It was almost too perfect. The man who coined the word metaverse thirty years earlier stepped out of fiction and into a press release.
June 2022: Neal Stephenson, Rebecca Barkin, and Peter Vessenes announced Lamina1. The pitch was crystalline: a Layer One blockchain for the open metaverse. Creator-first. Interoperable. A place where artists, coders, and storytellers could build worlds with permanence and provenance baked into the protocol.
The timing was uncanny. Crypto was on fire — not in the good way. Terra/Luna had collapsed, vaporizing billions. Ethereum gas fees still strangled experimentation. Avalanche, hungry for flagship projects, offered its subnets as an escape hatch: build your own chain on their rails. Lamina1 seized it. Instead of starting from scratch, it would launch as an Avalanche subnet, inheriting speed and scalability while borrowing credibility from Avalanche’s ecosystem.
The branding cut through the noise. This wasn’t pitched as another disposable chain. Lamina1 was a vision: immersive Spaces, interoperable items, a creator economy that echoed Stephenson’s imagination. Satire was being re-sold as salvation.
And the irony was thick. In Snow Crash, the metaverse was a parody of corporate feudalism. Now its author was at the head of a blockchain promising to empower creators. For many of us, this was feeling something like inevitability or destiny.
But in the moment, the community was electric. A Discord spun up like a neon carnival midway. Quests launched. XP points and badges handed out like tickets. NFTs minted. Digital clout gamified. Artists, coders, gamers, and speculators swirled together. For a while, everyone spoke about the team — as though we were co-builders of the same world.
Looking back, it was the purest moment of optimism. The fiction had looped into reality. Stephenson wasn’t just the prophet of the metaverse anymore — he was its architect. Or at least, that’s how it felt.