The Metaverse, originating from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” describes a virtual world parallel to the real world, where everyone in real life has a digital avatar. Currently, there is no unified definition of the Metaverse, but it is generally considered a convergence of physically-enhanced virtual reality, characterized by convergence and physical persistence, based on future internet technology, with linking awareness and shared features in a 3D virtual space.
Is the Internet’s ultimate form the Metaverse?
On March 10, 2021, “the first Metaverse stock,” Roblox, successfully landed on the New York Stock Exchange, soaring 54.4% on its first day, with a market value exceeding 40 billion USD. According to its prospectus, Roblox’s revenue in 2020 was about 924 million USD, an 82% increase year-on-year. Its daily active users reached 32.6 million, higher than 17.6 million in 2019 and 12 million in 2018. Since its listing, Roblox has attracted significant market attention, with its stock price once soaring to 103.87 USD, a 131% increase from the issue price of 45 USD.
Once, we thought living a second life in a virtual world was far off. However, the proliferation of smart devices, the rise of e-commerce, short video apps, games, and the sudden pandemic accelerating online habits, have laid the foundation for the arrival of the Metaverse.
The 2018 sci-fi movie “Ready Player One” allowed people to “touch” a bizarre yet fascinating Metaverse in a more tangible way. Three years after the film’s release, Roblox, leveraging the concept of a “Metaverse” game, rapidly rose to prominence. Essentially, Roblox is a platform that aggregates thousands of mini-games developed using tools provided by Roblox. Roblox gives the power of content creation to users, allowing them not only to play games but also to be creators, easily creating and publishing their own virtual worlds and games.
Roblox, considered the closest to the Metaverse vision among mainstream products, proposed eight elements that a Metaverse product should have: identity, friends, immersion, low latency, diversity, ubiquity, economic system, and civilization.
Blockchain is Part of the Technical Pillar for Building the Metaverse
To achieve immersion, the Metaverse needs to leverage VR/AR technology. Although most Metaverses have not yet used these devices, their advancement and decreasing prices make their integration only a matter of time. To sustain persistence, the Metaverse requires edge computing technology to ensure fast, smooth experiences, solving issues like high latency, network instability, and low bandwidth. To support identity and economic systems, the Metaverse needs blockchain technology to establish credibility, ensuring the security of users’ virtual assets, providing rule carriers for the users’ identity, property, and economic systems in the virtual world. The emergence of NFTs and their industry not only brings economic benefits to creators but also provides on-chain confirmation of their output, preventing tampering, seizure, and destruction.
In recent years, the global gaming market has expanded, with the number of players reaching 2.7 billion and revenue increasing to 159.3 billion USD by the end of 2020. Compared to this, the global penetration rate of cryptocurrencies is about 1%, less than 100 million people. Therefore, compared to the slightly higher barrier of DeFi and distributed storage, gaming is considered a point of entry to attract more users to blockchain and to better integrate blockchain technology into the Metaverse.
Currently, in the blockchain field, there are initial Metaverse concept projects like Decentraland, The Sandbox, and CryptoVoxels. Decentraland is a decentralized virtual reality platform built on Ethereum, similar to a blockchain version of “The Sims.” Users enter the platform with a digital identity, freely browse and create content, and can buy land and engage in social activities. In The Sandbox, users can create and experience 3D games, earning rewards for completing tasks and profits from games made with community-created pixel models. Cryptovoxels is a 3D blockchain sandbox game composed of plots and Minecraft-style voxels, where you encounter users from around the world in pixelated streets and cities. Players can buy land, build, develop, and sell buildings, and Cryptovoxels supports social functions like making friends, multiplayer voice chat, and hosting parties.
If mobile internet is a filling of effective time, the Metaverse is an infinite expansion of living space. With technological development, it will permeate and blur the boundaries between reality and virtuality, even reshaping our real world. We are still far from the Metaverse, but the door to the virtual world is already open. Humanity harbors endless longing for the distant stars and unknown universe, and exciting opportunities are on the horizon.