Irina Karagyaur is the Head of Ecosystem Growth at Unique Network, where she leads the business growth activities for the organization. She focuses on establishing strategic partnerships and ecosystem building to enable bridging the off-chain world with the Metaverse. She is the Head Ambassador for Western Europe of the Polkadot network, and also London’s Regional Co-Chair to FIBREE (Foundation for International Blockchain and Real Estate Expertise), co-coordinator of the DigitalArt4Climate initiative.
What was your journey like to get where you are?
Back in 2020, I was looking for new technologies and new opportunities for creatives to incorporate tech into their business models. As an architect by education and early career, I’ve always been passionate about designing and building. My research brought me to Polkadot and soon after NFTs. I became a Polkadot ambassador and joined Unique Network full time in May 2021 where I’m currently onboarding creators, start-ups, and enterprises into the world of NFT to help them build their creative solutions, support social causes, and to make NFT and Web3 technology to be truly accessible by everyone.
In a simpler phrase, what is your company exactly doing?
We provide open source NFT infrastructure and blockchain-as-a-service
What about Metaverse are you most excited for in the future?
Giving the opportunity to creators, women, and young people to build a new world with the new economy and ways we exchange value.
Why should we be paying attention to the Metaverse?
The Open Metaverse is inevitable. If we rely on History: There won’t be One Metaverse. That is because of 3 main drivers:
- overlapping tech integrations over time,
- organizational network infrastructure and communities, and of course:
- national regulations.
- When I refer to overlapping tech integrations over time, what I mean is that just like the energy sector diversification now ongoing (Coal coexists with Oil & gas. And now both Hydrocarbons are leaving space for Renewables in the energy mix); we will find a Metaverse where Roblox or Fortnite will seamlessly integrate between them and with future platforms (of themselves or new enterprises). Just like computers didn’t disappear because of smartphones, new hardware and software will bring us new concepts to integrate with current mainstream tech (For instance we can expect huge steps in Wearables).
- organizational network infrastructure and communities. Self-Identity is the quintessence of Human organizations. We organize among our “referent group” which will give us a sense of belonging, it will satisfy common interests, will fulfill shared values, etc. This important driver shapes the groups we chose to integrate and also the tech brands. We currently find Android Vs Apple.
- As we all know, we already have public and Nation-State concerns about privacy and human rights. (Graph of GDPR rules and China’s control over vid games usage) We don’t like how things have developed so far with the Internet and we believe we can do better. Claims about tech giants gathering data and using it against the interests of their citizens are probably the challenge of this new phase of the 21st Century as relevant thinkers propose. For that reason, we find on a daily basis how regulators are working on establishing frameworks for data usage, storage, or regulation for the crypto industry as well. We also find ongoing proposals such as the IPFS or Solid project of Tim Berner-Lee4 the inventor of the World Wide Web2 which can be integrated with IPFS. We can expect the World to dramatically change, once again.
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