📝Product Hunt’s Virtual Web3 Panel was a metaverse-native education event hosted inside 📝Topia, an interactive spatial video platform designed for real-time connection. Held on December 1, 2021, the experience combined immersive social mingling with a livestreamed expert panel, tackling themes from DeFi to NFTs.
The event was produced by our 📝One Studio team, and streamed live from PowerStation. NYC into Topia and onto Product Hunt’s social channels, blending Web3 thought leadership with an experimental form of community gathering.
The event attracted 2,200 RSVPs, with participants joining as avatars in a custom-designed Topia world to explore, connect, and attend the main event. The structure included 30 minutes of organic socializing, followed by a 40-minute panel and 20-minute Q&A session. To achieve seamless bidirectional audio integration between the physical panel studio and the virtual world, our team developed a custom A/V pipeline, eliminating feedback and ensuring real-time responsiveness. The panel, moderated by Laura Shin, featured leading voices in crypto: Amber Baldet, Chris Perkins, and Andrew Levine.
We designed the space to encourage serendipitous interaction and live engagement—complete with virtual photo booths, caricaturists, and embedded livestream windows. This hybrid format not only deepened audience immersion but also demonstrated the potential of Web3-native event infrastructure.
This was one of those experiments that felt more like a portal than a panel. I remember standing in the middle of the Topia world, watching participants organically break off into conversations, drawing little crowds around digital campfires while the stream played on the virtual screen. It was chaotic, a bit buggy, but undeniably alive.
At the time, Web3 was just crossing over into mainstream curiosity—and Product Hunt’s leap into the metaverse wasn’t just a novelty move. It signaled a shift. We weren’t just talking about decentralization. We were embodying it in the medium itself. The backstage challenge of syncing audio from a physical studio into an interactive browser-based world felt like plumbing the future—visible cables and all.
I still think about the people who met that day and stayed connected because of it. Not because they watched a panel, but because they wandered into the same digital forest and found each other by the fire.