Lighthouse is building the open metaverse navigation engine, a unified interface empowering users to search for places, events, friends, creators, and experiences across and within virtual worlds. The Lighthouse portal currently indexes thousands of experiences from more than 20 leading platforms, including ecosystems such as Hyperfy, Mona, Oncyber, Portals, Spatial, The Sandbox, and many others. Our portal is accessible at lighthouse.world and our browser extension, which enables users to share their location to their friends in near real-time across the spatial web, can be downloaded at the following link. Before diving further into this blog post, we strongly encourage you to check out the portal and download the extension. Reading about the metaverse is cool, but experiencing it is epic af.

We launched the Lighthouse closed beta on September 15, 2022 - almost 3 months ago to the day. The beta itself only came 4 months after we came out of stealth and announced our seed round co-led by Accel, BlockTower, White Star Capital, and Animoca Brands. Even if Lighthouse’s intent always was to cater to an as broad of an audience as possible, trade-offs needed to be made in the early days so we could provide the best possible experience to a core subset of users. Given the metaverse’s state of adoption at the time, the nature of the worlds we indexed, and our commitment to push forward web3’s adoption, we decided to focus on crypto native users.

As such, the Lighthouse closed beta launched in September was NFT-gated. This had the dual benefit of allowing us to control the pace at which we onboarded the thousands of users signed up to be testers and narrow in on users Lighthouse would most immediately shine for. After 3 months of successful building, testing, and iterating, we finally reached a point where we felt ready to open up the portal to all user types. At the core of our vision for the metaverse is the ability for users to retain control over their data and assets as they navigate it. Accordingly, the question was how can we smoothly bring on new users into web3, without beating them over the head with obscure concepts, nor shutting them out of the ecosystem altogether?

This is where Privy comes in.

Introducing the Lighthouse x Privy Partnership

Privy is a privacy-first onboarding toolkit for web3. The company’s solution helps developers easily onboard their users to crypto, regardless of whether they have wallets across mobile and desktop. Privy’s progressive onboarding flows enable users to sign up to apps with wallets, emails or social identifiers and build up their profiles as they engage. At its core, Privy is built with user privacy in mind, so users can protect their data as they surf the web.

We looked through a number of other offerings, both large traditional auth providers and web3 solutions and ultimately decided to work with Privy to onboard our users to the metaverse. Privy was the only solution we found that could easily help us onboard users to web3 regardless of where they come from. Whether web3-native or new to the space, Privy gives us a single user object that evolves as our user engages with Lighthouse so we can build custom experiences. It makes handling wallet connectors and securing user data easy.

As we worked through the integration with the Privy team, our choice was proven correct:

• We are aligned with their mission of building identity solutions that give people back control of their data and identity online. Privy seeks to ensure people maintain visibility and control over the data they share with the apps they use. While this work is still in its infancy, Lighthouse helps push boundaries to create a metaverse where users are in charge!

• Privy’s model is completely user-centric. This means dealing with a dynamic user abstraction that grows over time as the user interacts with Lighthouse. A user can sign in with an email, then connect a twitter account and later on two wallets. Through this all, Privy surfaces a unified object we can use to customize the user’s metaverse experience. Privy has the most comprehensive solution on the market when it comes to wallet connectors, traditional authentication methods, and user management methods. This means being able to onboard users regardless of how they come in without having to cobble libraries or wallets together ourselves, a huge step in our mission to bring the metaverse to as many as possible.

• Their UX is directed and delightful, enabling users to sign up quickly and matching our brand. With Privy’s coming work to make key management simple for users, we believe they will become the industry’s standard for web3 onboarding flows.

• The team is an absolute delight to work with. From upfront planning to integration and load testing, Privy’s team was deeply responsive, caring, and competent. They’ve been a pleasure to work with.

On the mission of building identity solutions that give people back control of their data and identity online

Lighthouse is a web3 company at heart. To us, partnering with Privy in order to ensure that users have control over their own data is only the first step in our quest to build a discovery portal that respects human’s sovereignty as digital citizens. 

Beyond the Privy partnership, Lighthouse is currently exploring decentralized social graph solution providers and benchmarking capabilities of leading projects such as Lens, CyberConnect, Orbis, and Farcaster. We are also reflecting on which, if any, part of our stack could / should be open-sourced in order to enable other projects to build on our efforts to simplify discovery across the open metaverse.

At scale, Lighthouse also wishes to decentralize its governance, but there is lot that needs to be built, understood, and derisked as we get there. This is currently more an inspiration that lies with our belief that large social and discovery platforms need to have built-in community governance mechanisms in order to thrive than a formal commitment to launch a Lighthouse token at some point. We believe in web3, community ownership, and are committed towards building a decentralized future .

On their approach as collaborators

The Privy folks have been a pleasure to work with. Here is what Alex Emery, Lighthouse’s talented Head of Engineering had to say: "Not only is the Privy product extremely well built, their team has been an absolute delight to work with. We’ve thoroughly analyzed the authentication solution providers on the market and feel confident that Privy has the most comprehensive solution. We are excited by their product roadmap and look forward to deepening our collaboration as they expand their feature library."

We agree with Henri’s take that web3 needs to power a broader set of use cases in order to drive meaningful adoption.

“In order for web3 to grow beyond its current financial focus, it must enable the creation of new product experiences for users. We’re thrilled to partner with Lighthouse to help them navigate the metaverse and onboard the next generation of users into web3,” says Henri Stern, Privy’s co-founder and CEO.

Wrapping it up

This partnership helps Lighthouse open the doors to the metaverse to users without crypto wallets, helping onboard them to the space smoothly. As we continue on our mission to simplify discovery across the open metaverse, we remain committed to exploring high-impact collaboration with web3-native solution providers that place users’ privacy and sovereignty at the center of the equation.

As previously mentioned Lighthouse has recently released its metaverse navigation engine. Users can easily and quickly navigate thousands of worlds by following creators and jumping into their favorite experiences and projects. Check out the portal and download the extension.

About Lighthouse

Lighthouse is building the open metaverse navigation engine, a unified interface empowering users to search for places, events, friends, creators, and experiences across and within virtual worlds. The Lighthouse portal currently indexes experiences from more than 20 leading virtual worlds, including ecosystems such as Hyperfy, Mona, Oncyber, Portals, Spatial, The Sandbox, and many others. Lighthouse is backed by Accel, BlockTower, White Star Capital, Animoca Brands and other leading venture investors. Learn more on lighthouse.world and download the Lighthouse browser extension here.

About Privy

Privy Auth is a simple library to easily onboard all users to web3, regardless of whether they already have a wallet, across mobile and desktop. Privy exists to help developers craft delightful products and keep users in control of their assets and data across apps. Giving users access to better products starts with login(), making it easier for people to manage cryptographic materials across the Internet. Privy is proudly backed by investors such as Sequoia Capital, BlueYard, Electric Capital, Protocol Labs, Archetype and many others. Learn more at privy.io.