Rapper Snoop Dogg and producer Deadmau5 are planning to invest in the metaverse

• Snoop Dogg and Deadmau5 are planning to invest in the metaverse by joining Outlier Ventures, a venture capital firm.
• As strategic members, they will invest in, advise, and collaborate with startups.
• Other new members include Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget and Polygon Network founder Sandeep Nailwal.

American rap artist Snoop Dogg and Canadian producer Deadmau5 are planning to invest in the metaverse by joining Outlier Ventures, a venture capital firm, as strategic members.

In their new roles, Snoop Dogg and Deadmau5 will invest in, advise, and collaborate with startups through Outlier Ventures' Base Camp accelerator. Other new members include Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget and Polygon Network founder Sandeep Nailwal.

Outlier Ventures' Base Camp is kickstarting its next batch of ventures, which start in early 2022. The VC firm calls Base Camp the Y-Combinator of the metaverse, referring to the prestigious Silicon Valley startup program that has launched global brands from DoorDash to Coinbase.

Outlier Ventures, founded in 2014, was one of the first venture capital firms dedicated to investing in the emerging crypto ecosystem.

Since launching its Base Camp accelerator in 2019, the London-based firm has received over 5,000 applications and has helped raise over $250 million in seed funding. For 2022, Outlier Ventures is on target to accelerate well over 100 startups, the company said.

Its portfolio includes projects across decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, and blockchain infrastructure with a focus on emergent metaverse use cases.

''We need the best people from across finance, culture, and technology to bring the knowledge, reach, and capital to accelerate the open metaverse," Outlier Ventures founder and CEO Jamie Burke said in a statement Thursday. ''The metaverse will eventually connect every platform, virtual world, and game into a single permissionless peer-to-peer economy native to the internet."

Metaverse, a buzzy, all-encompassing term that refers to a new iteration of the internet, is gaining mainstream attention as Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) and other mega-tech companies have ramped up their investments in the field. Also known as Web 3.0, the metaverse is seen as a space for people to interact using avatars and NFTs.

In a recent report, Morgan Stanley estimated that the metaverse could be an $8 trillion opportunity though there are still some short-term hurdles.