland. To build my office I will invest 2000 SPARK/HOURS. I will only have to return the UPX of the Initial Fee with my operation in 10 years, since the SPARK, once the construction of my office is finished, will return home.

THIRD STEP.

I, as a Master Franchisor of UPLAND FRANCHISES INC., will start looking for potential franchisees in Oakland.

I have to consider:

a) My investment in advertising to find new potential franchisees

b) Cost in SPARK of construction of the franchise in a property of the franchisee

c) Initial Fee paid by the franchisee to me for the purchase of the franchise for 5 years

d) Royalties for sales paid by the franchisee to me for the operation of the franchise

e) The advertising/sales ratio of the franchisee to attract new costumers

Notice how great this business is for brands. In addition to advertising and branding by third parties, and charging royalties for sales of their franchises, they have a series of people (Master Franchisors and franchisees) who generate brand awareness throughout the cities.

Suppose the first brand that is associated with the UPLAND FRANCHISES INC. is the TRIPOLI BAR.

The idea of ​​BAR TRIPOLI is to sell 10 franchises in Oakland.

So:

a) My Master Franchise UPLAND FRANCHISES INC shall advertise the sale of the BAR TRIPOLI franchise in Oakland

b) Sell the franchise to each prospect and ensure its construction within the established time (SPARK/HOURS)

c) collect royalties and pay the corresponding percentage to BAR TRIPOLI

d) Ensure that the new franchisee advertises accordingly in Oakland to attract more and more customers to their premises. Customers must attend the franchise and consume a minimum of UPX in a given period, according to the prices set by the brand. In return, they will have a series of benefits in UPLAND that they will consider together with UPLAND FRANCHISES INC. and the corresponding brand. In fact, this type of advertising in the Metaverse will be very common in a very short time in the different formats of the Metaverse, and the brands will fight for a place in the minds of the inhabitants of the different counties, just as until recently, they fought for a place in the mass media.

I ran a little model in Excel and the results look promising.

Assumptions Master Franchise UPLAND FRANCHISES INC

Quantity of UPLAND FRANCHISE INC. Trademarks = 10

Quantity of franchises sold by brand =10

Monthly royalty income = 500,000 UPX

Monthly payments to brands for royalties = 150,000 UPX

Monthly balance = 350,000 UPX

Assumptions franchisee

Franchisee monthly income = 1,000,000 UPX

Monthly royalty payment to UPLAND FRANCHISE INC. = 50,000 UPX

Monthly operating costs of the franchise = 700,000 UPX

Monthly investment in advertising = 50,000 UPX

Monthly balance = 200,000 UPX

Isn't it better to do this type of business in UPLAND instead of staking or lending the money with interest like financiers do?

Conclusion.

Come on guys from the UPLAND team! It's just a few lines of code!

I do not sell any of my properties on UPLAND. I only buy. The revaluation that I expect for these properties in the near future is gigantic. Also, if UPLAND starts incorporating businesses like the one I just discussed into their Metaverse, I'm going to need them.

I continue to present this model in the spirit of Thomas Alba Edison "I haven't failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that won't work"

Maybe one day…

As usual, none of the things written in this post are financial advice and are not intended to replace personal research.

Thank you for reading!

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them down below

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