In May 2022, we introduced Lighthouse to the world and shared our vision for better discoverability across the open metaverse. In our own words:

“Today the vast majority of virtual worlds are disconnected from one another. Finding friends, common interests, places to go, and things to see across the growing number of virtual worlds composing the metaverse is a daunting and disjointed experience. Unlike internet search, where everything is accessible from a single entry point, metaverse exploration currently requires users to jump from world to world, hoping to stumble on something interesting”.

We added:

“In a user-generated content universe in constant mutation, it is impossible for users to keep track of the ebb and flow of experiences available”.

We committed to launch a v1 of Lighthouse by Summer 2022 and we’re thrilled to announce the launch of the Lighthouse Closed Beta on September 21, 2022, one day shy of the end of the summer💪.

Today, we are happy to invite you all to join our waitlist and look forward to finally welcoming you to the portal.

What’s In The Beta

Although we’re still in early beta, the portal already offers many features that should simplify the lives of both explorers and creators:

Places and Events Search 🔭

• Across: Arhead, Arium, Artifex Unreal, Astra, Decentraland, Hyperfy, LVCIDIA, Mona, Oncyber, Portals, Protoverse, Rarerooms, Rove, Somnium Space, Spatial, The Sandbox, Voxels, Webaverse.

• Users can “like” experiences and “pin” them to their profiles, displaying and curating collections that make the metaverse a special place for them.

Gates ⛩️

• Users can create personalized profiles (“Gates”) linking both their built experiences (for creators) and pinned experiences (for explorers). Data sitting in a user gate remains exportable to other platforms. Portability, openness, and lock-in-resistant product design are part of our DNA.

• Users can also manually add metaverse places and events not currently displayed in the Lighthouse portal, allowing the platform’s native content to grow in a bottom-up fashion as we increase the breadth of worlds we partner with.

Community 🤝

• Beyond providing a snapshot of your metaverse tastes and identity, you will be able to build a following around your work. For creators specifically, this means (i) your fans can be notified of the new experiences you build as soon as they go live, (ii) gaining a better understanding of the traction your spaces generate, and (iii) laying the foundation for monetizing the traffic you bring to the metaverse.

• Discover the work of some of the leading metaverse creators and curators in the space.

Sharing 🌱

• Finally, we built Lighthouse to serve as your portal to the metaverse. That means making it simple and frictionless to share your tastes, discoveries, and artwork with the world. While there will be much more done on our sharing and social features between now and December, you can already share your profile and curations on your socials.

What’s Next

There are several features slated for our public launch in December 2022 that are excluded from this beta. Below our roadstarmap:

Why You Should Check Out the Portal

The alpha opportunity to take a new web3 product out for a test drive might be enough motivation for some of you, but we understand how busy you all are. So we created an extensive reward package for those completing our Beta Onboarding and sharing their feedback with us.

We built a three-tiered onboarding program (shared with users when portal access is granted) that includes gifts such as merch, free NFTs, and access to a cash draw on the yield generated from Lighthouse’s crypto-powered savings account. As part of this draw, Lighthouse will place $1 million USD in a Gemini savings account at time of beta launch and redistribute the earned yield in December at Art Basel to the lucky winners among those who complete the steps of our onboarding journey.

Again, we couldn’t be happier to have you all join us and we look forward to building with you all this piece of critical metaverse infrastructure that we see as a net positive for all actors across the open metaverse ecosystem.

The Lighthouse Team