The decentralized web, and the future, hunger for art, creativity, community, and culture. Web2 succeeded at the expense of content creators; power— and money—rests in the hands of the few. The burgeoning Metaverse, a catchall term that describes the interlinked virtual world that web3 and crypto makes possible, has the potential to radically realign that dynamic.
This is Alanna Roazzi-Laforet’s dream. She’s focused on how art, music, film, storytelling, and other cultural benchmarks in the web3 world are shaping the digital future, and by extension the rest of the real world. Not all heroes wear capes to the office.
Alanna is the co-founder of Decrypt Studios, the web3 advertising arm of Decrypt Media Inc., where she also serves as Chief Revenue Officer and Publisher of the popular crypto news site, Decrypt.co. She’s also mom to three daughters and wife to an artist, so the topics of equality and artistic expression are top of mind. Before being recruited for a leadership role at Decrypt, Alanna worked with ConsenSys Mesh on decentralized media and identity initiatives. Her career includes stints at Conde Nast and the Omnicom Media Group. She is also one of the founders of AdToken, an advertising-based token.
As Publisher and CRO for the Decrypt news site, Alanna is dedicated to demystifying crypto and the decentralized web. Decrypt is a media platform that celebrates web3 and the Metaverse, offers unbiased coverage of the latest developments, events, and news, and warns about scams, fraud, and bad technology. Decrypt’s tone – just as with Decrypt Studios’ philosophy – is aimed at enabling and empowering everyone. It has a “Learn” element that educates novices, people with an intermediate knowledge of crypto, and experts alike. “The goal is for everyone to benefit from our work,” emphasized Alanna.
That passion for web3 runs deep. Alanna cofounded Decrypt Studios, a web3 production studio specializing in Metaverse activations. It pioneers a whole new way of building audiences in the Metaverse. From designing NFTs to minting, marketing, and sales, Decrypt Studios introduce designs and ideas through events and exhibitions in virtual worlds, letting people interact and experience art, music, and concepts in digital environments such as Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, Spatial, Roblox, and Fortnite.
“We’re building activations in the Metaverse and web3 at large that are geared towards community,” explains Alanna. “And community can mean anything or anyone, from any gender, any proclivity; any consciousness; it really doesn’t matter.”
She believes NFTs were a good first step for people to express themselves in the Metaverse, by infusing art into a flat token. Now, Alanna and Decrypt Studios are building the next level: Metaverse installations that engage more fully and present greater opportunity for artists and their creativity to exist more fully. That requires superpowers – and Alanna has them.
Designing the new reality means starting afresh. Alanna recognizes that internet connectivity and the ability to render many of the Metaverse installations are barriers to entry for mass adoption of the Metaverse and web3.
For example, there is ongoing debate in regard to hardware and access to the Metaverse. Graphics are difficult to render, and there are at this moment many different virtual reality hardware devices that provide an immersive experience, most of which come at a higher price point and are not designed to work well with each other. Access should be universal and stay true to the spirit of the Metaverse and web3’s ethos believes Alanna. “There’s a whole conversation around what it means to be in the Metaverse. What is reality in the Metaverse? Is it a mirror of real life? Is it a crucial add-on to or component of real life? If so, it’s unethical to restrict access. There should be many ways to access the worlds you want to experience, and expensive hardware should not be a gating factor.”
The Metaverse holds unlimited opportunities for people to create experiences in the virtual world. Decrypt Studios hosted the Metaverse premiere for the documentary, “GameStop: Rise of the Players”, which told the story of the GameStop short squeeze of 2021. Viewers watched the film’s premiere in the Metaverse on the moon in virtual Lamborghinis at a drive-in theater. The potential for these types of unique, “impossible” experiences excites Alanna about the space: “The Metaverse is an opportunity to create experiences adjacent to our real world in the virtual world. You can experience ‘reality’ in a different way, augmenting it, changing it, creating new rules, because the Metaverse is not bound by gravity or the other constants we experience in real life. The power of the Metaverse is that anything about our real world can be kept or discarded; it’s up to the people experiencing that reality to decide which pieces they want to bring with them, or whether to live in both or a bifurcated reality. Eventually we’ll develop personal relationships in the Metaverse, a friend or loved one you’ve only met through 1s and 0s. It will be up to all of us to choose how and where we want to experience our relationships, which are virtual or IRL and whether we want to share between both.”
Opportunities will grow when people and technology align, believes Alanna. “You can be whoever you want to be, whatever gender you want to be, truly anything or anyone you want to be.”
The ultimate goal is for everyone to benefit from web3 and the Metaverse. Artists and communities can build a culture of creativity unbound from the real world, in which people are free to create art and be creative. “My legacy is bringing these artists and the platforms that enable them into the virtual and web3 conversation – artists such as David Russo, Lesley Schiff, Terry Gilliam and others who we’re working with right now. They’re coming from different art structures; bringing them into the web3 community is what really drives me to build all this. That’s my legacy in my mind – to equalize this art form and make it accessible to everyone.”
ALANNA ROAZZI-LAFORET’S METAVERSE & WEB3 TIPS
Website: decrypt.co
