Revolutionizing Web3, VR, and Blockchain; Interview With Jerad Finck, CEO of Cosmic Wire

Jerad Finck, CEO and Founder of Cosmic Wire, stands at the forefront of Blockchain innovation with over two decades of diverse experience in tech system design, music production, and executive leadership. As an early participant in Silicon Valley’s tech scene, he honed his cybersecurity and system architecture skills, contributing to major projects for startups and giants like Nokia.

Finck transitioned from technology to mental health and provided invaluable case management and counseling services, reflecting his commitment to social responsibility. This phase of his career underscored his versatility and dedication to making a difference in the lives of those facing socio-economic challenges.

Musically, Finck has carved out a successful path as an artist known as “BLAZAR.” Inheriting a rich family legacy in music, he won VH-1’s “Song of the Year,” leading to multiple Top 40 hits and partnerships with prominent labels like Warner, ADA, Rock Ridge Music, and AntiFragile Music through INgrooves/Universal. His extensive collaboration list includes Universal Music Group, Warner Music, and many others, showcasing his artistic versatility.

At Cosmic Wire, Finck combines his artistic flair and technical acumen to drive the Blockchain industry, championing innovation with an unwavering commitment to excellence. His unique profile as a creative technologist positions him as a notable leader in advancing Web3 and Blockchain technologies, as well as a driving force behind the development of spatial web.

Could you tell us more about yourself?

My career started in tech during the early 2000s while I was paying my way through college, where I originally planned to study abnormal psychiatry and music. I was balancing jazz and pre-med courses during the day while working in Silicon Valley on systems engineering and large-scale administration in the evenings, just as the internet was taking off.

My work has always revolved around managing intellectual property and large systems. Along the way, I ventured into music, landing a record deal in 2008. When the pandemic hit and my music career took a temporary halt, I transitioned to focusing entirely on an idea I’d been working on for years—an XR/VR-based, blockchain-powered spatial web concept. Cosmic Wire is the culmination of everything I’ve done—tech, music, and innovation—rolled into one.

What inspired you to start Cosmic Wire, and what long-term vision do you have for its future in the Web3 and digital entertainment spaces?

We have been focused on creating deeper, stickier environments around IP and fandom, which I always believed was web-based and immersive through XR, VR, and AR. Essentially, creating the bridge between analog and digital experiences. 

The ceiling for these technologies has always been the bandwidth of spatial compute. There’s a limit to what we can send out over the web. When we cracked the code with our compression, file formats, engine, and everything else that we put together for WebGL, that really opened up and changed things. 

I believe the future is more accessible and decentralized, where people are in charge of their proxy and data. While we can’t influence the top powers that be, we can raise the floor of accessibility. At a global level, we will empower people through existing infrastructure to connect to the world, educate, accept, and immerse them in entertainment in a way that they haven’t been able to do before. 

With Web3 technology evolving so quickly, what strategies does Cosmic Wire employ to ensure it remains at the forefront of innovation and continues to offer cutting-edge solutions?

Right now, our main focus is to follow through with the initial vision we’ve been building all along. We’ve been watching Web3 go through the ups and downs, and the industry seems to be turning towards where we always envisioned it would: a hyper-connected decentralized web.

By creating our toolkit, Cosmic Wire is always at the forefront because it’s the baseline architecture people use to build, expand, and express much the same as Linux, Windows, or any other OS-level system. 

Our philosophy isn’t to control the space but to empower it so that other builders can use these toolkits to do all the wild things they need to do to realize their vision of what Web3 could be. 

Since the inception of Cosmic Wire, what have been some of the most pivotal milestones or achievements that have shaped the company’s direction and growth?

The simple answer is to see stuff work. Going from ideation on a whiteboard to sketching out some architecture documents, putting together the development teams, actually building out prototypes, and then seeing it work has been the greatest thing ever inside of this company. 

Interchain messaging was an idea. It’s working now. Our wallet and identity systems, how we put our contracts together, the file format for the volumetric hologram, and using those over WebGL, getting our paymaster system plugged into the back end, and watching all this run through our cross-chain compatible blockchain indexing system without bridges in real-time. Seeing all these things that were just simple ideas by themselves now working in tandem in one large component tech stack has been an amazing experience. 

For me, that’s the most pivotal milestone. It’s efficacy, it’s proof. It’s not an idea or a roadmap. It’s a result. 

Who are the primary users of Cosmic Wire’s technology? Which industries do you see having the most potential for growth and significant impact through the adoption of your platform?

Honestly, anyone who uses the internet. The early adoption will be indexing systems and large-scale datasets that can be automated. Any kind of JWT-based database system that people are storing or doing large callback functions, most of that can be put in an automated system with blockchain in a way that doesn’t have all the vulnerabilities that exist in the current architecture. Time and time again, we see some databases get hacked, and multiple companies have all their data compromised. This is a full stop on any kind of brute force takedown. 

Our systems will change the very way that people can consume, view, and immerse themselves in whatever entertainment they choose, whether it’s a comic book, a video game, a sonnet, a poem, a piece of music, a play, or just talking to their family who’s on the other side of the world in real-time. 

Our technology will allow every single person on Earth to take advantage of it, and it will spread into every medium because it’s an infrastructure-level evolution of our current architecture. 

In an era where data privacy and security are paramount, how does Cosmic Wire’s blockchain technology ensure robust protection for its users, particularly within the Web3 and DeFi landscapes?

Our technology was built specifically to protect users. My sole purpose as an artist and a creator is to protect the intellectual property rights of all artists and creators. And, in this new world, all people are creators. 

All of our identity technology revolves around creating zero-trust environments that we don’t have access to. The only ones who have access to them are the users themselves. And that’s the point. We should all be in control of our data and our IP. Our IP is our very entity and our very being. 

We’re protecting all users in a zero-trust environment that can interact with all these ecosystems in a non-parasitic way. This empowers the user to allow data to be used and monetized if they opt in or not. Every person should have control over their domain. 

Can you elaborate on how Cosmic Wire is enabling creators and brands to unlock decentralized revenue streams? How does this approach differ from traditional monetization methods?

The premise of interchain messaging is that we can take any asset and put all of that intellectual property data inside of it, whether it’s PRO information, master rights, publishing rights, you know, your guild information, your bank accounts, your pantry, your authorship, whatever that is, and go inside of this zero-trust environment. 

That zero-trust environment is your unique digital fingerprint, which makes all of the expressions of that, a derivative usage. Suppose you’re on Instagram and holding up a bottle of shampoo, or you’re drawing a picture, or cooking spaghetti, or writing a song, or talking to your friend. All of it is running through your own entity that you control, which is essentially the master license for everything that you do. 

This is the perfect system for allowing these entities to control their IP. If you choose to license it out, it gets licensed out with that same hash that’s tracking all your things. This is also great for search and destroy to pull down deep fakes and all of the malarkey coming out of this space. This is the next iteration of how we will control intellectual property, and it puts creators at the very center of their IP like they should have been in the beginning.

How is Cosmic Wire exploring the immersive potential of virtual reality to enhance digital entertainment experiences? What unique opportunities do you see in the VR space for your platform?

VR is just one piece of the Cosmic Wire tech stack. Our tech is completely interoperable across any device with internet access. So it’s not just VR, it’s VR, it’s AR, it’s in between, it’s 2D, it’s 3D, it’s on tablets, smart TVs, it’s on your mobile phones, any device. It comes down to how the user wants to consume.

All of these things work together much the same way in gaming. We have people spending three, four, or five grand on a high-end gaming PC. Some want to play on a console, like their PS5 or their Xbox. Others want to play on a mobile phone, just playing Candy Crush. These immersive experiences will absolutely be in VR, but they’ll also be in AR, and they’ll also be through 2D flat-screen devices in a standard 2D interface. They all work in symmetry and across the board. 

Ultimately, it’s not about building specifically for one medium; it’s about building so all mediums can take advantage of that one piece of IP. 

Strategic partnerships are often crucial to a company’s success. Can you discuss some of the key partnerships Cosmic Wire has formed and how these collaborations have enhanced your offerings?

Strategic partnerships are the cornerstone of success. Cosmic Wire is not trying to boil the ocean. We have built our source and core technology and partnered with several large infrastructure companies, like our lead investors, Polygon and Solana. We also have cloud partnerships with AWS and GCP, which can scale our tech through their ecosystems.

We’ve signed deals with CAA and others in the entertainment industry, from the biggest names on Earth to mom-and-pop shops. All are being scaled by large infrastructure partners.

What emerging technologies or trends is Cosmic Wire particularly excited about? How do you plan to integrate these innovations into your platform to keep it at the cutting edge of the industry?

Web3, AR, VR, and AI are the center of the universe right now, and we’re incorporating all of them at scale. We have breakthrough revolutionary source technology that’s patented and protected so that these concepts can all be used and scaled. It’s all agnostic and interoperable across all mediums, and that’s the point. That’s what Cosmic Wire is.

Looking ahead, what future trends do you predict will shape the Web3 and spatial internet landscape? How is Cosmic Wire preparing to adapt and lead in this rapidly evolving digital ecosystem?

The entire ecosystem that Cosmic Wire is working in and on specifically is being trained with ML and LLMs like everyone else. We’re sending all this data through AI, which will take these systems, massively scale them, and create efficiencies across the board. 

The whole point is to create more concise efficiencies through AR and VR with our compression, file formats, volumetric captures, interchain messaging system, and interacting blockchains. We will run that into our Kubernetes clusters to scale the backend networks and do the entire cloud-based rendering or server-side rendering on whatever the project is. We’re using AI behind all this training as we build the systems that help us create efficiencies.

AI is moving much faster than anyone knows. However, it still needs the toolkit and the baseline OS systems to work from. With Cosmic Wire’s patented tech, we’ve created more efficient systems for AI to learn from, which will absolutely scale it at a drastically increased speed.