From being the very first India employee of Facebook when it first opened shutters in the country back in 2010, to helping steer global investments for SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Kirthiga Reddy has always worked within the intersection of technology, media, communications, and branding, not to mention the people and institutions who create, deploy, and enhance them.

Virtualness, which she co-founded with fellow Meta alum Saurabh Doshi, is a culmination of all those experiencesand market evolutions. It is an authentication, engagement and monetization platform for awards, events, certification, phygital goods and experiences – powered by generative AI and blockchain. It is a Web3 platform that is helping businesses and consumers navigate emerging technology in diverse ways.

“My prediction is soon everybody will be using blockchain without thinking about it. That's where the world is going. And you are seeing it changing industries: from education to how health records are done to real estate to legal work. And of course, increasingly for media and entertainment,” says Reddy.

And just like ChatGPT was in the works for years before it became an overnight sensation, Virtualness is looking to become the Canva for blockchain technology, and make it very easy and usable for the masses.

It’s a huge market. The market cap for blockchain tech industry is at $17.46 billion and growing at 87.7% CAGR, with a market opportunity that by 2030, will be $1.4 trillion.

“And all of that is growing by increased acceptance, increased usage. I have teenage girls, and when they get their degree certificate, they might get a piece of paper as they walk the stage, but their actual degree will be an NFT that's validated on blockchain,” says Reddy.

That naturally brings us to the elephant in the room, or the monkey on the yacht. When people hear the word NFTs, the first picture that comes to mind is that absurdist monkey art collection, the first meme that comes up has to do with the Tulip bubble, and the first word that comes out is nope.

“And a lot of the speculation, the trading, and stories about scams: that is what people have heard about,” fumes Reddy, saying that below all of that is a very fundamental technology transformation and that if you only think about the monkeys, you're really missing a huge boat (or yacht even).

“For the first time you have the ability to own, and use, an authenticated digital asset: the equivalent of a realworld real estate deed or a GIA (Gemological Institute of America) certificate. And if I give you an ID and the contract ID, you can take that and verify it on the public blockchain and see that said asset actually belongs to said person. That's the kind of public global verifiability that you have now, which never existed before,” she asserts.

And then there is the engagement aspect, whether that be between brand and consumer, event and attendee, jury and awardee, or just you and another human being. At a recent tech event that Virtualness helped curate, it created blockchain-secured digital commemorative for attendees, in addition to the traditional physical mementoes.

“It was a whole digital keepsake that had messages from nine unicorn founders, and three people were selected to get a one-on-one with one of these unicorn founders. So it was actually an exclusionary group,” says Reddy, noting Virtualness allows brands, creators and enterprises to design digital goods on blockchain using generative AI, add rewards and utility, securely distribute to a global audience - in less than a minute.

While its primary markets are currently in India, the US, and Indonesia, Virtualness, and its tech stack, are making inroads across industries and markets, having already caught the eye, and financial support of VCs like Blockchange Ventures, F7 Ventures, Micron Ventures, Better Ventures, FalconX, and Oceans Ventures, among others, as well as Randi Zuckerberg, Harsh Jain, Stacy Brown-Philpot, and others.

Reddy says when the Guinness World Record Women in Cloud team worked with Virtualness, they said that they had been looking for a solution for years, but every other solution requires a certain amount of technical knowledge about the problem. “And if you look at the average user, they don't have that technical knowledge.”

“And for the first time, they felt that there was a platform where you can just log in using your regular social media handle, email, OTP, phone number, and find your solution. You can buy or sell using local currency. And that's the power of the platform: that we give you the power of blockchain without the complexity of blockchain.”