GiveTree founder Sam Joel launches world’s first ‘metaverse for good’

From being homeless to launching a start-up, this founder is fired up and says the Sydney VC set are asleep at the wheel when it comes to metaverse opportunities.

With demand exploding for virtual sneakers, T-shirts and digital collectables Australian entrepreneur Sam Joel has founded what he describes as the world’s first metaverse game-for-good – GiveTree – a virtual world in which a percentage of every transaction will go to charity.

Three years ago Joel was homeless and living in a Sydney internet cafe, and said in an interview that his struggles with drug and alcohol addictions and mental health issues motivated him to create something that could genuinely shift the dial on improving the world.

He originally founded GiveTree as an online charity directory, and has since progressed the idea into a full virtual world for users to explore and interact, as well as give back.

Now 22 months sober and having built up his business, he is ready to launch GiveTree to the world.

“GiveTree is going to be the first virtual game world ‘for good’. Every single transaction will go towards a real-world partner, and there’s global motivation to solving the world’s problems, not through politicians or marketing solutions but through actual tangible results and we think we can achieve a lot with what we’re doing,” Joel said.

Supplied Editorial The GiveTree virtual world. Source: Supplied.

“I look at the metaverse as being very similar to YouTube. YouTube started small and is now a behemoth with over 15 million different channels, each with different types of content. The metaverse will have the exact same evolution, you’ll have Facebook’s meta world, which will be closed off, but there’ll be millions of other meta worlds and some of them will be really big and popular. The GiveTree world will be an immersive, playable environment built in stunning 3D.”

In the GiveTree metaverse, creators who want to sell an NFT fill out a smart contract and describe the digital product being sold, the impact partner they want to support, and the percentage of the transaction to be donated along with which blockchain they prefer.

Once the NFT is bought, the purchase is recorded, and the donated amount is guaranteed to go straight to the impact partner as money or cryptocurrency. The smart contract also ensures further donations any time the NFT is resold.

GiveTree is also giving its charity partners the opportunity to create, mint, and sell NFTs and will help them set up crypto wallets. Sydney-based daytime women’s refuge, Lou’s Place, is among the more than 100-plus charities, DAOs, and profit-for-purpose GiveTree partners to already sign up.

Joel is this week kicking off a crowd-funding campaign with leading Australian platform Birchal to raise $1m at a $5m valuation in order to invest further in building out the GiveTree virtual world, which he said will be expensive to develop.

The entrepreneur said that while Web3 projects were in hot demand globally, Australian venture capitalists did not understand the concept or its potential.

The term Web3 is used to describe what some see as the next generation of the internet – projects built on decentralised and blockchain technologies.

“I don’t know what the Sydney VCs are analysing but it certainly is not the local talent here, there is a lot going on in this space around the world and the talent here should look elsewhere for funding,” he said.

“The Sydney VC community have had a monopoly for so long that they’re asleep at the wheel, they have no idea what’s going on. I’m speaking to international VCs, some based out of Israel for example, and the have road maps to invest in hundreds of Web3 projects over the next 12 months, it’s such a rapidly moving space.

“And VCs here posture in the media but what they’re saying is not aligning with what they’re actually doing.”

He added that most charities are currently only able to accept donations of money or fundraisers for money, limiting what donors can give.

“GiveTree opens the door to a whole new world of opportunities for charities, including the opportunity to redesign their organisation‘s structure and process to align more with rapidly advancing Web3 technologies.”