Preface: This article will make a cursory analysis of the three concepts - Metaverse, NFT, and GameFi - which have recently attracted high attention in the crypto market, as well as the relationship among these three. Due to the lack of a clear and unified understanding in the industry about Metaverse, NFT, and GameFi, this article will be based on the more common views in the crypto community. Any errors or omissions are welcome to be corrected through the official channels of OKEx.

Summary of viewpoints:

1. The Metaverse is not a castle in the air, but a virtual space projected from the real internet world into the future, extending from entertainment to every corner of the internet. However, the development of the Metaverse is still in its infancy and will require a long time to mature.

2. NFTs will become an important infrastructure of the Metaverse. Their uniqueness and irreplaceability will provide a reliable basis for mapping real-world objects into the Metaverse, and they have already shown their value in the current stage. However, the core and extension of NFTs still have a vast space for imagination in the future.

3. GameFi is currently a very intuitive window for users to understand the Metaverse. It originated in the gaming industry but will inevitably have a far-reaching impact on all aspects of human social life such as social networking and finance in the future.

4. The integration of NFTs and GameFi has already shown initial effects and will continue to have a profound impact on the business models of the gaming industry and the confirmation of virtual assets within games, both macroscopically and microscopically. It is highly likely that NFTs will further and more broadly integrate with other industries, sparking more innovative ideas.

Discussion on concepts: What are the Metaverse, NFT, and GameFi?

About the Metaverse: The concept of the Metaverse can be traced back to the novel “Snow Crash” by the famous American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson published in 1992. In this novel, the author defined a virtual world parallel to the real world. Similarly, Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin in his work “The Three-Body Problem” also described, “In front of humanity, there are two paths: one outward, towards the stars, and one inward, towards virtual reality.” Let’s delve into the meaning of the Metaverse.

The term “Metaverse” comes from the translation of “Metaverse.” Looking at “Metaverse,” the word is a combination of “meta” and “verse,” where “meta” is a prefix meaning after or beyond; “verse” comes from “universe,” meaning everything that exists anywhere. Therefore, Metaverse can be directly translated as “beyond the universe” or “beyond everything.” The widely used Chinese translation “元宇宙” (Yuan Yu Zhou), where “元” (Yuan) means origin or fundamental, and “宇宙” (Yu Zhou) means space and time and their contents. From this perspective, translating “Metaverse” as “元宇宙” is quite accurate. From the above analysis, we can try to give a straightforward definition of “Metaverse” (Metaverse): From the standpoint of most ordinary people today, to think about the origin of human development, explore the ultimate scene of future society, from real to virtual, and then from virtual to real, a process of coexistence of virtual and real. Because most people’s cognition is limited by the productive forces and relations of the times they live in, when we look forward to the Metaverse, we inevitably have to stretch and strive to “transcend,” but in the end, we can only see a vague virtual illusion.

Regarding NFT (Non-fungible Token), it is generally translated as a non-homogeneous token in Chinese. From a technical perspective, it mostly refers to tokens issued following standards such as ERC721 and ERC1155, with ERC721 being the mainstream. It is worth mentioning that the ERC721 standard was created and released by Dieter Shirley, CTO of CryptoKitties and one of the founders of the NFT industry.

NFT is the opposite concept of FT (Fungible Token). Literally, the biggest difference between the two lies in whether they are unique and divisible. NFTs include different identification information recorded in their smart contracts, making each NFT token unique and irreplaceable by any other token. There is no such situation as “exchanging one Bitcoin for another of equivalent value,” nor can it be divided. This attribute makes NFT an important infrastructure of the Metaverse, providing a reliable and feasible technical means to accurately map everything in the real world into the virtual world in the future.

Currently, the application fields of NFTs include games, artworks, collectibles, digital music, virtual assets, identity characteristics, digital certificates, and so on. However, in terms of development progress, most are in the early stages