Will Gomez comes from a family of engineers and entrepreneurs who formed a credit-card security firm that used cryptography to battle fraud. After initially missing the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, he found it in 2016 and immediately understood its power from his cryptography background. A Houston native who spent his early life in Matamoros, Mexico, Gomez co-founded MetaZone with his brother and friend in 2019 to help metaverse users easily deploy buildings or other features in virtual worlds like Decentraland. Thanks to Matty who recommended I speak to Will in an interview you can read here.

Matt Leising: You're based in Houston now, is that where you grew up? Tell me a little bit about where you grew up and your family life.

Will Gomez: I grew up in Houston and my family came from a border town called Brownsville. The border town in Brownsville is on the Texas side, but my family, my parents, grew up in Matamoros, which is right across the border right next to Brownsville. And so I was born in Brownsville. Probably the first five years I was in, in Matamoros. My first language was Spanish. And then after about five years in Mexico we moved to Houston and my dad got a job here at Compaq and then moved to HP and we've been here ever since. My background was really in engineering, kind of like my dad, he was a computer engineer, but I was in chemical engineering and I was in that industry for a good five, six years.

WG: There was a lot of good people, everyone's nice, the only thing was there wasn’t a whole lot of passion. It was just everybody goes to work and that's about it. And until we got into cryptography – my family and I started this cryptography business (called EpicOne) focused on payment security – and so we got really into cryptography before we even learned about cryptocurrency. We started that business in 2010. We ended up getting a background in cryptography and there were so many people that during that time, maybe 2012, 2013, they're like, ‘Hey, what are your thoughts about Bitcoin?’ And I was like, oh, you know, that's internet money, that's no big deal. It's just a fad, it's going to go away, blah, blah, blah.

WG: And then obviously it didn't. And then I was like, okay, it's time to read this white paper. So this was in 2016. I read the [Bitcoin] white paper. I was like, what the, I can't believe I missed this. Because had I read the Bitcoin white paper in 2012 or 2013, I would've instantly recognized the value of Bitcoin at that time, because I knew cryptography. Right? I knew the value of public and private keys. So that's, that's how I started into cryptocurrency.

ML: What was it like growing up in Houston? And did you have brothers and sisters on?

WG: I have a brother and I have two sisters. I'm the oldest one, my brother's younger and he's a full stack developer. And so it was me and my brother and my other friend Iman, who I started a podcast with in 2019 focused on cryptocurrency. The three of us started MetaZone. My two sisters, one is still in high school and the other one is a bodybuilder and a personal trainer. That's the family dynamic, because all of us have an entrepreneurial streak, we're all working on our own businesses

ML: You said your dad worked for Compaq. That's funny. My dad, I remember him bringing home a Compaq computer that he could – it was actually kind of one of the first portable computers and you would unlatch this one part and that was the keyboard. And I used to write “if/then” programs on that computer, sort of like choose your own adventure kind of thing.

WG: I think that might've been one of the first laptops ever made it. Yeah.

ML: I don't know if you'd want to put that one in your lap. [laughs] Another thing caught my ear. You said you and your family started a cryptography business. How did that come about? What made you guys want to do that?

WG: The best way to explain it is really how our minds work. We like to solve problems. Even though we have engineering backgrounds, we have official degrees and all this stuff, but even without the degree, we would have been entrepreneurs because we inherently liked to solve problems. And when it comes to credit cards and payments and all that, we're all exposed to it. We all know what it's like to get credit card fraud. And so when thinking about the problem, we're like, well, what's the best way to solve that? So we ended up investing a lot in figuring out the problem and the solution and we ended up being rewarded a patent that we filed. That patent took an extremely long time to get issued.

WG: And it took a lot of money. So, you know, patents, I think for startups are probably the worst idea because it's too expensive, too time consuming and really not necessary.

ML: I have to ask, were you guys victim of some credit card fraud and that made you want to do this?

WG: Absolutely. Everybody for the most part has been a victim of credit card fraud, your information has been compromised from some database or hack. But it wasn't the fact that we got credit card fraud that really motivated us. We just recognized that it was a huge problem, and that huge problem led us to solving that problem.

Using cryptography to battle credit card fraud

ML: Can you describe your patent and what you guys were able to do and what you did to solve this?

WG: Absolutely. When it comes to credit cards and the payment transaction, there's a lot of parties that touch the payment information when you swipe a credit card or debit card. The dominant form of payments was the [credit card] stripe and it's been dominant for like 30 or 40 years until the chip came out just within the last five years. What we ended up doing was coming up with this this powered payment card, right? It had a battery, you had a dynamic magnetic stripe, but the innovation wasn't in the electronics of the card, it was in what the card was actually doing during a payment transaction. I'll try to simplify it this way. When you swipe a credit card, there's are pieces of information that travel to complete a payment.

WG: It's your name, credit card number, CVV expiration date. That's it, those are the four pieces of information that travel through five different parties to verify transactions. So what we did is we replaced your name with a cryptogram, basically a 26-digit alphanumeric code. So we replaced William Gomez with this dynamic code generated from the card. So the what's the big deal, right? The problem was that you couldn't change the hardware infrastructure of the payment industry. You'd be dead in the water. Walmart is not going to update their systems and change their hardware just because of this code. Right? They're not going to do it. So we ended up fitting that code within that name field, which meant that you didn't have to change anything of the infrastructure.

ML: Has that been adopted by the payments industry, your protocol?

WG: Not exactly. The reason is the payments industry is this huge cartel. Anybody in the payment industry knows this, it’s extremely difficult to break into that industry and innovate. There's been a number of founders who talk about this. I mean, Elon [Musk] has talked about this, he knows that it's been difficult just to innovate in that space. And that's why it hasn't really changed. We ended up getting that patent and there was another startup company that was interested in the patent and they acquired it.

ML: So now we're back to Bitcoin and you're kicking yourself because if you had read the white paper in 2012 you probably would've gone out and bought a bunch of Bitcoin we would probably not be talking right now. You might own an island somewhere.

“You quickly learn that you have to investigate everything that you’re seeing, because you don’t want to miss the boat, especially at a time like this where cryptocurrency could be the biggest wealth transition that humanity has ever seen.”

WG: Yeah, ultimately, the white paper is so simple, it's like eight or nine pages and it really outlines the implications of what Bitcoin could become. It was interesting how [Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto] explained the technology and applied this public key cryptography in this public ledger in a way that anyone who knew about cryptography knew instantly that this was important and valuable.

WG: I just missed it, it's one of those things that I think all of us learned at some point. We can't look at NFTs, we can't look at these PFP projects., we can't look at new technology, like Sushi Swap and blow it off. We've learned that anything new that has traction we cannot ignore. You quickly learn that you have to investigate everything that you're seeing, because you don't want to miss the boat, especially at a time like this where cryptocurrency could be the biggest wealth transition that humanity has ever seen.

ML: I find it really interesting, talking about Satoshi and the white paper, that he didn't really come up with any innovation. He just put the pieces that already existed together, which nobody had done it quite right. People had gotten close, but he just, or they, or whoever it is, they got the recipe right and the cake came out and here we have Bitcoin.

WG: I think the biggest thing that he did was he actually implemented it. It wasn't just a white paper, it was a white paper with – here’s the code, you can download it here – and you can run a node.

ML: There's that awesome tweet by Hal Finney back in the day, where he just says ‘running Bitcoin.’

ML: You mentioned your intro to crypto is reading the white paper. People had been trying to like tell you about Bitcoin, but you kind of dismissed it. Was that your “aha moment?”

WG: It was. I attended a conference at the time. I was hustling, I was telling everybody about our technology payments and cryptography and all this stuff. I was excited about what we were doing and I attended a bunch of conferences and there were meetups for Ethereum and meetups for different cryptocurrencies. So I attended those because I figured we could apply our technology to that industry. At that time it was still super early for Ethereum and they were talking about smart contracts, which just went way over my head. I didn't understand anything that they were talking about, but you don't recognize things until, I don't know, there's like this degree of comprehension that you have to really spend a lot of time to understand the implications of the technology.

Running bitcoin

— halfin (@halfin) January 11, 2009

ML: That reminds me of how a lot of people just laughed at Crypto Kitties and kind of dismissed them. It's kind of silly, right? You have a cat that can breed and it's linked to the blockchain, but it was one of the first examples that I remember of an NFT where there's digital scarcity. You add the blockchain to digital files and suddenly it's not a Napster kind of moment where you can upload a Metallica album and anyone in the world can now download that file. You have an ownership record and it's verifiable. Like you're saying that's a huge innovation.

WG: Yes. I totally agree. It's so easy to dismiss things. Like said, I think it's like a component of our primitive brain to dismiss things. It's a big problem in cryptocurrency because if you don't do the work, you're going to miss out and then you're going to be kicking yourself. If I had to say anything to anybody, if you see something dumb, look into it. If you think it's dumb, definitely look into it because you might be surprised. And I don't know, you could become very wealthy by being early.

ML: What was your entre to NFTs then? What did it take for you to do the work and figure it out? Because I would think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but MetaZone is a huge NFT bizarre, right? Kind of like the app store for Apple or Google Play for Google apps.

WG: The way we got into NFTs was really through Decentraland. Let me go back one step here. In 2019 at the peak of the bear market, me and my friend started a podcast in the peak of the bear when Bitcoin was around $3,500. It was after the big crash. So pretty soon after that we were talking about cryptocurrencies, just like a regular podcast.

WG: Everybody was talking about Decentraland in 2017, that's when they did their ICO that raised like $25 million or something like that. We were like, Hey, we need to learn more. And that's when we reached out to Matty because he was basically the only one talking about Decentraland. And we're like, Hey, come on the podcast. So he comes on and at the time Decentraland was just this 300 by 300 black and gray grid. There was no world, it was just purely speculation as to what it could look like.

Read more: Q&A With Mateen Soudagar, aka @DCLBLogger

WG: And Matty was explaining all this to us [on the podcast] and my brother happened to listen to that podcast. My brother's a full-stack developer. He was like, this is an interesting idea, a world completely owned by the community where the community builds and constructs. So he started building stuff for Decentraland. He realized that it's extremely complicated to deploy stuff in Decentraland, he has a bunch of experience building enterprise products. And so he was like, well, what if we made an application that made it easy to deploy content in Decentraland? So that’s where MetaZone comes from, the whole idea of MetaZone was essentially for the community to come in and create content, whatever it is from couches to games and make that content accessible to the community to be able to click and deploy content into the world. We figured that this was the most sustainable way to construct a metaverse where people who own the land don’t have the burden of building on that land. Instead they can go and purchase content to deploy on their land rather than having to hire a developer. That was really the genesis of how we stepped into this whole NFT craze that's happening now.

ML: It's kind of like you guys are providing the picks and shovels to this community. When I was looking into putting a house on my plot in Decentraland I was talking to some developers and they were quoting me $15,000 to $20,000. And then I found you guys, and paid, I can't remember, like $1,200 or something. But it was right out of the box. It's amazing.

A house for sale on MetaZone. You can buy it here

WG: That's right. We talk about this all the time on our podcast. The idea that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is starting to talk about the metaverse, he’s even thinking about changing the Facebook name, but the whole idea of building the metaverse in our opinion, the most sustainable way to do that, is to have the community contribute to the construction. If you compare it to traditional games like World of Warcraft or any of the larger games, it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to build out everything. And I don't think that we can expect metaverses or companies to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to build out a world without any contribution from the community, especially in a decentralized culture that we have with cryptocurrencies.

ML: I don't worry about Zuckerberg or Facebook or Libra or whatever they're calling it now, because they’re so at odds with the decentralized peer-to-peer ethos that has made all of this so powerful. And you're talking about the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to develop something like Decentraland, but if you think about it as those users and those people who want to be there, they're bringing their own little pieces in to add up to that a hundred million dollars or whatever. I think we're seeing that the inclusion that it provides to people in the sense of community and the sense of adventure are all working to bring people with their ideas and their capital and whatever else that they bring to the party.

WG: I couldn't agree more. I would only say this. Roblox is worth about $40 billion right now. And we were doing a little bit of research on Roblox because they just recently announced ideas of a metaverse for Roblox. And what's interesting is that they have 50 million daily active users.

ML: My son is one of them.

WG: Definitely a, a lot of kids are into it so deeply that they they've also attracted a million developers onto that platform. Their announcement was talking about the metaverse and they had ideas of ownership of content.

Could Roblox be a metaverse killer?

WG: It’s kind of like NFTs, but they're not NFTs. So what they're building is sort of a quote, unquote, ownable metaverse where you own the digital content, but they still have these censorship capabilities.

ML: It's centralized. There's no blockchain element to it.

WG: Exactly. So what I think is going to happen is companies like Facebook, Roblox, they're going to build these metaverses that are centralized and they're not censorship proof, right? They're not using blockchains. They're going to vicariously teach their audience about the ownership of digital content and their audience is going to demand actual ownership with blockchain. So I think ultimately Facebook and Roblox and pretty much every gaming company out there, they're eventually going to have to implement NFTs because that's what the community demands. That's my prediction.

ML: That reminds me of – I don't know if this is apocryphal – but something I came across when I was writing my book about Vitalik Buterin, and he tells a story of getting very upset one day when World of Warcraft erased some of his characters. And he got fed up with any kind of centralized power and I'm sure Roblox or Facebook, if they do create their own metaverses they will create people who had that happen to them. They lose something for whatever reason – their conduct or maybe it’s a glitch – and those people are going to come right over to Decentraland or CryptoVoxels and be like, all right, let's do this for real now.

WG: Yeah. I a hundred percent agree that's definitely going to happen. I think when you compare this industry to any others, this industry is probably the most exciting, the fastest moving, and probably the most interesting because it literally touches all facets of fundamental society, from finance to ownable digital content. A lot of us grew up as gamers and we all inherently know what it means to own digital stuff, even though we never had access to it until blockchain. So if you're reading this, you're still extremely early.

ML: That's something Matty and I were talking about. I don't think people are yet grasping the size of the digital ownable market for just take one example of fashion. You know, you see Dolce and Gabbana are doing NFT versions of their dresses. It's going to be a trillion dollar market.

A 70/30 split between artists and MetaZone

ML: I read that you guys split the proceeds with the artists who to build stuff on MetaZone. Is it 70 30, with 70 to the artists? .

WG: Yeah. If you're a veteran in the crypto space you're used to fees like two and a half percent maybe no more than like five, maybe 7% for all the different stuff that's out there. Those are general fees. And then all of a sudden they come to MetaZone and there's a 70 30 split. What's going on there? It turns out the stuff that we're building – I'm going to use another analogy here – these are apps. Every piece of content that you deploy on your land is an app. Whether it's a building or a couch or a game that you've deployed on your land, these are applications. And these applications happen to run on an operating system that's called Decentraland or name your metaverse, right?

WG: Decentraland gets updates just like any other operating system, so anytime the operating system updates, a lot of your applications break, right, they end up stopped. They don't work. Let me give you a scenario. What if the content you purchased from MetaZone was not connected to these developers? You would buy this game or you'd buy this building and then the burden is on you to update your application.

WG: We figured that’s not sustainable. So our platform allows the developers to continuously maintain their applications without having the burden be on the actual NFT owner to update those applications. That's why the fee is so high because at 30% the burden is on MetaZone to continue updating and making sure everything is running. And then the 70% goes to the original creator.

ML: What's your growth been like? Can you give us any numbers or any metrics?

WG: Yeah. We've always been transparent with our revenues. We do that because it's good to have people join this journey. Not only to the creators, but also people who are coming into purchase stuff and deploy stuff on their land, because if we don't make those people happy then we don't have a place for creators to make stuff. Up until this point we’ve generated around 3.6 million manna. [Mana is the native cryptocurrency to Decentraland and at its current value of about $3.11 cents, 3.6 million mana is worth just under $11.2 million]

Read about rovi.ai and MetaGen

WG: One of our new tools is called MetaGen. It’s sort of like the groundwork of a PFP project, a profile picture project, but in 3-D. You can make these models of anything, it could be a building or character. The MetaGen tool will mix and match the different components of your creation and create a new building or a new character. Like I told you before, in order to showcase the technology, we've got to use it. We can't just talk about it.

ML: So it’s a kind of generative art, like a Crypto Punk.

WG: Exactly. You know how they have generative art for 2-D and it replaces the eyeballs and the hair and all this stuff. So we did that, but for 3-D. These 3-D elements are characters that you can deploy in Decentraland and these characters can battle each other for a token.

WG: That generated roughly about a hundred ETH in about two weeks. So that's the revenue that we're looking at for MetaZone.

ML: And help me understand when you said 3.6 million mana over what period of time is that?

WG: A lot of that mana that came in 2020 when mana was around, I don't know, roughly 10 cents or so. And it's generating manna this year. It's been from 2020 all through 2021.

ML: It's just mind boggling to hear about 3-D avatars battling in Decentraland for mana tokens. We started our conversation with you missing the Bitcoin white paper, and here we are like 30 minutes later talking about these futuristic, 3-D battles that are blockchain based. It's such a fun, exciting time.

WG: It is. I think you're going to see these PFP projects mature. They're not going to be just websites with a roadmap anymore. They're going to be full on teams with investors and the market is going to mature. They're going to expect a lot more from these projects rather than just a picture.

ML: Let me ask you on the PFP front, what do you think people are going to want from that? Are people paying so much for a Crypto Punk because this is now going to be their digital identity going around to all the different worlds, or to Discord? Is that what you see here?

WG: Yeah, I think there might be two sides to this. So there are PFP projects, like Crypto Punks and like this new one Mekaverse that gain some degree of traction to the point where they become viral. And once they have this network effect, it doesn't matter what these pictures look like. As long as they get that network effect, they're going to be valuable. Then there's the other side. I think there's going to be NFTs that have functional utility, like revenue-generating NFTs that are going to be equally as attractive.

WG: Ultimately for the majority of these PFP projects, it's more about identity, but I think identity without utility is only half the story.

ML: This has been fascinating. Thank you so much. Is there someone that you respect and admire in crypto that I should talk to next for, for this interview series that I'm doing?

WG: I have a few people. Have you talked to Rio Rio?

ML: No.. Well, again thank you so much Will this has been really fascinating.