Case study · Media and gaming
Social.li
An interoperable metaverse protocol on Polkadot.
- Product
- Social.li
- Service
- UI/UX, blockchain, web development, QA
- Sector
- Metaverse
- Built on
- Substrate, Polkadot
At a glance
What interoperability means here
Built on Substrate, which is what makes cross-chain interoperability structural rather than bolted on.
Assets tradeable between compatible metaverses instead of trapped in the one that issued them.
Users move from one compatible metaverse to another rather than logging out of one and into the next.
Social.li is the layer other metaverses build against, not another destination competing with them.
The brief
Every metaverse was built as a walled garden
The first generation of metaverse projects each built a world and an economy inside it. That produces a user whose assets, identity and history stop existing the moment they leave — which is the opposite of what the word was supposed to mean.
Fixing that inside any single world is impossible by definition. It needs a layer underneath several of them, which is a protocol problem rather than a product one.
A metaverse you cannot leave with your things is a game with better marketing.
The build
Why Substrate and Polkadot
The choice of Substrate and native deployment to Polkadot follows directly from the problem. Polkadot's design premise is chains that communicate, which is the same shape as metaverses that communicate. Building the protocol anywhere else would have meant reimplementing that from scratch.
Wow Labz covered UI/UX design, blockchain development, frontend and backend development, and QA testing.
Social.li also underpins Movy, a watch-to-earn dApp built on the protocol, which is the practical demonstration that a protocol layer is worth having.
What it provides
Three protocol capabilities
Interoperability
Compatible metaverses can recognise each other's users and assets, which is the precondition for everything else.
Cross-world trade
Users trade with each other across worlds rather than only inside the one they happen to be in.
Teleportation
Movement between compatible digital realms as a protocol-level action rather than a marketing metaphor.
Stack
What it was built with
Questions
Social.li, answered
What is Social.li?
An interoperable metaverse protocol built on Substrate and native to the Polkadot blockchain. It lets users trade with, and teleport between, compatible metaverses.
Why build on Substrate and Polkadot?
Because Polkadot is designed around chains that communicate with each other, which is structurally the same problem as metaverses that need to interoperate.
Is Social.li a metaverse?
No, it is the protocol layer beneath them. It exists so that separate worlds can recognise each other's users and assets.
What did Wow Labz build?
UI/UX design, blockchain development, frontend and backend development, and QA testing.
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