Alessandro De Grandi on buying bitcoin in 2010 and building a IRL/Virtual metaverse in The Nemesis

In 2010, Alessandro De Grandi, CEO and founder of The Nemesis, was playing Second Life, basically a rudimentary Web2 Metaverse, when he bought his first bitcoin, two of them actually. They cost less than a dollar each and he sold them for around $75 a few years later to his great satisfaction. However, it was the sensation of buying bitcoin in a metaverse that changed his thinking.

“It was a beautiful sensation. Something changed in my mind when I realised that we could make the metaverse into something that everyone could enjoy. While Web3 had not been invented, I just understood the internet was going to merge with the metaverse.”

De Grandi was not a hardcore game, preferring casual games, he instinctive understood that casual gaming would be the gateway drug to the metaverse. He also understood that people, and indeed brands, would need handholding to move from Web2 to Web3.

He and his co founder Riccardo Zanini, together with The Nemesis’ CTO Andrea Bernasconi (who had several years of experience in 3D graphics and in the world of videogames) first began working on The Nemesis back in 2018. De Grandi stresses that over the past four years the team has not spent a penny on marketing but focussed all their time, money and energy on building the platform.

To find out more, tune into the episode