A UC San Diego-Based Tech Startup (and Professor) Is Testing the Limits of Blockchain, VR

Amid eucalyptus trees and native shrubs, a biotechnology-focused virtual reality and blockchain company found a home on the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) campus in La Jolla.

Founded in 2015 by Chief Executive Officer Steve McCloskey, who graduated from the world’s first nanoengineering department in the world  at UCSD, Nanome Inc. is headquartered at a central hub of science and technology. With support from the UCSD campus, the company is developing ways in which virtual reality can help researchers in academia. They want to use blockchain to open their technology up to the crowd. 

Apace with creating VR interfaces for the ‘STEM’ fields (science, technology, environment, mathematics) and a portfolio of corporate biotechnology clients, Nanome is building the Matryx blockchain platform.

The idea is to bridge all of the Nanome products together with blockchain. Researchers will be incentivized to experiment with and analyze 3D data in a collaborative environment; in particular, the Matryx native digital token, ‘MTX’, for which there is presently an ongoing token sale. Matryx has partnered with San Diego-based Edge (formerly Airbitz) to incorporate crypto-tokens.

On Matryx, ‘the crowd’ would be able to collaborate abreast corporations and universities on profound research questions. While a pharmaceutical company might create a bounty on the platform for which it maintains a record of intellectual property rights, an online creation community might prefer to keep the IP in the public domain. The blockchain will also be used as an addressing layer to track identity for accurate attribution, something which many believe modern academia lacks.

Nanome spun out of UCSD Professor of Visual Arts Benjamin Bratton’s Design and Geopolitics lab. Bratton is an advisor and co-founder of Nanome and author of “The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty”. In this tome, he posits a future world in which “planetary scale computing” (think: Ethereum’s Virtual Machine) underpins human society.

“To me what’s exciting about blockchain-based systems is the way in which they would potentially open up and make [the world] a much more equitable and efficient [place],” said Bratton in a YouTube video.

He calls the way in which mankind “senses value” today a “low res” way of doing things. In a future tech stack, with blockchain keeping track, value might be perceived differently.

“You know, when a rain forest absorbs CO2, we might say there’s value there and then carbon markets there is some sort of value there, but again these are very kind of with the mechanisms we have to sense these things,” philosophizes Bratton. “When a nurse knows just how to care for a patient and her expertise in knowing how to care for this patient, we don’t know how to sense, and essentially as a society, how to pay for that expertise that she has.” Bratton thinks, in principle only, blockchains could allow “higher resolution” ways of keeping track of what is important.

“[Y]ou’re beginning to see blockchains being used as an underlying layer, a protocol layer, that allows you to keep track of a lot of the things and events in processes that are happening in a sort of a complex swarm,” says Bratton. “And you need to know is where they are and when they are and how they relate to one another in a way that is open, essential, transparent, and all those kinds of things.”

Nanome intends for Matryx to sense, index, store and calculate value (like tokens and IP) created in a collective and collaborative environment.

“I think what we will see with Matryx is players who already have a significant intellectual property portfolio, but are looking to activate that portfolio and realize the latent value in that portfolio in ways that would be beneficial publicly,” says Bratton. “I think the ways in which you have put this IP out there, and allow it to be used, and let it be part of projects in a way in which you can disintermediate that licensing process a little bit will be one that will have a potentially important accelerating effect on innovation in collaboration.”

Images: Justin O’Connell

Justin O’Connell is founder of CryptographicAsset.com. He has covered blockchain topics since 2012. His work has appeared in VICE, Bitcoin Magazine and more.