Wherein we learn about his early life in Australia, his days as an pipeline engineer, how he almost became a mobile phone franchisee and hit it big in ecommerce. “And then in 2017 I discovered crypto.” Now he’s obsessed with NFTs and has founded a startup to take digital identities across metaverse worlds.

I first got to know Mateen Soudagar, who prefers to go by Matty, in 2020 when I was exploring ways to use the metaverse world Decentraland to promote a book I’d written. Decentraland is a virtual world that’s split into a finite number of parcels; owners of those parcels can build houses or art galleries or amusement parks or conference centers on them. Visitors to Decentraland move through the world with their avatar in a way that reminds me of Minecraft and are free to explore, play games, look at art, go to a party or chat with friends. Big name brands are also coming to the space. Atari recently announced a partnership with Decentraland, and the auction house Sotheby’s recreated their London location in the virtual world. Earlier this year, the blockchain firm Boson paid $704,000 for Decentraland plots to create a virtual mall.

By 2020, Matty was all over Decentraland, with the twitter handle @DCLBlogger to prove it, yet I had no idea how deep he’d gone into the metaverse and how flipping digital parcels of land had kept the money coming in during the crypto winter of 2018-20.

I reached out to Matty to kick off this informal interview series because from the moment I got to know him I could tell he’s just one of those people who can see things a bit earlier than others. His exploration and familiarity with Decentraland led him to non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, before they were widely called NFTs. He was poised to pounce on the NFT craze that began in early 2021 and has amassed nearly 120,000 Twitter followers for his sane advice and endless enthusiasm. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Enjoy!

Matt Leising: I believe you're in Australia. Can you tell me where you grew up and what your parents did and what early life was like for you?

Matty: Yeah, I was born in Australia. My parents had just migrated from India to Australia and it had been a little over a year when little old me was born and life was good. Mum and Dad or were hard at work, being new migrants to the country. Dad was working every day and Mum was taking care of us kids, me and my older sister and then eventually my brother who came six years after. It was good, I grew up loving Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh! that was my generation and fell in love with online games. And as soon as I found the Game Boy and the PlayStation, I was stuck on the TV much since then.

ML: What were your favorite games?

Matty: Pokémon by far. I was obsessed with it. I felt like just the game concept was made for me. I used to like drawing weird creatures and animals and dragons and stuff so when Pokémon came out I was like, holy shit! What else? I used to play RuneScape. Shit it’s like 20 years ago. Grand Theft Auto.. It's pretty much anything that came out that was trending back then. Yeah, grew up playing games. Went to school, did pretty good and then ended up getting into uni -- university -- and did an engineering degree. Actually I wanted to be an architect, but then the parents were like, there's not, not many jobs in architecture.

Matty: So I ended up doing civil engineering. Finished it, worked two years as a pipeline junior engineer when I was installing drainage, I was installing like gas pipes and all kinds of groundwork. And it was fun and I was learning a lot and it was looking great as a career opportunity. I'm pretty sure I would have done pretty well there because of the company I was in and the climate in Australia was pretty good, you know, eight years ago in terms of construction and still is. But then I was very unfulfilled in the second year of work. So the first year was not too bad. I was learning a lot, but in the second year I was just . . . I’ve always been very business oriented. So I've always been a bit of a hustler at heart, I guess trying to buy and sell stuff on eBay and trying to buy and sell stuff at school.

Matty: I just get a thrill from buying something for $20 and selling it for $40. I don't know why that’s just a lot of fun for me. And then in second year of work I was getting super bored and kind of getting sick of working nine to five and the grind and working for “the man.” I had saved about $50,000 or $60,000, which is about 80,000 Aussie dollars, and then I thought I would start a franchise. Back then there was a franchise called Crazy John's, which is a mobile phone telco company that’s pretty popular here in Australia. Then they eventually got bought over by Vodafone. I was in discussions with someone to be a franchisee and take on that and set up in a local shopping center.

Matty: So all that was going into work, in the process to sign the papers. And then I quit work and I was, you know, I had my team ready to go and everything ready to go, but then they got the news that they were being bought over by Vodafone. So then I had quit my job and I was like, oh, screw it, I just have this whole world of opportunity to explore. I’ve got some money in the bank, let’s just spend the next one or two years, three years, whatever, kind of make it in business, whatever that means.

ML: So what year are we in here?

Matty: Ah, we are in 2014.

Matty: I had quit work and basically was on my own. I pretty much searched ‘how to make money’ online. I went through everything, trying to make phone apps, tried to make websites, tried to make some sort of income. I probably stopped and started like 50 things that year. But eventually I found that to make anything, you sort of need to learn marketing and learn how to bring eyeballs to whatever you make. It's not really so much the idea, but awareness and tweaking up that idea along the way. And then that's where I started to make content and then paid marketing for Facebook ads, ads on Google. I started to use the popular paid marketing channel and started to see success there and then eventually I found a lot of success in e-commerce.

I just get a thrill from buying something for $20 and selling it for $40

Matty: Back then there was a platform called Teespring where you could customize merchandise and put logos on a t-shirt and sell them to people on Facebook. And that was, that worked really, really well.

Matty: And then in 2017 I found crypto and the rest is history. I pretty much followed the path of every degen crypto investor who happens to fall upon it, went through all the scams, went through all the lessons the hard way. Lost, started, stopped, lost a lot of money, made a little bit of money, and then in 2018 I found NFTs.

ML: So wait, let's go back for one second here. How did you find crypto? Did somebody introduce it to you? Did you like stumble across it on the web? Or what was that moment?

Matty: I remember keeping tabs on Bitcoin and in 2017 -- there was a time when Bitcoin hit a thousand dollars and I think that was 2017, and I remember just going into my friends group and be like, guys, holy shit, Bitcoin hit a thousand dollars and no one really paid attention. And then I just let it go again. Then it hit $2,000 and then he hit $3,000 and then I was like, this is crazy. I jumped in then. So, I must, I'm not sure. I don't think anyone told me, I think I was just keeping tabs on it and it hit my radar. So I was starting to feel the energy in the air Pretty much jumped in at $3,000.TK

ML: Nice. And then, so that was quite a ride up to $20,000, right? Pretty quickly from there for Bitcoin.

source: Coindesk

Matty: Yeah. So I got in at some time like April or May. Then I quickly realized there's all these other coins, and my local exchange in Australia only had like 20 alt coins, so I decided to put a few hundred dollars in each one to be diversified. But then I basically pulled all my money back out and went all in into different coins and then learned the very hard way to diversify, not to take all your money out of one thing. It was a fun time and I was going through all the, you know, the China FUD and all these things and Bitcoin would go up like crazy and then crash back down. Sleepless nights. It was a fun time.

ML: It's interesting, there's some people out there that didn't go through that period, they got in more recently. What are some of the lessons you took from that to bring you forward into what you started doing later in NFTs?

Matty: There were definitely a lot of lessons. The good thing is when I jumped into NFTs I found Decentraland at the time, which had one of, if not the most, consistent volume of sales happening. So I was able to not just invest but trade and buy and sell. And for me, I realized that it doesn't matter if the industry is on an uptrend or a downtrend, as long as there’s consistent volume I could make money. So I was buying and selling land and, you know, buying land for $200 and flipping it for $500. For me it was a very sustainable income. And that's kind of how I made my money.

Matty: But lessons definitely learned along the way, in the sense of things don't always go up, sort of take your profits you know, just be conservative with how you invest don’t go all in on things. Don’t be impatient. It taught me a lot of patience about projects and the reality of how long it takes to create something in the space and what sort of teams are likely to pull through.

Matty: So I learned a lot in the crypto space but being in the NFT space for the next year or two I learned a lot more. It got me to stick around when I guess 99% of people probably just left or 95%, maybe 90% of the people had left the crypto space. So sticking around when none of that was going on, but realizing that there's a lot, a lot of depth here, like people were still building and although a lot of people had left and lost complete faith in the crypto space, there was a lot of innovation here. So real people making real product.

ML: You're talking here about kind of like the crypto winter, right? From about 2018 to roughly 2020?

Matty: Yeah.

ML: What I find fascinating about Decentraland and other metaverse sandboxes like Cryptovoxels is once you're immersed in it, it's such a great way to understand the power of an NFT. You know, you come around the corner of some building and there's some huge graffiti like NFT. That's just like, wow, that's amazing. And then of course there are all the art galleries that popped up and you can have NFTs in your own house if you have one on your land. Can you just tell me a little bit about that? How that feeling of being – was it that feeling of being immersed in that sort of land that got you to really get your head around the potential of NFTs?

Matty: Definitely. It was the concept that Decentraland had. Back then, these weren't called NFTs. They were, you know, Decentraland had virtual land. We were thinking it would be “crypto collectibles.” The word NFT didn't really -- of course, on a technology perspective that's how it's referred to -- but I don't think people used the word NFT [yet] to talk about the whole space. So for me, yes, it was virtual land that started it. When I started doing this it was still very utility based, like what you can do with the NFT and what the plans were to build this NFT into a game and all that. So art, still for me at least on Ethereum, it hadn't really taken center stage yet. It was still, I think, mid 2018, late 2018 when platforms like SuperRare started to appear.

Matty: And that was a very slow process of collecting. So art was a thing which was sort of on my radar but that I did not pay attention to at all until 2020. Realizing that holy crap, you can buy land on the blockchain somehow and build stuff on it. This is super cool.

Matty: And then the ability to trade crypto on the land, and, you know, all of these were concepts for the first two years of Decentraland. They didn't really have a product. I remember going into Cryptovoxels that did have a product and walking around and being like, holy shit, this is actually pretty cool. This is what Decentraland is going to look like and how it's going to feel. But yeah, I definitely learned from Decentraland what I thought NFTs would look like.

ML: A lot of people I've spoken to over the years that made it through the crypto winter and just kind of kept their head down and built stuff or had that foundational belief in crypto in general, it kind of has a deeper meaning to them, I think. Do you feel that way about what you went through there and then coming into 2020, it was Defi Summer and a lot of things started to happen. Tell us a little bit about, like, was it hard for you? Did you always keep the faith or like what, what did this mean to you through that time?

Matty: For me, it wasn't just the concept of holding, for me it was the concept of trading and being very metric driven and finding which projects were starting up or getting some sort of attention. Decentraland was pretty much my bread and butter for the whole two years from 2018 to 2020. People lost faith and I'm sure a lot of them went. I think people were in their own pockets of communities like Crypto Kitties or Crypto Punks. I don't think people stuck around because they were invested financially and they were just sitting on that investment.

Matty: They stuck around because there was some sort of revenue stream that sustained them. They were making some sort of money during those few years. If I was just holding some assets, no way would I be checking on it every single day for four hour. So I didn't really lose faith at all.

ML: And just for anyone who isn't aware, the thing about a place like Decentraland is there is a limited number of plots of this digital land. So its supply is finite and it creates that real tension there about, you know, demand. It's like demand for real land in the world, that you can develop and maybe you're right next to Crypto Valley or, you know, some other spot where a lot of people are going to be coming and walking around. One of the things I've been reading on your Twitter feed is also just, as we went through in 2017 and 2018, there's a lot of scams out there and you really need to do your own research and you need to figure out who's behind it, if anyone's building it. You've been sort of putting that out there more related to NFTs. So can you just talk a little bit about that and what advice you give to people?

Matty: We’re definitely in a new space, that’s super, super high risk where best practices have not been ironed out, the ways to protect ourselves have not been completely figured out. This technology of blockchain is irreversible, no one's going to give you money back if you get scammed. If you lose your money where a transaction occurs where the assets from your wallet disappear that’s irreversible so you can't help that or fix that. It's not as easy as getting your accountant hacked and then just simply getting that log in back and getting access to your funds. This is a very unforgiving space. So with that said, the general advice would just be start slow. Don’t really take big decisions straightaway. There are people out there that have taken big decisions and gone all in and gone wild and they've done very well.

For me, it wasn't just the concept of holding, for me it was the concept of trading

Matty: I'm sure there are other success stories there as well, but just in terms of the thousands of others that get into this space and end up, you know, those sort of things not going too well for them, they will go a bit too aggressive at the start. Just allocate your funds accordingly. You know, don't put too much money or don't invest money that you can't afford to lose. Don't have all your assets in the one wallet. Maybe keep them separated from the one that’s used continuously to buy and sell and the ones that’re used to hold your assets very long-term. And keep your passphrase very, very safe. Do not store that online anywhere through email or WhatsApp or anything because if any of your devices gets hacked -- sometimes hackers get keys in a way where it's just mind-boggling like, how do they even do that? Just be careful and tread carefully. You’ll learn the most in that first six months. The most secure traders and investors today have still been scammed. Everyone's kind of been scammed at some stage.

ML: Yeah, that's great advice. I tell people still to like treat it like Las Vegas money where you could lose it all and it wouldn't matter -- except maybe for some coins like Bitcoin or Ether where I think it makes sense to be building a position.

ML: I love some of your tweets where you were sort of playing into the future and imagining riding around Decentraland on a dragon, but then your dragon disappears because you forgot that you listed it on Open Sea and somebody bought it from you. Having paid attention to this space for a while now, I think the thing that people aren't quite getting yet is the vast potential for revenue in these metaverses like in fashion. Just like in real life you want to look really good in Decentraland. And maybe if you can afford it, you're buying a five-of-five NFT from Prada, or you've got an Hermes handbag. These are real companies that are going to be able to come in here and verify that these are authentic products and you could show that, yeah., that is a Gucci bag and I can show you right here in the blockchain history. Can you talk a little bit about what you see coming in that world? I think we're still very early, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Imagine my pet digital dragon disappearing mid-ride because I forgot I had it listed for sale on Opensea and someone bought it.

Metaverse things.

— Matty (@DCLBlogger) October 13, 2021

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When our #Artemis astronauts visit the Moon, they’ll go where humans have never been before: the South Pole. In this episode of NASA Explorers, we cover the insights astronauts could unearth by returning to the Moon: https://t.co/1c28mQlcb2 pic.twitter.com/EBsl0xSlpb

— NASA (@NASA) October 12, 2022

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Matty: It's going to be quite big. Fashion is something that we sort of do naturally in the real world, and there's no reason why we wouldn’t continue to do that in the digital world. There's been some small experiments some early on ventures from people that are exploring fashion. You've seen, I think Dolce & Gabbana released something. Coca-Cola released a jacket that you can wear in Decentraland. And I think NASA has done some wearables in Decentraland. The metaverse is amazing. It's not just confined to clothing pieces that fit you like they would in the real world. Fashion could be a helmet or a mask or something that floats on your head. It could be an emotional sort of movement or a character movement. It could be anything.

ML: It could be a pet.

Matty: It could be a pet. Exactly. It could be the car you drive. Right? It's just the cool thing about being in the digital space, especially through blockchain and what NFTs allow is that you can see somebody wearing something and through blockchain you know that is the only one piece in the whole world from that brand. That has a flex symbol, just like how someone who owns a Crypto Punk can maybe eventually verify that Crypto Punk on Twitter one day, and that has its own flex symbol. People like to display what they own and what they have and what they represent. So definitely a big sector to look out for.

ML: A guy I've gotten to know is working to use video motion capture to get that sort of movement and dance into the metaverse or, you know, an altered reality kind of situation. So the kind of blocky interaction that you have now might be a thing of the past pretty soon. You could really have a full-on dance party. The implications are so interesting.

Matty: That's when it gets really cool, because suddenly you can move in ways that you can’t move in the real world and then you can do it in digital worlds. It's been a bit crazy, we're at the start.

ML: I wanted to ask you who you'd recommend I speak to next for this kind of interview.

Matty: I admire quite a few people. A lot of them are not prolific on Twitter. They just keep to their own sort of smaller communities and keep building their own thing. But they're very, they're very smart in the way they think. So I would love to put you in touch with Will from Meta Zone

ML: Thank you so much for this. You've got a YouTube channel and you've got your other venture The Metakey, do you want to talk about that for just a sec?

Matty: Yeah, sure. So Metakey is a concept where most of the NFT projects, as we said, you know, they may look like images of different animals and different things, but especially the mainstream NFTs that we see out there, you know, the 10,000 avatars and this and that. But what we have done is we've created this concept where you can buy a Metakey and you can connect that Metakey to different virtual worlds and the whole concept of the Web 3 products, kind of working together and different games being sort of collaborative in a way. What we are focusing on is the community and the tickets, or how to access it. There is just this concept of how much utility and how many use cases can you bake into a single NFT.

ML: So it's a bit of a passport to different virtual worlds, or a way to take a sword or a weapon or some armor through to different games and have your same identity on different platforms?

Matty: It’s different identities, it's to enjoy them in different ways as well. So maybe aesthetically, you can have a different pet that follows you if you have the Metakey, people can see you having that pet and be like, ‘Hey, is that someone that has a Metakey?’ It's this concept of taking your assets and your identity and what you represent and being connected to different communities in that way. So it's kind of fun. If the future is going to be existing virtually that’ll definitely be a lot of fun.