Most people in the 1990s were still logging into walled gardens: AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy. Respectively owned at different points by Time-Warner, H&R Block, and Sears. Pre-packaged by-the-minute private networks with parental controls and a price tag. The real internet, the open one, felt raw, unfinished, and a little dangerous.
Inside that chaos, the cypherpunks were busy. Mailing lists full of pseudonyms and manifestos, trading source code like contraband. Often using a decentralized voluntary network of dial-up Bulletin Boards Systems or a "BBS". Some of which did connect and relay UseNet and SMTP messages into that alternate "internet". I ran one myself in Honolulu on a Tandy 286 PC with DOS 5.0, but that's another story. Their creed: privacy was not a luxury, it was survival. Public-key cryptography, digital cash, anonymous remailers, all were sketching blueprints for a future nobody else believed would come.
To outsiders, it all looked like paranoia. To insiders, it was the only way to live free in a coming world of surveillance. They weren’t building a metaverse yet, they were building armor.
Fast forward to 2008. The global economy was in flames, Wall Street getting bailouts while everyone else got foreclosures. And then, on an obscure cryptography list, a ghost posted a white paper: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” It was eight pages long.
It didn’t look like prophecy, but it was. A monetary system with no bankers, no kings, and no permission slips, just consensus written in code. Suddenly, digital scarcity was real, and trust didn’t have to flow through governments or corporations. It could flow through math.
But Bitcoin was a ledger, dumb money that only knew how to move from A to B. In 2015, Ethereum cracked that open. It made money programmable. “Smart contracts,” they called them, though they were closer to vending machines than lawyers.
Still, it changed everything. DAOs emerged, networks that could govern themselves in theory. NFTs, tokens that turned JPEGs into property deeds. The whole thing was messy, expensive, and often ridiculous. But for a moment, it felt like maybe, just maybe, the network could run itself.
By the 2020s, more contenders arrived. Avalanche promised speed, consensus without waiting, cheap transactions, the kind of throughput a game world would need. It wasn’t the first blockchain to claim scale, but it was one of the first that actually worked.
Meanwhile, Meta, Zuckerberg’s empire, tried to brute-force its way into Stephenson’s playbook. Headsets, billions in burn, cartoon avatars grinning in a corporate-branded wasteland. It was supposed to be the metaverse, but it looked more like a marketing department trapped inside The Sims.
And yet, hardware got better. Headsets shrank. AR prototypes slipped into the edges of everyday life. Even Magic Leap, where Stephenson himself had once dabbled, proved that fiction could shape R&D.
All of these experiments in cryptography and virtual economies rested on something more physical: the massive build-out of internet infrastructure. While the cypherpunks and early blockchain pioneers were sketching their blueprints, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were quietly building the backbone that would make any kind of metaverse possible.
Amazon, struggling to pivot out of the e-commerce bloodbath of the early 2000s, discovered that its real product wasn’t just books or consumer goods — it was servers. Out of that realization came Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing platform that turned spare capacity into a new industry. It was AWS, not retail, that made Amazon a durable technology company.
Microsoft, once content to dominate desktops, answered by retooling itself into a cloud-first company. Azure became the spiritual successor to Windows: a platform that quietly ran the world’s businesses, governments, and now blockchains. Google, never one to be left out, expanded from search into global cloud services, building an empire of data centers alongside its advertising juggernaut.
Underneath it all was the physical layer: the high-speed fiber networks, the wireless build-outs, the mobile connectivity that turned “always online” from aspiration to reality. Billions of devices, each tapping into petabytes of compute housed in data centers that consumed as much energy as small nations. The fifth dimension of human experience — the digital layer — only hummed because of this machinery.
Without this cloud build-out, without ubiquitous mobile connectivity, without racks upon racks of humming servers, there would be no blockchain, no NFTs, no talk of a metaverse. The fiction bled into reality only because the infrastructure beneath it could carry the weight.
Infrastructure made the metaverse possible, but it was the application layer that made it profitable. Gates understood this with Windows and Office: software that ran on every machine and locked in entire industries. Zuckerberg understood it with Facebook: the social application that colonized identity itself. The Google dorm-bros understood it with search, ads, and data — the true currency of the network. The PayPal mafia and their fintech heirs understood it with payments, wallets, and digital rails for money.
What all of them grasped was that the real leverage wasn’t in the servers or the fiber, but in the apps running on top of them. Control the layer where users live, and you control the value. The cloud was the soil, but the applications were the crops — the part everyone ate.
By the time Lamina1 entered the scene, this lesson was gospel. The future wouldn’t be won by infrastructure alone. It would be decided by the experiences — the applications — built on top of it.
Each step had flaws. Cypherpunks fought over implementation. Bitcoin ossified into digital gold. Ethereum drowned in its own gas fees. Meta turned satire into a product demo.
But taken together, they were more than failures. They were scaffolding. Pieces of a half-built structure, waiting for someone to claim they could finish it.
That’s the stage Lamina1 walked onto: declaring itself “The Layer 1 for the Open Metaverse,” backed by the man who coined the very word.