Building the Future Metaverse: Q&A With QDEx Labs CEO Walt Greene

Since Facebook’s name change to Meta, the company has been making a hard push to build Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse, but it hasn’t exactly been going as planned. The company’s stock price has dropped since the name and focus change, and it has been criticized for its lackluster graphics in its current flagship metaverse environment, Horizon Worlds.

Of course, Meta is far from the only company innovating in the web3 and metaverse space, but they are currently one of the most high-profile. Elsewhere in the tech landscape, Walt Greene, founder, inventor, and CEO of cyber security and blockchain dev lab QDEx Labs, is hard at work rolling out a new digital infrastructure, the QNTYM Railway (pronounced “quantum”) that will power a decentralized network, TSSYRQ (pronounced "tesseract”) without compromising on safety and security.

XLIVE sat down with Greene to discuss the tech he’s building, how it works, and why the future of the metaverse likely doesn’t lie with Big Tech.

XLIVE: Can you share a bit about your background and how QDEx Labs came about?

Walt Greene: My background is in technology. I’m an inventor. When I first started out, I loved computers. I loved technology. I started building computers for friends and family when I was about 10 years old, so I have always had a good way with technology and have always been drawn to it and had an ability to understand it. That rolled into mathematics, quantum physics, and even medical devices. Right now I have a few different patents pending from medical devices all the way to quantum communications. I call myself an amateur in the best sense of the word. I do it for the love of it.

I eventually went into broadcasting, but my love for technology won out in the end. I saw some issues in the internet as a whole and had been working on a possible solution to the way web 2.0 has approached things. I created an architecture for a new digital backbone that was predicated on quantum entanglement, and just a few years ago, I met a gentleman who had certain aspects of security protocols that was the closest that I could come to that quantum entanglement. I plugged it into the architecture, and the tech stack that we have today, which we have labeled the QNTYM Railway, is that inherently quantum secure digital infrastructure.

XL: What are some of the biggest issues that you see with Big Tech’s approach to building the metaverse?

WG: One of the biggest issues that I've seen goes back to the aspect of understanding what people want and what they may not even know that they want. When we look at the metaverse from our perspective — we're a major contributor to a decentralized network too — we believe that the metaverse that you're going to see in the future needs to be done on a community level and needs to be directed by the individual. That's where I see a big issue for organizations, not just Meta, as people start to want to direct this vision. That goes back to that whole decentralization aspect of having a community involved, a community driven organization rather than one organization imposing a metaverse on the people.

Meta has taken risks, and I definitely have a certain level of respect for that. But what one person's idea of a metaverse is should not be unilaterally pushed onto the individual. I firmly believe that the successful metaverse is going to be highly experiential, and highly individualized. That’s the only way that this thing really is successful, and I believe it's when it’s in the hands of the people.

XL: Are there any data privacy issues with their approach as well? That’s becoming a growing concern for many consumers.

WG: Five or 10 years ago, that wouldn't even be something on people's minds, but you're absolutely right. People are starting to wake up and realize that these centralized organizations that you’re handing over all of your data to on a platter, they kind of get to do whatever they want to do with it now. There's been repercussions and some pushback on that, but the change happens when the individuals start to realize what's happening, and they start to say, I don't think I want to give every bit of my personal information to this centralized organization to use in order to create ‘a more convenient experience.’

XL: How is the QNTYM railway approach different from what some of these other tech companies are doing?

WG: The QNTYM Railway serves as the digital backbone of the network of the future. We have security, speed, and sustainability as our mantra. What we have created with the tech stack addresses most of the technological issues that organizations like Meta are facing, and most of that's predicated on encryption. When you're dealing with encryption, it is the single worst bottleneck to something like the metaverse. With the QNTYM Railway, we answered the speed issues, the latency issues, and even the sustainability aspect because we're not predicated on encryption. We have an alternative form of cryptography that we use throughout the tech stack.

The decentralized network that we are a major contributor to is where another piece of that magic happens. We’re not set up like what you would normally see as a “decentralized network” like something that you would see for Ethereum or Bitcoin or a network like that. We are very, very unique, and I actually had to come up with a unique new topology to deal with the metaverse. It’s purpose built to sustain the metaverse, not only on the optimization level, but even in that sustainability aspect of it. So the technology that we created underlies a new decentralized network that is going to be able to proliferate the metaverse on a scale people have only dreamed of.

XL: Can you touch on the sustainability aspect a bit more?

WG: Encryption is a major, major energy suck. But because the entire world network is predicated on encryption, everyone just sees it as a necessary expenditure. I didn’t see it that way, which is what prompted the entire build of this thing, starting with the QNTYM Railway. We have proven that with the cryptography that we're using - again, t's not encryption based - we're looking at significant savings in energy and in processing power for data servers and other forms of technology.

XL: So you've managed to create an equally secure ecosystem without relying on encryption methods.

WG: Exactly. Security, speed, and sustainability are kind of the Holy Trinity in cybersecurity, the way we see it. In cybersecurity, you either have security as good as it can be, but you don't have speed and you don't have sustainability. If you want speed, security has to drop, and so on. With what we have created, we have put those three major aspects out there because we do believe that if you have the ability to effect massive change for the planet on a massive scale, why would you not? Those three things allow us to say, you can have speed, you can have security, you can have sustainability, all in one. You don't have to compromise. And we're very proud of that.

XL: You’ll also be building a metaverse game, KRYPTI, on this technology, is that correct?

WG: Yes. KRYPTI is being put out by QDEx Labs, and it’s basically us putting our money where our mouth is on that hyper real metaverse play, that transition of web 2.0 into web3. No one else has the tech to do it, so it has to be us. It will reside on top of the decentralized QDEx network called TSSYRQ. That TSSYRQ network is one of the major pieces that’s going to allow for the metaverse to be proliferated, and it’s owned and fully governed by the people in a one user, one vote set of governance. It's not whoever has the most has the most say. It's a one-to-one ecosystem for true equitability.

XL: When do you expect it to be available?

WG: We expect it to be released end of Q2 of next year. The QNTYM Railway itself is up and running completely. We're building a proof of concept for the hyper realistic metaverse, which is nearing completion. That’s a big deal in and of itself, because the partnerships that we're going to garner in that gaming world are going to be massive.

Just to recap, KRYPTI is a game that we are creating with the guidance of the community. We’ve had our first launch for utility NFTs. We will be listening to the people on how they want to use KRYPTI. Underneath that, we have something called the KRYPTI-verse, and that's where people can build and create metaverses, or meta-spaces if you prefer, in that those will have a certain aspect of interoperability between all of the different ecosystems on KRYPTI-verse. That’s all on top of TSSYRQ, which is a network. That's the only network capable of supporting it. And that QNTYM Railway is the digital core and the digital underpinning.

XL: Do you see KRYPTI being like a Roblox type environment where brands can come in and create metaverse spaces for people to engage in?

WG: The KRYPTI-verse will be basically anything you want it to be depending on the tool sets that the team continuously creates. We're trying to make this extremely easy for people to get into and have a place where they can build something on an extremely hyper realistic scale.

The whole idea behind KRYPTI is to allow people to get into web3, to get into the usable, useful crypto space, using the technology and NFTS without having to know how to use them. We're making it easy — we’re gamifying. So when someone comes into this game, they can do something, they can build something, and it creates an NFT or it creates certain aspects in that space, and it gets written out to the network as such, but the user doesn't have to understand it. KRYPTI is supposed to be the equivalent of someone coming into a dark room, flipping on a light switch going and sitting down, and not having to think about how that's happening. They just flip the switch on and go sit down.

That's what we're doing with KRYPTI on multiple levels, not only for crypto, but also for web3 and subsequently the metaverse. As people start doing what we're doing with KRYPTI and making this super simple to get into — so simple it's like a learning curve of a game — that's when mass adoption happens. And mass adoption is required for the ongoing proliferation of any blockchain technology.