Over the past year, metaverses have been all the rage. Online MMORPGs have been around for years; the concept of interacting in a virtual world is nothing new. True ownership, however, is what sets metaverses based on blockchains apart. These metaverses allow players to own plots, and they can create and build whatever they want on their plot. While some monetize their plot of land by creating and offering interactive play-to-earn games, others use their plot of land to create free immersive experiences or set up a virtual office or store of their real-life business.
Many famous brands and personalities seem drawn to the concept of the metaverse because of the degree of player control it offers. One example is Facebook, which has rebranded itself as Meta to champion the idea of a metaverse. While many metaverse projects are in development, the most popular metaverses such as Decentraland and Sandbox have been built on Ethereum.
In this article, we’ve decided to explore a metaverse built on the Cardano blockchain – Pavia. This particular project saw its virtual land prices soar in the past month even as the broader crypto market fell. Let’s find out what prompted this!
What is Pavia?
The Pavia metaverse is built on the Cardano blockchain. ‘Pavia’ is an Italian town named after Gerolamo Cardano, who was born there. A key reason for this is that Cardano was named after Gerolamo Cardano, an Italian mathematician.
The metaverse is still at its very early stage of development and has yet to deliver a testable version. This project utilizes a 3D art style and has a total of 100,000 parcels that have been sold in three phases. Currently, landowners are able to view the position of their land parcels on the Pavia Map, but they can’t visit their land parcels or deploy content on them in-game. Pavia also intends to be an interoperable metaverse so that its residents can explore the broader metaverse ecosystems within or outside of Cardano.
Anonymous Founder and Team Members
Pavia is managed and owned by Pavia Corp, a legal entity registered in Seychelles. Its legal office is located in the Czech Republic. Pavia Corp is run by a decentralized global team with the conscious exception of the USA. The project claims to have had no funding from any Venture Capital investors. Notably, while the project has a list of team members, the real-life identities of the team remain undisclosed at the time of this writing.
According to the website, the CEO and COO of the project go by the pseudonymous names of Morgan and Paul, respectively. Morgan, the CEO, claims to be an investor with 5+ years in the blockchain & cryptocurrency space and comes from a UK legal & compliance background. Paul, the COO, claims to be a seasoned technology executive and business growth specialist with seven years of experience in game services and cloud tech.
Metaverse Ecosystem
Since the Pavia Project is still in its infancy, the project’s ecosystem is in a state of conceptual development and addition. As it stands now, the team plans to develop the below listed specific components for the ecosystem.
Land
This is the first and most fundamental component of the Pavia Ecosystem. Pavia has a total of 100,000 land parcels which were sold in three different sale phases. On the Cardano blockchain, these land parcels are minted and sold as NFTs (cNFT). Each parcel has a unique coordinate that indicates its position on the Pavia map.
The first two land sale phases of 29,000 and 31,000 land parcels happened in October and November 2021. After witnessing an unprecedented level of interest in the land sale, the Pavia team decided to hold a whitelist campaign for the third land sale of 40,000 land parcels in February 2022. The whitelisted land sale is currently in progress, with almost all land parcels successfully minted and purchased at the time of writing.
Similar to the Sandbox, adjacent land parcels can also be grouped to form ‘Estates’ in Pavia, provided there is at least a minimum of 9 adjacent land parcels arranged in a rectangular or square shape to form an estate.
Where to buy land?
Currently, the floor price of Pavia land parcels sits at around 400 ADA. Users can purchase land parcels at cnft.io, jpg.store, and tokhun.io. Always keep in mind to cross-verify the policy id of the cNFT given on the official project website before making any purchases.
Pavia Map
The Pavia Map is the visual representation of the Pavia Metaverse. Players can visit the map to see the position of their plot in the overall Pavia Metaverse. Using this feature, investors can make strategic decisions on buying a specific parcel of land at a particular price. There is also an inter-land messaging function in development that landowners can use to message other landowners on the map.
If you look across the Pavia website, you will notice six types of plots on the Pavia Map. They are Land, Sand, Sea, Deep Sea, Mountain, and Forest. While the land parcels being sold are only the light green plots called ‘Land’, the other five plots will be public spaces. While there is no official confirmation, there is some speculation that some of these public plots might see some sort of public utility and experience being built on them.
Pavia Compatible Assets and VR
Adding experiences to the purchased land cNFTs is crucial to any metaverse project. Users can create these experiences by creating 3D models and scenes, such as a virtual store, a game experience, a zoo, a building, etc. There is no limit to what a user can create. These are known as Pavia Compatible Assets (PCAs) in Pavia.io. In the future, Pavia plans on having a marketplace for traded assets built by players. They also plan to provide early public access to the v1 of the official PCA building tool in the near future.
Users can currently create 3D models of PCA using modeling software such as Blender, Maya, or 3Ds Max, or a combination of these. Pavia will allow the deployment of these assets if creators comply with the official guidelines, which can be found in the pinned messages of the Pavia discord channel.
However, by focusing on VR experience for its users, the project appears to have one of the best long-term goals. In-game VR experiences will be financed by Pavia Corp. They also plan to showcase their initial efforts in early 2022 (or earlier if possible) by showing you the ‘Pavia Plaza’. Users will spawn in the Pavia Plaza when they enter the metaverse.
Pavia Smart Contract NFT Marketplace
Pavia also plans to build an independent on-site marketplace to facilitate trades of Pavia Compatible Assets (PCAs) and Lands in the Pavia ecosystem. The marketplace is currently being developed in partnership with cnft.io. This partnership with cnft.io aims to build an engine for their marketplace that will lower transaction costs.
Avatars
Avatars refer to the appearance of the user within its metaverse. Pavia has partnered with readyplayer.me to create its user avatars. This partnership plays well into Pavia’s vision for an interoperable metaverse. This allows users to use their avatar across multiple applications and games, not just the Pavia metaverse. The avatar creation feature is currently available to users. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the platform offered to create an avatar by uploading a photograph of my face. It’s safe to say I was impressed by the likeliness of my avatar with my IRL picture. The clothing and customization options available on the platform was also extensive.
Pavia Portals
One of the exciting things about Pavia seems to be its long-term goal of interoperability. The Pavia team has hinted at the possibility of traveling between the metaverses. It is worth noting that they seem to have purchased land at both Decentraland and the Sandbox. Pavia Portals aims to be the plot of land in different metaverses, allowing users to travel between other metaverses through the Pavia Portals land located in those metaverses.
PAVs – Digital Pets
#PavsnotPets. That’s the tagline of this new and hyped announcement from the Pavia team. While much detail is not known, it seems like Pavia will have creatures known as Pavs that users can catch and domesticate. What happens after that is unknown, but with the way things seem to be playing out, one can speculate that we might see something similar to a Pokémon-inspired metaverse. Maybe?
Pavia Community Forum
One of the core missions of Pavia is to be a community-driven project, which is exactly why the Pavia Community Forum exists. Users can post improvement proposals called Pavia Improvement Proposal (PIPs) on the community forum.
PAVIA Tokenomics and Airdrop
The Pavia token is the native utility token of the Pavia metaverse. Even though it is not yet clear how the token will be used in the Pavia ecosystem, it is possible that it will become the primary currency in its on-site marketplace once it is available. Additionally, developers could use the token to monetize gaming experiences built on land parcels of the metaverse.
Token Allocation
The total supply of the PAVIA token is 2 billion tokens. The token was minted in December 2021 and distributed in the following manner:
- Community Airdrop– Around 25 percent of the total supply of Pavia tokens was airdropped to land parcel holders from the first and second land sales. The snapshot for the airdrop was taken on 16th December 2021. The airdrop rate was 8,333 PAVIA per land parcel in the wallet at the time of the snapshot.
- Liquidity and Utility– Around 25 percent of the tokens are allocated for liquidity and utility measures. These tokens will be slowly released into the ecosystem through different programs such as play-to-earn gaming, public sales, and liquidity offerings through DEXs.
- Project Development and Ecosystem– Around 30 percent of the tokens are allocated to developing the project and ecosystem. For example, this could be in the form of incentivization programs for PCA creators and game developers.
- Pavia Team and Advisors– Around 20 percent of the tokens are allotted for the Pavia Founders, Team, and advisors. The tokens are vested and will be distributed according to a schedule that will be released by the team soon.
Price History
The Pavia token is currently trading at 0.081 ADA or 0.09$ per token. The token reached an all-time high of 0.18 ADA per token on Jan 18 before steadily declining down to current levels. However, this is expected as the token currently does not hold any utility until the initial version of the metaverse or the on-site marketplace is launched.
Where to buy Pavia tokens?
The Pavia token is currently trading on SundaeSwap and MuesliSwap.
Partnerships
Pavia’s most notable partnerships are with cnft.io and readyplayer.me. The partnership with CNFT is to develop an engine for their on-site marketplace to keep transaction fees to a minimum. The partnership with readyplayer.me is to ensure their Avatars are interoperable and can be used across many applications. Pavia also recently acquired ‘CardanoKidz’, a popular NFT project on the Cardano blockchain.
PAVIA Roadmap
Even though the project is in its early development stage, it has a clear roadmap laid out for the current year. The goals of the roadmap are split into four quarters.
- Q1– We are already midway through the completion of Q1 of the roadmap. So far, the team has already completed the liquidity provision to Cardano DEXs and started developing PCAs and user-generated content. The team has also begun work on creating the in-game experience of the Pavia Plaza. The final goal of Q1 happens to be the final land sale which is almost done at the time of writing the article. The team seems to be well ahead of schedule in their goals for Q1.
- Q2– The team has five goals for Q2. These goals seem to focus on releasing the Pavia Ecosystem’s key components, namely the PCA builder tool, the in-game marketplace, the PAVIA tokenomic model, and finally, a limited-edition airdrop ‘Pavs’ to landowners.
- Q3– This quarter’s goals seem to be focused on testing and deploying the in-game functionality of the metaverse components. This quarter will see the team test out the PCAs by deploying them at scale onto land parcels and testing out the functionality of Pavia Portals. The quarter ends with announcing the date for full deployment of the metaverse.
- Q4– This quarter’s goals seem to be one of refining the experience of the users of the Pavia metaverse. The team plans to refine the tokenomic model based on past data and experiment with integrating the Pavia metaverse into the wider metaverse ecosystem inside and outside of Cardano.
Controversies
The disappearance of ‘Cardano Buzz’ has been the subject of recent controversy in Pavia, causing some to panic. Aside from being the project’s CMO, he was also one of their public faces. CardanoBuzz’s Twitter, YouTube, and other social channels suddenly disappeared, causing this panic.
However, the Pavia team has quelled rumors by tweeting that Cardano Buzz has officially left their team, and they are planning to bring in a new CMO. They had stated that CardanoBuzz had left the project after completing all contractual obligations.
The main gripe from some of the community seems to be the team’s pseudonymous nature. Whether the team plans to dox themselves concerning the incident remains unclear. The subject of pseudonymous identities in the crypto-space remains a hot topic. Just last week, the identities of the Bored Ape Yacht Club founders were doxed by the Buzzfeed team. This particular move by BuzzFeed was met with much debate from both sides of the conversation.
Conclusion
Pavia’s focus on interoperability certainly adds new dimensions to metaverses. The founders’ pseudonymous identities have generated some concerns, but the majority of the community seems to be unperturbed. Despite a promising roadmap, it remains to be seen whether Pavia will be able to achieve all its goals without delay. This is especially true considering Pavia’s plans to make the metaverse interoperable with other projects.
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Author
Chris Munch is a professional cryptocurrency and blockchain writer with a background in software businesses, and has been involved in marketing within the cryptocurrency space. With a passion for innovation, Chris brings a unique and insightful perspective to the world of crypto and blockchain. Chris has a deep understanding of the economic, psychological, marketing and financial forces that drive the crypto market, and has made a number of accurate calls of major shifts in market trends. He is constantly researching and studying the latest trends and technologies, ensuring that he is always up-to-date on the latest developments in the industry. Chris’ writing is characterized by his ability to explain complex concepts in a clear and concise manner, making it accessible to a wide audience of readers.
