Popular crypto prpjects in Metaverse ecosystem are enhancing and this guide will help you. Over the past few weeks, an exciting new term has entered the crypto lingo, the Metaverse. You might be wondering what the heck it is and what it actually means for crypto. So, if you’re curious to know more, then stick with me here because I’m about to dive deep into every little detail and tell you exactly where you can go for hidden treasures. This you don’t want to miss.
Metaverse Introduction
The term Metaverse is just about everywhere these days, and this is largely the fault of one Mark Zuckerberg, who announced that Facebook was rebranding to META at connect 2021.
In late October, in the announcement, Zuckerberg introduced the concept of something akin to a Facebook 2.0 a new, and alternative Facebook model that aspires to bring the Metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses.
All the while shovelling their personal data onto the company servers from whence it will be turned into money. In META’s own words quote “The Metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world.”
I’m not the biggest fan of Facebook in general, as might be obvious. However. I do have to respect its latest developments, but more on that later.
As it pertains to crypto, Facebook’s rebranding to META saw multiple NFT, and VR related coins shoot up in value in a short period of time. Decentraland’s native token MANA, for instance, saw a price appreciation of over 400% soon after the META announcement was made. Christmas certainly came early for some.
You might be wondering what the heck is this Metaverse thing, how does it work, how does it relate to our beloved crypto-verse, and most importantly could this be the next big thing? Let me explain. I’ll start off by saying that there are many differing opinions, various conceptualizations, and a plethora of definitions when it comes to the Metaverse. Thus boiling it down to one simple sentence is no easy task. But that being said, I will do my best to give you the most all-encompassing and clearest explanation possible.
What Is the Metaverse?
According to a recent presentation by the Wall Street Journal, the Metaverse is loosely defined as quote “An extensive online world where people interact via digital avatars.” sound familiar?
If you’re a sims video game lover, then this shouldn’t be too complex to fathom. While I do believe that this definition by the journal does encapsulate all the primary fundamental elements of what makes up the Metaverse, it does seem a bit basic. Thus as always, I’m tempted to go the extra mile here and provide you with my own in-depth analysis, and now for a bit of history.
The term Metaverse is a portmanteau word made up of META and universe, and it was coined by American writer Neel Stevenson and first used in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash.
Snow Crash is a VR inspired novel where humans portrayed as avatars interact with one another and with artificially created software agents in a three-dimensional virtual space that is supposedly viewed as a metaphor for the real world.
This next part is a bit dystopian. In the novel, Stevenson’s Metaverse appears to its users as a primarily urban environment developed along a 100-meter wide road called the street, which spans the entire circumference of a dark and perfectly spherical planet.
Users of this Metaverse can access it through personal terminals that project a high definition virtual reality through special goggles worn by the users, who experience the Metaverse entirely from a first-person perspective.
Another more recent representation of the Metaverse is the one portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 2018 Sci-Fi film Ready Player One. What a great watch that is.
In both Snow Crash and Ready Player One, the Metaverse is portrayed as something akin to a hypothesized, and somewhat futuristic iteration of the internet as a completely AI-infused and augmented reality or AR focused space.
In Ready Player One, the Metaverse constitutes a root of escapism from a world ravaged by climate change and an unprecedented fossil fuel crisis. It rings a bell doesn’t make it. But, of course, before you jump to any rash conclusions, remember that this is only a film one would assume.
The Metaverse is conceptually growing at an incredibly rapid pace both in cultural awareness and financial terms since the idea of a Metaverse-oriented reality is slowly but surely starting to become more mainstream with several big data companies embracing or at least experimenting with it some analysts are calling the Metaverse the next big investment theme in both the crypto and traditional tech spaces.
This is because, according to
, founder of Metaverse advisory firm Meta Ventures, the idea inherent in Metaverse goes beyond the simple implementation of AI and VR technologies.
In fact, in a recent interview,
argued that Metaverse inspired technology has the potential to become an ultimate experiential equalizer in the first half of the 21st century by integrating people’s physical and digital existence in a hybrid virtual experience.
According to a report by bitcoin.com, Morgan Stanley, one of the biggest investment banks in the world, has also announced that it now considers the Metaverse together with all of its related products as the next major buzz concept in the world of investing.
This is all great news, but the question I’m particularly interested in is how does all this relate to crypto. I would argue that the simple answer is that some blockchain blockchain-based gaming protocols could potentially be considered as the true pioneering forces when it comes to the development of Metaverse ecosystems as a whole, and while it’s all very well that major tech players such as META and Microsoft have recently staked their claims to the Metaverse the truth of the matter is that some early visual inklings of the Metaverse could already be witnessed in popular online games such as Minecraft, Second Life, World of Carcraft, and even Runescape, which leads me to my next point.
The happy marriage between the Metaverse, Gaming, and Non-fungible tokens. In my opinion, the combination of these three primary elements gives us a clearer glimpse into what the most authentic Metaverse form will look like. An apology Stephen, it’s not quite your Ready Player One, I’m afraid, and you too, Neal Stephenson. I loved your novel, but your Metaverse just isn’t it for me.
Rather the Metaverse can be defined as something a bit more akin to an online arena, where decentralized finance or DeFi reigns supreme, and as a virtual domain that fuses together cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, augmented Reality, NFTs, and gaming.
NFTs And The Metaverse
For many, the term NFT conjures images of digital artworks, pixelated collectables, and funny looking Ape figures tied to what seems like an inordinate sum of money, and in some cases, I can’t really blame them.
Virtual realities and gaming spheres have ultimately opened up the playing field for NFTs to actually start experimenting with their built-in functionalities and leverage their respective in-game utilities. This is primarily because apart from the manic digital art frenzy that NFTs have found themselves caught up in, the architecture inherent in an NFT grants the holder a digital certificate of verifiable ownership over an asset in the virtual realm.
Thus if we assume that the Metaverse is an augmented parallel representation of the real world, it can also be thought of as an extension of it.
In a similar vein to what happens with ownership contracts in the real world, NFTs allow holders to use and leverage their assets, be it a valuable Crypto Punk or Bored Ape avatar, a plot of digital real estate or an in-game item within the Metaverse environment.
Thus I’m tempted to say that NFTs and the Metaverse will continue to be somewhat analogous in their future development and will most likely carry on growing hand in hand. This is ultimate because NFT-based meta-verses that incorporate assets and blockchain into their underlying technology can usher in an entirely new economic framework and a cutting-edge financial paradigm within their respective ecosystems.
In fact, while Metaverse-like environments have existed in massively multiplayer online games for quite some time now. The implementation of blockchain, NFTs, digital assets, and Virtual Reality in the sector is not only drastically altering who can participate in and enter these environments. But also demonstrating the real-world market value of the assets, the interactions, and the experiences earned in the digital realms of blockchain games. But at this stage, you might be asking yourself. What makes a blockchain Metaverse? So, fundamentally different from those more traditional environments found in games such as The Sims and Run Escape. There are three key features of the blockchain built Metaverse. Read More...