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Today we are delighted to announce that we are joining Lighthouse Labs seed round, co-led by Accel, BlockTower, and Animoca Brands. This $7M seed will help Lighthouse Labs broaden its ecosystem and to grow its team in anticipation of its summer 2022 launch. Lighthouse Labs is building an open metaverse navigation system, helping to onboard users to the many metaverses and to connect with their friends and communities within these vast new worlds.
StreamingFast is an employee-owned company made up of some of the best Web3 builders in the space. We are Core Developers of The Graph and the masterminds behind the Firehose, a files-based and streaming-first approach to processing blockchain data. We are making strategic investments in projects building core components of the Web3 stack that we can also accelerate through our unique expertise.
A navigation engine to power the open metaverse
There’s no doubt that the metaverse is here to stay, but getting your toes wet is a daunting task. With many different metaverses capturing the spotlight, coupled with virtual worlds like Decentraland and The Sandbox raising millions of dollars through virtual land sales, a clear lack of infrastructure to connect these worlds has been revealed. As the ecosystem continues to grow, discovery across worlds grows exponentially. This leaves a gap in the market to create an engine that ensures browsing the metaverse feels as simple as browsing the internet.
Lighthouse is putting a strong emphasis on mobility because creating a hub where users can navigate between virtual platforms is just as essential as having a frictionless way to navigate the web pages we use today. “As users will be spawning with their avatar identity into many parallel virtual worlds in the open metaverse, we believe a new standard for a navigation system allowing for both content discovery and socialization layers will be needed,” says Sébastien Borget, co-founder and COO of The Sandbox.
Lighthouse’s platform seeks to solve this problem by simplifying the discovery process across virtual worlds. They will rely on The Graph, a decentralized indexing solution, to query across multiple blockchains and metaverses fast enough for users to be able to search for people, items, events, and info in real time in a metaverse equivalent of a search engine. With our expertise, we are excited to guide them in this journey of building the metaverse navigation system.
Connectivity between people and communities is ingrained into the idea of a successful metaverse. By enabling users to create friend groups, they transform the experience of exploring the metaverse into a social experience, made even easier with the interconnectivity between worlds.
To us, the many metaverses present a new opportunity for how we choose to spend our time, as well as interact with people around us. It opens up a world full of rich and immersive experiences, unlike anything we’ve seen before. By enabling efficient navigation, simple-to-use Find My Friend functionality, and alerts as to which activities are currently trending across the metaverses, Lighthouse will empower the most meaningful moments.