At a press event yesterday, Singapore bank DBS unveiled their metaverse concept for DBS Betterworld, which has been in the works since the bank announced its partnership with The Sandbox in September last year.

DBS Betterworld is a gamified adventure created within The Sandbox that explores themes of sustainability, food wastage, and other ESG issues.

In DBS Betterworld, players will have to complete five tasks, all of which bring attention to the massive amounts of food wasted worldwide. In total, players can expect around 20 to 25 minutes of content from DBS Betterworld.

There are also "easter eggs" scattered throughout the area, such as cameos by the cast of its award-winning web series Sparks, as well as cultural icons of Singapore such as the Merlion. Players from Singapore will also have access to extra rewards, which can be redeemed via special QR codes accessed using the DBS Paylah! app.

Blockchain isn't just about money.

In order to create DBS Betterworld, DBS also partnered with several companies who are already involved in such sustainability efforts, including Brewerkz, Breer, GreenPrice, Edible Garden City, and Rooftop Republic.

When queried on why DBS is now choosing to enter the Metaverse in order to bring attention to these issues, Karen Ngui, Head of Group Strategic Marketing and Communications at DBS, and Board Member of the DBS Foundation, explained that "DBS believes that it is possible to leverage the metaverse as a force for good" and that such an interactive medium would increase awareness of such issues to those who could find innovative ways to address these issues.

“The metaverse gives us a chance to imagine and do things differently, and to reach out to a new generation. We understand that gaming is a huge industry, and for us, it's an opportunity to reach out to the young people who care about the planet.”

- Karen Ngui, Head of Group Strategic Marketing and Communications, DBS

Sarah Rodriguez, Head of Marketing at Edible Garden City, one of DBS' partners in creating DBS Betterworld, applauded the effort as well.

"DBS' foray into the metaverse and exploration of food wastage fits well with our mission to make food resilience more accessible to everyone. We are very excited to partner with them, and are glad that DBS does have social causes in mind."

Not every metaverse is a good metaverse

Lam Chee Kin, Group Head, Legal and Compliance at DBS, also revealed why DBS chose to shine the limelight on social issues instead of simply creating and augmenting banking services that it already offered.

Lam pointed out that throughout the team's research of what other companies had done with their metaverse expansions, they realised that many companies either tried to capitalise on the tech, or focus on digital identities in their forays into the metaverse.

This, however, was not how DBS wanted to take advantage of blockchain technology.

"We thought long and hard about what would happen if we took these approaches, and we realised that these approaches did not really make the most of what the metaverse has to offer.

People join the metaverse because it's a new experience, and we felt that we needed to deliver on that. If we simply took the tech approach or the digital identity approach, we felt that we might let people down, since this need to have new experiences is not really satisfied. It's not the tech that makes a metaverse sustainable and long-lived, but the content.”

As such, DBS Betterworld is meant to function as a testing ground for DBS. After all, as some audience members noted, 25 minutes of gameplay is hardly enough to compare to the many hours of content that other games are creating.

Therefore DBS says that there is no specific number at which their metaverse would be considered 'successful'. Instead, this will be used as a gauge for how businesses can interact with the metaverse, and to gather data that will be used to decide their next steps.

Lam, however, has expressed interest in expanding the bank's reach into the blockchain ecosystem.

“As the Web3 community grows, people will begin accumulating assets in the metaverse, and more likely than not, there will be more than just a single metaverse. Consumers will want to move assets in and out of the metaverse, and there is a way to capitalise on this. Banks and financial service providers are good at financial intermediation, and this is one role that banks can play in the Web3 ecosystem”.