Facebook famously rebranded itself as Meta Platforms in October 2021 and since then has been doing its best to convince users that the metaverse is where we’ll all end up. The Metaverse has today become one of the hottest buzzwords in tech, and it’s something that everyone is paying attention to.
While its new name suggests that Meta created the concept, the reality is that Facebook’s parent company has just hijacked an existing idea to achieve its own ends. Moreover, for all of Mark Zuckerberg’s talk of the metaverse as “the future”, there are plenty who would argue that it already exists.
The metaverse is hard to define, but one thing most people agree on is that it represents the next evolution of the internet, from the existing Web2 infrastructure we use today, to a decentralized platform known as “Web3”. In a nutshell, the metaverse can be thought of as an immersive network of virtual, 3D environments where people can visit, interact with one another, buy and sell land, play games, get work done, purchase digital objects, design things and much more besides.
Today’s Metaverse
The first person to coin the term “metaverse” was the author Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash, where he described a virtual world in which the protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, socializes, shops and defeats his enemies through an avatar. In Snow Crash, the metaverse is accessed via a personal terminal that’s equipped with virtual reality goggles, a similar concept to what we see today with VR headsets like Oculus Quest.
That said, while VR is often seen as an integral aspect of the metaverse, the next evolution of the internet isn’t entirely dependent on that technology.
Today’s existing metaverse can in fact be accessed without using VR technology, though a combination of smartphones and super-fast mobile networks. The metaverse relies on concepts such as cloud computing, online payment processors and cryptocurrency, and is built around large communities such as those that have emerged within games such as Roblox, Fortnite and Pokemon Go. These elements combine to create the dream of a connected world and a shared digital reality that can easily be accessed through any device.
We’re still some way from being able to enter the kinds of immersive virtual worlds found in movies like The Matrix and Ready Player One, but at the same time it’s hard to find an online platform that doesn’t already enable users to create their own virtual identity with an inventory of digital goods.
Games such as Fortnite for example are essentially a virtual world where players create and grow their in-game character, buying weapons and skins and slowly evolving and progressing to become more powerful and successful.
Equally, we have existing metaverse platforms like Decentraland, which recently hosted an interactive Metaverse Fashion Week in partnership with Vogue. Within Decentraland’s virtual world, fashionistas were able to virtually experience fashion shows, attend live concerts at branded after-parties, and buy the digital clothing that was on show and wear it on their digital avatars. Also included in the experience were multiple showrooms from brands such as Hugo, as well as various talks and meetings.
Decentraland has established itself as an iconic name in the metaverse thanks to its gaming platform Decentral Games, which is a virtual metaverse gaming lounge where players can enter and play all manner of games using cryptocurrency tokens. Decentral Games reportedly accounts for more than 60% of all Decentraland’s daily active users.
Gaming is a huge part of the metaverse, and part of the reason why is because a number of popular Web2 games have moved to embrace the concept. For instance, Roblox has emerged as a metaverse platform in its own right, with more than 9.5 million developers and 47 million active daily users. Within Roblox, players can play in hundreds of immersive gaming environments. Its metaverse is notably not reliant on VR though, but instead on the basis of a shared fabric, or digital environment where players can create their own personalized avatar and meet up with friends and play games together. It even has its own token that can be used to purchase land and accessories and make payments.
Tomorrow’s Interconnected World
The metaverse is often envisioned as a digital world that’s owned by its users and two key technologies are set to enable this – namely blockchain and cryptocurrency. They combine to create a decentralized internet that’s controlled by its users rather than by big companies, as we see in Web2.
Whereas commerce on the internet largely uses a digital version of fiat currencies, digital tokens are often the preferred medium of exchange within the metaverse. Crypto was developed as a digital-native way of performing transactions within digital worlds, enabling permission-less interactions between users.
The potential for e-commerce and social interaction is one of the key selling points of the metaverse, and this is where crypto, which is powered by blockchain, comes into its own. With direct, peer-to-peer transactions, users benefit from the instantaneous settlement of funds with low fees. Blockchain also enables digital ownership through the use of NFTs, which can represent anything from a digital weapon or race car to a pair of digital jeans or Nike shoes or even virtual land. This is how users will be able to own Web3 platforms.
The bare bones of this infrastructure is already in place, but at present it is troubled by some major limitations that have prevented mass adoption. For instance, while play-to-earn games have become relatively common, you don’t see any major AAA games implementing crypto. That’s because today’s existing blockchains, such as Ethereum, simply cannot scale to support the large number of transactions that would occur with such games. The Sandbox metaverse, for example, boasts some two million users, but a top-tier game like FIFA 2021 counts more than 25 million players.
Ethereum’s problem with scaling is due to the low number of transactions per second it can handle, combined with high “gas fees” that are paid to facilitate each payment a player makes. The average gas fee on Ethereum is currently around $15.50, which is simply not realistic when purchasing an in-game item for a couple of dollars.
Luckily, solutions to this scaling problem are already being implemented. Layer-2 networks like Boba can integrate with existing blockchains to offload transactions onto a second layer, vastly reducing the number of transactions that must be processed on the main chain. With Boba, Ethereum can scale from its current 15 TPS to handle thousands of transactions per second, while radically decreasing the gas fee users must pay. At the same time, it provides greater security than alternative scaling solutions such as sidechains, which are commonly targeted by hackers. Boba’s security stems from the fact that it uses the same structures as Ethereum does, eliminating the need for a vulnerable blockchain bridge.
Final Thoughts
The proto-metaverse is already up and running in multiple Web2 platforms that offer virtual identities, worlds, avatars and inventories. With the advent of blockchain and crypto, this existing concept will evolve into a more expansive virtual world where users can create a digital persona they can use on any platform.
The technologies required to enable this are already in place. As big companies like Meta, Microsoft, Google and Nvidia continue to flood the space with their investment dollars, it’s surely only a matter of time before a much grander and more interconnected metaverse emerges to connect the dots between today’s existing digital realms.
