HighStreet x Satoshi Club AMA Recap from 16th of August

Welcome to another episode of our AMA series. Today we are glad to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from HighStreet, the bridge between virtual worlds, real life and web. The AMA took place on August 16 and our guests was Travis Builds.

The total reward pool was 500$ and was divided into three parts. In this AMA Recap we will try to summarize some of the most interesting points for you.

PART 1, INTRODUCTION AND COMMUNITY QUESTIONS

Gold Rocket | Satoshi Club: Hello again, dear Satoshi Club community! We are pleased to announce AMA with HighStreet. Today our guest is Travis Builds.

Travis Builds: Hey guys.

Gold Rocket | Satoshi Club: Let’s start! Introduce yourself please. How did you get to be involved in crypto & HighStreet?

Travis Builds: So the story of HighStreet is a little more interesting, my background is in Computer Science and I met my co-founder in Draper University @San Mateo in 2015 where we founded a traditional equity based VR company called LumiereVR. At Lumiere, we use our computer vision technology to help brands and retail companies turn underutilized real estate into mixed reality experiences. Since our inception we’ve built and picked up a few entities along the way. We have an award winning studio arm backed by Sundance Festival that consistently pushes the boundary of Art and Tech, in fact, last year, my co-founder produced a piece that won an Emmy. In 2018 we also acquired a data analytics company called Retinad Realite Virtulle based in Montreal. Incorporating their gaze tracking software into our metaverse allow brands to receive consumer behavior data in real time. How long a product had been interacted with, how many times a logo’s been seen, every piece of information is natively picked up and processed for brands to help improve their customer experience.

At the same time as the company’s founding back in 2015, I’ve started to invest into Crypto. From BTC and ETH to being one of the earlier buy-ins to the NEO and QTUM ecosystem during the ICO boom. I’ve seen the rise and fall of cycles, re-invested back in during DEFI summer where I got to meet and co-invest with a bunch of great people on our cap table today. As the pandemic aided in the growth of our digital retail business and the NFT craze further edged a lot of our customers into the blockchain space, we rebranded the company as HighStreet and replaced our whole back-end infrastructure with smart contracts.

HighStreet is essentially shopify on an MMORPG game, it allows various brands from HIGH fashion to STREET wear to easily launch their own virtual shops in our metaverse. The game itself is inspired by some of our childhood classics, from Maplestory, Avatar the last airbender, Treasure Planet, and One Piece. From a user’s perspective it should feel just like any other MMORPG game, with monsters to fight, quests to complete, with the only exception that the shops within the world are very much real products from real brands and that it’s built with native VR support.

Gold Rocket | Satoshi Club: Tell us about the benefits of HighStreet. How is it different from others?

Travis Builds: So we’ve built the project from the ground up obviously with a lot of nostalgia in mind but here are some points that we usually highlight as our differentiators.

1. We are building an MMORPG built from the ground up to support VR natively
2. We are integrating real brands and real products into this world
3. We don’t sell land, but sell real estate in forms of Condos, Villas, even castles
4. Every Product in the game is phygital meaning either you can redeem it for a physical product, or they’re fractional NFTs that allow you to pick either to buy just the digital component or the entire phygital pair
5. Our limited edition product market uses a bonding curve that automates price discovery for new brands as well as guarantees liquidity for buyers.

Andres M. | Satoshi Club: Which MMORPG inspired you to create High street?

Travis Builds: So I’ve played a lot of Maplestory Growing up, and the idea of the free market there itself was my first intro to commerce I would say. A lot of our colleagues on the team is the same way with a lot of WOW players and early runescape players as well. I’d say all of us are very big fans of open world explorations as well from BOTW to Skyrim, Witcher 3 to Assassin’s Creed. On the Sci-Fi side our big inspiration definitely also come from Ready Player One (the book!) and Sword art online.

Gold Rocket | Satoshi Club: Also we would like to know more about your team. Who is on the project team core?

Travis Builds: So the team’s been working together for over 6 years now since our founding in 2015. Jenny, my co-founder and I met during our time at Draper University, her art background at Sotheby’s and my Tech background made a perfect match in starting a new type of VR company catering to brands. We’re later joined by various other characters as well, from corporates like Mckinsey, to blockchain projects like NEM, from alt asset collectors of the traditional kinds to NFT collectors. The team is approaching40 now rapidly, and over the years it’s become quite diverse. The core values haven’t changed though, all of us are gamers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsogJArDhek&t=4s&ab_channel=HighstreetMetaverse Here’s a video of our Crypto Lounge, where heavily inspired by ready player one, users can load up their $high tokens and trade natively in crypto with VR.

Q1 from Telegram User @andrey_seleznov

Hi HighStreet Market!

I am intrigued by the concept of hybrid products that you advertise on the website. Not all will agree that we live our life half online and half in real life. Your market will offer products that are crafted to exist both in physical and virtual form and always come straight from the brands. Do you estimate this approach will work equally well for both crypto holders as well as people who never owned a token? Will such products potentially be able to introduce new users to the crypto space via granting them virtual copies of the physical goods? And lastly, what are the main benefits you consider this hybrid products system brings?

Travis Builds: Hybrid products, or what we tend to refer to as Phygital Products are where we can begin to merge the digital and the physical world together. We primarily have two types of Phygital Products that will be sold on HighStreet.

On our limited edition product market place:

This is based on Ethereum, and when someone makes a purchase they receive an ERC 20 token representing the Product itself. When redeemed this product token is burned and the physical redemption process begins where the Brand will receive an order from their back-end ecommerce system. This market place is geared towards newer brands, perhaps started by influencers. The bonding curve is automating price discovery for them, while guaranteeing liquidity for the buyer. Since all Deposits are stored in a smart contract (besides fees), it makes it easier for newer crypto users to buy with confidence.

Regular products purchased in game:

These are regular items that brands sell regularly, they are tokenized as NFTs and will be on the Solana system. When users purchase these products they are sold in fractions. The first fraction is usually relatively cheap and contains the digital item only that can serve other in-game functions. If a user wants to acquire the physical component, they purchase the other fraction and the redemption process will begin where brands will receive an order from their EC system. The first fraction is essentially pure profit for brands.

Andres M. | Satoshi Club: Could you share us the most important physical products in the platform? Maybe some pics of it or links to check it.

Travis Builds: So the limited edition product market place will launch a couple days after our public sale (planning for Sept). We will make announcements soon!

Andres M. | Satoshi Club: Can we redeem weapons, clothes, things like that?

Travis Builds: yes, to all, some products that are real, for example a lipstick from a brand may very well be a sword in the game. By adding special in-game features to real products we can create a better connection between brands and users.

Here’s another clip captured from within a VR headset. Here you can also see a bit of HighStreet City out the window

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnI4_oVLWzA&ab_channel=HighstreetMetaverse

Andres M. | Satoshi Club: Awesome, which tools are needed to join the world? Oculus rift? HTC vive?

Travis Builds: at the beginning we are supporting PCVR (Quest (2) with Link, Rift, Vive, Index) etc., of course you can opt to play with Keyboard and Mouse as well, but we are hoping to slowly convert everyone into one of us ha! Early next year we’re working a release for companion apps on mobile and browser where you can take a part of the met averse to go. Maybe you’re in-game real estate, you can buy products for and decorate it on your way to work.

here’s another look at a limited edition space lounge that we will be selling soon as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wmsXFqGQ68&ab_channel=HighstreetMetaverse

Q2 from Telegram User @yellowchamp

According to your website that as we already live our life half online and half in real life. The products on your market are crafted to exist both in physical and virtual form and always come straight from the brands. So as the products on your market are crafted to exist both in physical and virtual form, what would be the difference between the physical and virtual form products especially in terms of quality? Why do you need to sell some virtual form products if the physical form product is available? What will be the use of Virtual form products? How it can be utilized? Does HighStreet has any marketplace where we can access both the physical and virtual product of your platform? As you say that those products are straight from the brands, so can you tell us what kind of products are available in your marketplace for both physical and virtual form? Thank you

Travis Builds: When you get the digital component of the product, your avatar gets to wear/use it in the metaverse. Some products have special features (E.g. Umbrellas that let you fly or glide, pants that let you walk faster), when you redeem for the physical product. The actual umbrella or pair of pants will be shipped to you! Quality wise will be similar to all the footages I’m showing today. I would say selling real products as in game items create the value of the digital products. If the Product themselves is just a 3D representation of the physical product, then there would not be a point to it. Hence why we do have an entire game behind HighStreet!

Andres M. | Satoshi Club: What payment methods do you accept?

Travis Builds: At the beginning we support ETH/DAI/$HIGH, eventually, it will migrate to purely $HIGH. We do have on-ramp integration so credit card for items < $500 will also be supported.

Furthermore, for the brands, when certain physical products are tied into a game, you augment the utility this product can provide. A shirt is a shirt in real life, but in game a shirt can be a piece of armor. By Selling phygital products as fractional nfts where the first fraction is digital, you open up a new stream of revenue for the brands that hasn’t been explored prior.

Andres M. | Satoshi Club: I think that is great for collectors to have a unique edition of their favorite item.

Travis Builds: I would say there are different ways to look at it, the digital collection era definitely helped ushered in a lot of people who collect digital arts and nfts. I think for limited edition products especially this could be super valuable. However, I do know a lot of people still, especially those who are a bit foreign to the crypto culture, tend to still prefer physical products. Hence why we make all our items redeemable.

Q3 from Telegram User @victorogb

HighStreet which is a rebrand of Luminiere VR and the first commerce-centered Metaverse, recently launched on BullPerks; August 14th 2021. HighStreet hopes that it’s launch which runs till Wednesday 18th August 2021, will open its futuristic marketplace to users satisfying their gaming, shopping and commercial desires. As a matter of investor and shopper preferences, can you carefully provide us details of your current BullPerks event, why did HighStreet choose BullPerks as its preferred launch platform, and what are the added incentives from members of both communities, and what sort of partnerships would HighStreet consider as project develops?

Travis Builds: BullPerk to me is a really innovative project lead by very experienced people. They are a decentralized VC that distributes the allocation provided to them to their community. The tokens purchased there are locked up the same way our institutional investors are. This provides confidence to me as a founder because with more investors sharing the allocation, its less likely they will all dump at the same time. So to clarify this is not a public sale like those on Polkastarter and Miso. we are working on partnerships beyond brands for sure!

HighStreet consists of many islands each owned and run by brand or partners.

Here’s a quick mockup for example of an island we’re building with FlamingoDAO. each island will have residential areas; each island will allow for brands to launch stores onto. Residences of each island will also have special privileges granted by the Island owners, so lots of opportunities to play to earn.

Here’s our concept of Republic City on Realm Island.

Andres M. | Satoshi Club: Wow, a big world.

Travis Builds: it will constantly expand as well! We are working with a few game companies as well to build in portals from islands that will connect to other game worlds. But that is a very difficult technical challenge. So aiming maybe for the first bridge to open end of year next year.

Gold Rocket | Satoshi Club: I never cease to be amazed at how deep your project is.

Travis Builds: Ha-ha It’s been a dream of the team, and a work in progress bit by bit over the past 6 years. Every brand we work with; we essentially build a little piece of the metaverse along with it.

The way users move about from island to island uses solar/steam ships. From individual sized ones like this one to full own battleships. They all fly!

Gold Rocket | Satoshi Club: Are you personally the owner of a portion of the metaverse?

Travis Builds: Umm I think this is a bit of a tricky question, our metaverse differentiates from some of the other projects by being a bit more centralized to begin with. That’s because in order to maintain a level of quality we have to build professionally generated assets. However, down the road 3D modelers for example can propose to have a new statue or art integrated on an island, and the residences of that island can vote to either have it included or not.

So in general, although our core team has a lot of control over the metaverse at the moment from bringing in brands, crafting islands, and building cities. Eventually it should transition into being in the control of our users adn residences.

Q4 from Telegram User @bigboicity12

Virtual reality is really a “replanted land” with more applications and better development in different fields and industries of society. Highstreetworld is building virtual technology (VR) for Artists, Gamers, crypto enthusiasts. Currently NFT and GameFi are growing very fast, will Highstreetworld face any barriers when entering this market? What is your plan to exploit the full potential of the market? I don’t know if the Highstreetworld platform is exclusively for gamers? What about non-gamer users? Can they still generate income even without playing your game? If so, what are the other possible ways?

Travis Builds: Yes, VR is a new opportunity for a lot of traditional industries. For Retail, it allows the creativity of brands to sing once again without the constraints of physics or expensive building costs, bringing the joy of brand discovery and shopping as an adventure back to a world dominated by fast E-commerce checkouts. We are absolutely involved with the NFT and GameFi industry, we have a proof of play mechanism that allow players to earn $HIGH tokens by completing daily quests, we have sponsored quests from brands that allow players to complete certain branded tasks to earn even more tokens, and of course our real estate components are another method for both brand partners and users to earn more by playing!

Regarding non-game users, you can simply buy and sell products on our market place on the browser to make money! If you buy limited edition products, it’s a really easy bet, if one more person buys the product after you, you would’ve made money in theory ha! We also have mobile companion apps coming out for those who don’t have a PC, this not only allow non-core players to provide more content for actual VR users, but also potentially serve as a gateway into our world that will convince them to one day buy a PC Rig.

Andres M. | Satoshi Club: Thanks for the answer, after proceed with the next question I would like to ask if there are more ways to buy $HIGH tokens?

Travis Builds: There are plenty of ways to earn $High tokens, obviously the exchange is one place! Otherwise:

1. Fight monsters and earn $HIGH from their drops like any open world game.
2. Complete Daily Quests to earn stable amount of $HIGH every day.
3. Sponsored & Special Event Quests?—?Brands can sponsor quests as well that challenge the community as a whole.
4. Brand activations may pay-out in $HIGH tokens as well, find HighStreet Theaters located in any city to see what is available for watch-to-earn ads.
5. Treasure Hunts are available on $HIGHSTREET as well where the whole community can compete in a game wide treasure hunt. Form parties or compete solo, more to be revealed later.
6. Combat Arenas can allow PVP wagers. Challenge your friend to an archery dual by committing $HIGH Tokens ahead of time. Winner Takes All.

Gold Rocket | Satoshi Club: To be honest, I have not seen such Marketplaces yet. When is the release? When can I put mine on vr glasses and buy something?

Travis Builds: We are starting Alpha this week with early signups and users! I will send video update later today in this chat as well! We just have to record some footages. The goal is to transition to public alpha later this year, and in November try to open for beta. Metaverse is hard! So we are launching the limited edition market place first to slowly ease people into the world.

Q5 from Telegram User @Billz120

On Whale Alert?—?you did say that you have Incorporated two main forms of defense, the first being by means of the reserve ratio, the higher the reserve ratio between Reserve Token Balance and Product will lower the price sensitivity, this means depending on the product and can tweak the reserve ratio to ensure drastic price swings don’t occur? The second being by means of KYC, which you did said you understand may be a hotly debated issue, and as of now you people have no other means of limiting the amount of the same product each individual can buy, hence open for community suggestions. Does this not mean that the system is vulnerable here and in which case the community would be badly affected? And do you intend to fix this?

Travis Builds: This is a really good question; we have been talking about this internally for a long time. This question is regarding specifically to the limited edition product place. Based on the brand we take in a couple metrics to generate a custom bonding curve. Initial Price and Max supply is the obvious, however the slope of the curve is also determined by the brand. Some brand may want more redemptions and products being delivered to the users’ hands, others may want to have full speculation and see the price go to the moon in a similar fashion to unstocks. For us although we let the brands decide we generally would put a dampener on the pricing function so that the price increase wouldn’t be too drastic. However, no matter what happens buyers will always still have liquidity and can sell no matter what. Our fear is for someone to come in and buy up a bunch of products at once and driving the price up so grass root users cannot afford the item anymore. Hence the KYC measures being put in place. However, I think this is something we have to really experiment with as we ramp up product listing. It may very well be as simple as limiting products to one per wallet, however if we still see the same issue persist, we may enforce KYC on users. The team wants to provide a fair and fun experience for every buyer, so you can absolutely count on us to be prioritizing the community here.

Q6 from Telegram User @mm_carlos

NFT’s secondary markets like StockX are plagued with logistics overheads. Once a buyer is found, I as a seller, must guarantee the delivery of the product and its authenticity, do these types of cases also occur within highstreet or are your policies different? How does highstreet’s logistics overhead work?

Travis Builds: ha! So this is the exact problem that Highstreet’s limited edition product market solves.

When a user buyer a product on highstreet they get an ERC20 token. That token can be held for when the price goes up and then sold to arbitrage the difference, or it could be redeemed and burned for the physical product. This way traders are only handling the token and not the product itself and can sell that token back to the market at any time he/she wants. The collector on the other hand is the only person who needs to touch the product, and they will always receive it direct from brand, so this way there’s no need for authentication from middle-parties. The bonding curve amm essentially merged the traditional primary and secondary market together removing the logistical nightmares from traders.

However once a product is redeemed, it leaves HighStreet market, and whatever the user does with the physical product is up to them. It may very well end up on stockX or maybe framed and sold as an NFT with Sotheby’s.

PART 2, TELEGRAM COMMUNITY LIVE QUESTIONS

The chat was open for 120 seconds; a lot of questions were posted by Satoshi Club community. Our guest chose some of them.

Q1 from Telegram user Ross

Highstreet.Market is a market place for redeemable limited edition products. The idea of tokens for limited edition products was born with $SOCKS in 2019, and though it is an initiative that would result attractive for even the biggest brands worldwide, is unknown for all of them yet. So as a marketplace specifically for these kind of tokens, who would be the market of High street market right now? Also, the main goal of course is to get huge companies to use these tokens to release their limited edition products, so what is your plan to contact them and develop an effective marketing?

Travis Builds: Highstreet’s limited edition market place is indeed inspired by $SOCKS. Although we work with a lot of luxury brands as mentioned in other answers, this particular market place is actually more suited for newer influencer lead brands. Whereas an established brand may use this as a one-off launch collaboration with an artist, for someone who is new to the apparel business or any business, knowing where your product is priced and valued at is crucial. Lots of influencers are great at building hype but not necessarily good at monetizing it, using the AMM solution we create an automated price discovery mechanism from them. We have a lot of friends in this space, from ASAP Lou of the ASAP Mob who’s starting his Cozy Boys brand, to Jaeson Ma of triller and 88rising, who’s an active advisor to our project.

Q2 from Telegram user Astle

Why do You Bonding Curves Formula is getting Popular is Crypto space? How does Highstreets Solves Logistical & Liquidity problem by using Bonding Curves?

Travis Builds: Bonding curves took off in defi because it removed the middle-man in an exchange. However there are tons of issues with things like “impermanent loss” and slippage, on HighStreet, we actually put deposits from purchases into a vault so that there is always liquidity for sellers as we move up and down the bonding curve. When you sell the liquidity comes straight from the vault. Of course when someone redeems, the vault also pays the brands.

Q3 from Telegram user Rimjhim

How does HighStreet Guarantee the Authencity of any Products? How will you try to provide 24/7 customer support?

Travis Builds: I’m assuming this is from the video. We Guarantee authenticity because products that are redeemed are shipped directly from brands. 24/7 customer support is a way to communicate the bonding curve’s amm to non-crypto natives. We don’t have a middle man making markets for you, if you want to sell, the market will automatically take care of you.

Q4 from Telegram user Alex B

Which one of these aspects is important for you?

1. 1.Increasing Token Price & Value
2. 2.Empowering Platform Development
3. 3.Building Community Trust
4. 4.Expanding Partnership Globally

Travis Builds: Right now definitely empowering platform development, we want to make sure we can deliver the best products to our community at launch. So we are releasing in phases. Phase 1 is alpha for testers of the metaverse, and the limited edition market place for the public. Then followed by a gradual ramp up of products sold as well as a transition to beta.

Q5 from Telegram user Mars Crypto Community

There are too many thieves who want to scam investors by creating fake Crypto projects. Hundreds of projects are viewed with suspicion because of these fraudsters. How can you, potential Investors, resolve doubts about your project and team?

Travis Builds: We’ve been in business for 6 years and are very public with ourselves. The company was known as LumiereVR before we rebranded to HighStreet this year. Anyone can look up our team and track record!

Q6 from Telegram User Lucky Boy

Can you List 1–3 Killer features of your PROJECT that makes it ahead of Competitors? What is the Competitive Advantages your platform Has that you Feel most Confident about??

Travis Builds: First: Real brands and real products in an MMORPG Game.

Second: Limited edition products sold on a bonding curve, eliminating logistical issues, guaranteeing liquidity, while automating price discovery for new brands

Third: Built from the ground up to support VR natively.

Q7 from Telegram User Gem Lover

Is your project backed up by any investors or ventures? who are your strategic partners and do you have enough funds?

Travis Builds: Yes! We are super fortunate enough to have had a ton of support on our journey from both Traditional and Crypto investors. From HTC on the VR side giving us that major hardware support since the early days of VR, to funds like Mechanism and NGC who provide support on the tokenomics side. We are really humbled to have so many great industry leaders who share the same vision and perhaps childhood nostalgia of living in a fantasy or game world. Our traditional investors like Cherubic Ventures and Palmdrive Capital also play a quintessential role in helping us expand our communities beyond just crypto natives. Their almost daily introductions to leading luxury brands and celebrities alike help us close the gap between crypto and non-crypto users by enhancing our onboarding and user experience design

Q8 from Telegram user Alice

Since the tokens from the marketplace represent redeemable limited edition products, how is it ensured that no token or product can be plagiated and therefore no user can be scammed? What gives the tokens the mark of being original and not replicable?

Travis Builds: Tokens are erc20 tokens kept on the HighStreet Market exchange with a unique ticker. They have zero value elsewhere. The system currently is invite only, so we onboard brands manually. In the future if we transition to a permisionless system, sellers/merchants will have to authenticate themselves via Instagram and other KYC means as well as stake our tokens in order to be allowed to sell. We need to make sure all sellers have the ability to deliver physical products.

Q9 from Telegram user Alex Carry

Given that only a small percentage of gamers use cryptocurrency, how will you integrate gamers who are unfamiliar with cryptocurrency in your platform so that you can reach a wider audience in the GAMING and cryptocurrency Industries?

Travis Builds: This has been one of the biggest questions we ask ourselves too! We built a community on telegram without token giveaways, before this week we’ve been only giving away gaming products and VR products like haptic feedback suits and high-end Headsets. For gamers they don’t need to be very familiar with crypto to play, $HIGH works as any other in-game currency and can be obtained by simply playing the game. We hope as they progress in the game they can slowly explore the crypto aspects of the game’s backend and get into this industry bit by bit.

Q10 from Telegram user Einstein

Usually a project will have feature for buyback & burn to up value for the token, I want to know more about High Street burn system, how the burn work, what possible to trigger burn inside your project?

Travis Builds: We have a 30% pool in which tokens are delivered to users playing the game via Proof-Of-Play. Tokens need to be spent everywhere in game, to maintain your real estate costs $HIGH (a bit like management fees in a condo), to repair your ship after dying and respawning back to the city will cost $HIGH, all of these are sources of burns. Furthermore, we do charge brands for various integrations from Consumer Insights analytics to sponsoring quests, these fees are used for token buy-backs.

PART 3, QUIZ AND INFO

As usual, for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about HighStreet. A link to a Quiz form was sent into the chat. Participants had 10 minutes to answer. 300$ were distributed between the winners.

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