Making a Metaverse – a conversation with Dirk Lueth from Upland

By Jillian Godsil

A conversation with the co founder of Upland on his career and how he came to create one of the busiest metaverses today – Upland.me

Aged 16, German native Dirk Lueth spent a gap year in the States and was really impressed with the concept of the school yearbook, which was not common in Germany. When he returned to finish his schooling, he took this idea with him – launching both a love of writing and entrepreneurialism that would mark out his career.

While he claims not to be a good journalist, his track record shows a love of the written word both from his PhD research in private and state-controlled currencies or the fact that he co-founded the German edition of the Financial Times. In 2012 he also became advisor to an online publication called Fair Observer, a non-profit media organization that engages in citizen journalism and civic education.

Fair Observer is an interesting exercise in neutral reporting. The organisation relies on citizen-curated reporting but emphasizes 360-degree reporting where all angles of a situation or subject matter are collected and represented. An interesting counterpoint to the agenda-led, entertainment-focused, pop-culture shows popularised particularly in the US.

His writing began with a typewriter and coincided with the beginnings of the internet. Lueth knew that the internet was going to be big from the get-go.

“My first job was with a media company that was also very interested in technology. I knew that the internet would deliver entertainment and information at a fraction of traditional media’s cost and in a much faster way. That was where the idea for launching an innovative version of the FT with a strong online department in Germany emerged.”

A proud boast indeed, as it had to be funded via strategic investors namely the publishing houses Financial Times of Pearson and Gruner & Jahr of Bertelsmann as it was also before Venture Capital funding was commonplace.

Being an entrepreneur is core to Lueth’s passion, whether in writing or business. He became the lead mentor in the German Silicon Valley Accelerator and helped grow numerous startups in tech.

“I could see very clearly that the internet was going to change how we communicate and when combined with smartphones we were going to witness a lot of innovation.”

Lueth is not ashamed to admit he made some mistakes – but then that comes with the territory when one is ahead of the party. For example, he opted for Flash technology but was scuppered when Steve Jobs said it was useless for mobile.

“Our company at that time actually was just about starting to see product-market fit with good customers such as Lufthansa but I was forced to pivot to continue providing services to them.”

For Lueth, he came to digital currencies through gaming, which fed in nicely from his PhD. He was fascinated that games had their own currencies and the fact that value could be exchanged over the internet. In 2011 a friend told him about the Bitcoin whitepaper and while he did not see at this time why this approach to cryptography was more promising than others, he was interested.

“I bought some bitcoin in a back alley from someone in San Francisco and the seller literally handed me a piece of paper with all access information written on it – which I misplaced shortly after I tried it out. I’d love to find that piece of paper today but at that time it was more of a learning curve for me.”

“It was a little later that I discovered digital money was not limited to Bitcoin and that the concept of decentralisation was key to this new technology.”

Back in 2013 Lueth found himself pitching to Venture Capitalists – which had long time become more commonplace in Silicon Valley – but when he started talking about that in the future the transfer of value in the internet will be decentralised he could see their eyes glaze over.

“There are many times when I have been early and that was another such time.”

Lueth started attending Bitcoin meetups, where he met small groups of nerds like himself. At the time, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast.

By 2017, the rest of the world had started to catch up with Lueth and his fellow decentralisation advocates. He shared an idea with two friends who went on to become co-founders and the concept of Upland was formed.

“Initially, we took the inspiration of Monopoly because everyone knows the board game which means that fewer explanations would be needed and developed the basic idea of property trading into a digital format. We also had the hypothesis that most people have an emotional connection to the real world, which is why Upland is based on it, and we also realised that we had to go mobile first to make the game attractive and accessible to a mass audience.”

Another interesting choice was registering the platform under the website www.upland.me in 2018 where the ME stood for metaverse. However, Lueth and his co-founders did not use the word metaverse when pitching to investors and consumers because they thought it would be hard for people to understand.

“We just spoke about a parallel world or a virtual world to keep things simple.”

It worked and the trio successfully raised $18 million to build their digital world. Then in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg changed his company name to Meta, and suddenly it was okay to use the metaverse word openly.

But even the Metaverse needed and still needs repetitive explanations to the world. That was when he decided to go back to writing and co-author the book “Navigating the Metaverse” which became a best-seller on Amazon in 2022.

At the same time Upland started to grow very quickly. Going mobile first was a key advantage for Upland.me in gaining adoption, according to Lueth, and using the familiar and simple access method of email and password helped to onboard users with much less friction than other blockchain-based games where users need to deal with wallets, passphrases, and other complications.

“The third winner was to allow customers to use fiat to buy digital assets by using Paypal, credit cards or in-app purchasing.”

Being too decentralised at the beginning of a game or metaverse project can be risky because not everything can be thought of from the get-go. There is a cost curve of centralisation and one of decentralisation.

“We are looking for the intersection of those two cost curves and where they meet is the optimum for an economic system. Over time, when there are more people engaged in the economy the equilibrium shifts and it can make sense to introduce more decentralised control. This is what we call progressive decentralisation. It’s all a question of size, and the larger the community, the easier it becomes to devolve power.

“Now we’re in Super-App mode. The first and core feature Upland was buying and selling virtual properties – “think again: Monopoly”. But then, over time, we started adding more and more features for the owners and the visitors of the properties. Today we have so-called metaventures which are player-run shops to sell digital goods to other players. But the properties also function as hubs to other places in the metaverse, where developers can provide access to their own experiences connected to these properties. This includes building immersive spaces on those properties to add value to others – perhaps in the form of a café, an art gallery or a separate app where players can play an exciting game while bringing their identity from Upland and digital assets with them. These are real value add that will encourage new players into the wider Upland ecosystem.”

Building the wider ecosystem includes for Lueth also working with other metaverse platforms to make them interoperable, meaning that users can easily move between different worlds. To advance this vision, he co-founded and is now chairperson of the Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3 (www.oma3.org) where over 1,000 companies have registered and a subset is collaborating in working groups like “asset transfer” or “portaling and mapping”.

Important to note, like with all web3 games, there is a very strong emphasis on working with its community which is highly engaged in the Upland metaverse. Users gather together in so-called nodes in one of the virtual cities that are open in metaverse – even if they don’t live in these – and develop their neighbourhoods to their likening. They socialize on Discord, the in-app communication tool or in real life during local meetups and the in-person conference called “Genesis Week” in June every year.

Upland acquires users via traditional marketing and word-of-mouth. But also partnerships with the NFLPA, FIFA, Unicef and many others are key to attracting more people to the metaverse. Upland is certainly on the way to becoming the world’s largest metaverse with ten thousands of daily active wallets according to DappRadar.

“It’s not too late though for newbies,” Lueth emphasizes. “We have built-in what we call the Fair Start Act or FSA where less expensive properties are reserved for new players, especially as we open up new cities.

“We are currently live in 23 cities in the US, we’ve opened up London, Birmingham and Porto with more cities to come in Europe and we have a few cities open in Brazil and Argentina – oh and the first Asian cities are coming soon as well.”

Luckily for potential new Upland users they don’t have to be early adopters – unlike Lueth there is room for lots of stragglers yet to come.