1. How did you go from studying food technology to working in IT?

My journey from studying food technology to entering the IT field was fueled by a childhood passion for technology. I had database classes in school, but I didn’t dare to take a step on this career path. Despite my initial hesitations, I pursued food technology after school. After working in the food industry for nearly three years, I realized my unfulfilled aspirations.

Secretly editing and creating videos during my free time has always been a creative outlet for me. Encouraged by my brother, I took a leap into Kaunas Coding School, drawn in by the dynamic nature of programming and the constant room for improvement. There was no better time than the present to make my career path switch. Balancing work and studies was undoubtedly challenging, but it marked the transformative phase of my career.

2. What hobbies do you have? How do you manage to maintain a work-life balance?

Beyond work, my life is a blend of passion for sports and enriching travel experiences. Basketball has been a constant in my life, leading me to establish an amateur team in 2016, where I serve as both a player and a coach. The basketball court is where I can pour out all my accumulated emotions. I also represent the team of my hometown, Žiežmariai, where I was born and raised – an honor that adds a special touch to my connection with my roots.

Aside from this, I’ve been refereeing basketball since 2015, officiating in Lithuanian leagues such as the MKL (Pupils Basketball League) and the amateur basketball leagues. This role serves as a refreshing mental exercise for me.

Additionally, travel is a vital ingredient in maintaining my work-life balance. Exploring the world, with Italy standing out as a personal favorite, brings richness to my life. Even ventures to countries like India, where I lived with a local family, provided cultural revelations that significantly contributed to my understanding of life.

Moreover, I’ve embarked on memorable cycling journeys with my colleagues. Cycling from Kaunas to Nida and Kaunas to Jurmala not only strengthens our bonds but also adds a unique flavor to my travel adventures, making them even more unforgettable.

3. What helps you stay positive during challenging times?

Optimism is my guiding principle in life, and I always see the glass as half full. During challenging times, I prioritize staying calm and conducting a thoughtful assessment of the situation. Physical exercise serves as a refuge, and travel acts as an escape when needed. Balancing life is crucial, and I am committed to continual improvement and growth, ensuring that life remains a journey of positive experiences and personal development.

We are one of TOP 10 .NET development companies out of 2000+ software development providers from Europe in the Aciety network.

Our partners Aciety were reviewing more than 2000 IT service providers in their network. Based on our service quality and expertise, Xplicity was awarded the TOP 10 .NET partner’s badge. This wouldn’t have been possible without our customers’ trust and the team’s good and hard work. We promise to don’t rest on our laurels, continue providing high-quality services for our customers and keep making their dreams come true.

In this presentation, you’ll find Vytautas Kašėtas’ from SUPER HOW? insights on a metaverse topic which were given during a meet-up with Xplicity. 

What is Metaverse?

The metaverse is described as the inevitable evolution of the internet. But what exactly is the metaverse, and what will it become? 

In other words, the metaverse is a digital reality that combines aspects of social media, online gaming, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and cryptocurrencies that allows users to interact virtually. Augmented reality overlays visual elements, sound, and other sensory input into real-world settings to enhance the user experience. In contrast, virtual reality is entirely virtual and enhances fictional realities.

“It is predicted that a 25% of consumers will use the Metaverse daily by 2026 to work, shop, attend school, socialize or consume entertainment,” says Vytautas. 

The size

So, how big is Metaverse? Vytautas suggested that “the best way to measure it is by using money value. Various experts are calculating that metaverse value will reach over $1 T in the next few years. While Blockchain added value is predicted to be $3.1 T by 2030.”

So, according to speaker, there’s no doubt that “21st Century doesn’t belong to China, US or Silicon Valley. It belongs to the Internet.”

Internet as a country

Internet becomes as powerful as a country, and we should take a glance into some milestones. This powerful shift started around 2008-2009 when was documented the first practical use of bitcoin. At that time happening banking crisis was so-what catalysator to the “21st Century Internet” (as we know it now) creation. 

Many things happened during that moment, from Pizza day to WAGMI, DeFI, NFTs, etc. The latter – NFTs or non-fungible tokens, are digital assets based on blockchain technology. Anything can become an NFT: a piece of art, sports memorabilia, or even a tweet. Now, as society, we are going into the next period consisting of GameFi and MetaFi.

“The gamification process started as a way to involve communities into this new world. So NFTs built the way, into the next level social networks where virtual world with finances is gamified. It lead to Meta Finances, MetaFI, GameFi, Gaming for Finances concepts. These concepts are based on thinking ‘play and earn’. It means that you can choose if you want to do both or only play/earn”, – explains Vytautas. 

As we can see, the beginning of Metaverse as physical, real place (a place where you can go and meet friends) on a given day already exists. 

History of Metaverse: Paradigm Shift

If we wanted to better understand how the path to the metaverse was built, it’s important to go through the key elements that had a major impact.

• Science fiction author Neal Stephenson coined the term metaverse in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. In the book, human avatars and software agents interact in a three-dimensional virtual space.
  
• By 2003 millions of people already worked, played and socialized in the Metaverse within the online Second Life world. Second Life is an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user created content within a multi-player online virtual world. 
  
•  From 2015 Decentraland is the most well-known modern-day “proto Metaverse”. Decentraland is a 3D virtual world browser-based platform. Users may buy virtual plots of land in the platform as NFTs via the MANA cryptocurrency, which uses the Ethereum blockchain. It was opened to the public in 2020.
  
• From 2018 other interesting projects such as The Sandbox, Axie Infinity appeared. The latter is a non-fungible token-based online video game developed by Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis, known for its in-game economy which uses Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies.

Photo: Decentraland

 So Open Metaverse Worlds is a new paradigm interconnected by the digital crypto economy.

The New Paradigm

Metaverse is fundamentally different from contemporary internet/mobile paradigms, design and priorities. 7 Core Metaverse attributes, according to Vytautas:

1. Synchronous and live: the Metaverse will be living experience that exists continuously for everyone and in real-time, just as it does in real life. As well, it is 100% continuous – never resets, pauses or ends as it just keeps going endlessly. 
2. Available individually and concurrently as everyone can be a part of the Metaverse and take part in a specific event/place/ activity simultaneously with their agency in the Metaverse.
3. A fully functioning economy. Individuals and businesses should be able to create their own, invest in, sell, and be compensated for a vast array of efforts that produce value. 
4. An Immersive experience. Engagement is important and Metaverse must be immersive, e.g. it can be done with VR: I put my glasses on and play games, I’m here in Metaverse. Of course, it is important to remember that social immersive experience is a very important attribute as well. 
5. Mass Collaboration of contributors. Metaverse is built by us to us, every participant becomes a creator. 
6. Unprecedented Interoperability. Interoperability is another important element as if we want to create a Meta world among all protocols – the interoperability has to exist (it means that interaction is “a must”).
7. Metaverse must have decentralized infrastructure.

“There are few elements that are worth to remember when thinking, talking or discussing about Metaverse, as well. First, it is an open world that allows users to own a piece of it, so that all can benefit from the shared network effect that occurs. Second, the ability to own an asset serves as the foundation for a platform that is far greater than the sum of its parts, Last – true digital ownership (virtual property rights) is the foundational block underpinning the entire open metaverse,” – summarizes Vytautas. 

The full presentation can be found here: Metavisata_by Vytautas_Kaseta.

• We met with previous clients and generated new ideas to extend our collaboration
• We met with former DevAcademy “Out of the box” speakers
• Met lots of potential future partners
• Established a solid number of new connections
• Scheduled a bunch of meetings with the prospect companies
• Got involved into exciting projects (for example, a new software project for water quality management)

We could continue the list, but it’s better to visit it and experience everything live! Even though the majority of people whom we met have admitted that the event is overwhelming, they also agreed that it’s worth visiting.

Year after year we help organizations and volunteers who provide their help to the community. For 6 months Xplicity’s team of programming volunteers led by colleague Matas were working on the pro-bono project – Warehouse Management System developed for Lietuvos Raudonasis Kryžius.

How war refugees influenced the software solution

We were witnesses of a significant increase of war refugees arriving in Lithuania when Russia started the war against Ukraine. With this challenge our goodwill to help increased too, as we knew how many related things must be organized, how many items must be recalculated and distributed daily. The Red Cross was experiencing the challenge of how to effectively organize the provision of essential supplies and products to all units. The team had been doing everything manually and the digitized solution was a game changer.

Implementation

Digitizing supply chains is one of Xplicity’s strengths, so we decided to help out by creating a digital tool that will help involved volunteers to help others. We have:

• automated warehouse management, 
• created the ability to automatically import the old data and keep it in the system; 
• added ability to adjust the goods’ quantities and addresses that the sender and the consignee see in the system; 
• automated generation of waybills, 
• created functionality for filtering of the sent goods according to various attributes (dates, addresses, products, etc.)
• etc.

Results

It took a bit longer than we expected but finally the Warehouse Management System was created. The technologies we used to develop the system: C#, .NET 6, SQL Server, Azure Storage (storage account). It is a solution that facilitates the supply chain processes. With this tool, Lietuvos Raudonasis Kryžius can now make their routine tasks, which used to require a lot of extra time and effort from the people involved, way more easier. 

Red Cross in Lithuania: https://redcross.lt/  

In this video, you’ll find Linas Būtėnas’ presentation “Beginners Guide to the Galaxy of Blockchains” on blockchain technology. The presentation was given during XPLICITY DEC ACADEMY 2022.

Blockchain gold time is coming

“My own touch to blockchain started a few years ago. Before that time I thought ‘who can pay for some virtual currency around 7 euros? It’s expensive, it’s nonsense.” How wrong I was. In 2017 I saw all that ideology about blockchain and I got a vision that we are pretty much in a similar situation as in 1996. In 1996 the internet existed but there was no mega boom. So with the blockchain now is the same feeling – that I’m at the beginning of technology which soon is going to bloom into something big,” says Linas.

What is blockchain?

The blockchain is a distributed, public ledger that contains the history of every bitcoin transaction. Anyone involved can download a copy of the blockchain, and it can be inspected to trace the path of bitcoins from one bitcoin transaction to another.

“Since the Public Private Key System was invented (1970-1973) and the first RSA algorithm was developed (1973), many things have changed and been developed, e.g. as e-gold or e-money. In 2008 blockchain was born. Now we are fourteen years on and it has taken a long time for governments to stop ignoring this technology and recognize it,” says Linas.

Linas’ insights on blockchain technology:

1. Need for trust: the value exchange is possible then trust is present

From my point of view, the main thing that blockchain brings – is a tool of trust that belongs to everyone who wants to participate. Regardless of state, government or anything else and, it gives us a whole different set of possibilities.

Basically, all exchanges in the world are based on some kind of trust. For example, in ancient times there were Rai stones. Rai stones have been viewed by modern economists as a form of money, and are often used as an example to support the thesis that the value of some form of money can be assigned purely through shared belief in said value.

The bigger is a stone, the greater wealth it represents. E.g. the whole village would gather and say “now Linas passes this stone to John”, and everyone knew that the stone now belonged to John. Often the stones were so big that they could not be moved. So you have a record memory in everyone’s head, just as blockchain technology has a record in its code.

2. When did a change start? 

It is often asked why blockchain technology could not have been developed earlier. A good answer would be that there is a distributed ledger change over time. From clay tablets, papyrus, tally sticks, double entry bookkeeping, spreadsheets to distributed ledgers (electronic).

So when we become aware of Bitcoin (₿) – a decentralised digital currency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries – the change happened. Bitcoin was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin’s original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. So we start talking about CRYPTO ECONOMY – an economy based on cryptographical and decentralised infrastructures. 

3. Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAO)

The first thing I would recommend to start your understanding of blockchain is to look up Don Tapscott TEDx’s speeches or read his book “Blockchain revolution”. This man already in 2016 spoke about the things what the world is doing with blockchain only now. So, Don Tapscott had the right vision, the right understanding, and now you could say it’s just a technical implementation of it.

Blockchain enables the creation of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs), which create an element of trust. Like the European Union and the movement between its countries: moving freely without checks helps to create efficiency. So, with the blockchain: we have the ability to “move”, we have a trust protocol that gives us the ability to invest in the projects. For example, I, as sole person in the world, can invest into various projects e.g. only two dollars. Obviously, I would be on a different playing field, but the point is that I can be on it.

So the idea of decentralised autonomous organisations is that there is an organisation that exists on a blockchain, its members have a democratic vote and they make the decisions; and that organisation can have its own money, its own particular protocols and so on.

4. Self-sovereign Digital Identity

Self-sovereign Digital Identity is a very important thing, as well. We are nobodies on the internet. We identify ourselves, for example through Gmail. So if someone accessed my Gmail, they can access a lot of my stuff, change passwords and so on. And there is no way I can identify myself remotely then. So, I cannot do or buy anything on the internet where identification is needed – in this case constraining the economy. 

5. Where are we heading?

We are migrating from the Read-only web to the Read-write-execute web and participating in it. Whereas before you opened a page and could read it, now we can upload content and move towards a more augmented reality. Blockchain is not only a social web, but it is also social – the public has yet to adopt it.

A full video presentation with a broader explanation of blockchains can be found here.

I want to download the presentation slides:

“Beginners Guide to the Galaxy of Blockchains” by Linas Būtėnas