Given the recent excitement surrounding the phrase “metaverse,” many people would have been forgiven for thinking it was just another hip buzzword to come out of the blockchain and cryptocurrency world.
But there is a real technology, one that is anticipated to reach a global market value of $1.6 trillion by the end of the decade, hidden behind the excitement surrounding the metaverse. The current inflow of capital into the metaverse is creating the digital underpinnings for both an open, accessible domain where people may connect, communicate, and have fun, as well as the infrastructure for the majority of future economic operations.
What Constitutes the Metaverse?
A single, open, interoperable metaverse will need to adhere to a number of strict requirements in order to replace our current daily interface as the dominant one. Financial transactions should be as simple at a shop counter, bank, or vending machine as they would be in an all-encompassing metaverse with a robust economic system.
Additionally, it will be necessary for the boundaries between the real and digital worlds to fade into invisibility so that eventually no one will be able to tell them apart. It goes without saying that several security concerns must be resolved in order for this to be feasible.
For instance, a user’s real-world identification must be rendered identical to their digital identity in the metaverse, and this identity must be verified safely. In addition to preventing unnecessary user data exposure, this will enable metaverse users and administrators to remove malicious users from the system.
To ensure that users actually own what they purchase and that what they own cannot be duplicated, certain protocol and governance regulations for user-ownership will also need to be implemented. Here, NFTs and the metaverse converge, with NFTs’ immutable and unfalsifiable properties contributing to the technological framework for financial transactions.
Graphical Fidelity
The graphical fidelity of these early iterations of the metaverse will soon be improved and expanded upon, but well-known metaverse worlds like Sandbox and Decentraland have already released alpha versions which allow players to explore and engage to some extent.
Future metaverse projects, like Ultiverse, for instance, use the Unreal Engine 5 to create virtual worlds with graphics on par with the most recent AAA games. The Matrix Awakens and The Witcher 3 will both be built on the Unreal Engine 5, which has already been utilized by Fortnite and other well-known video games.
Because Ultiverse is compatible with Virtual Reality (VR) equipment, users will be able to experience the metaverse in a way that is as immersive as possible. Since VR is already a significant part of the mainstream gaming sector, one can anticipate that in the upcoming decade, metaverse world integration will become the norm.
Terminus Metropolis, a complete virtual city housed within the Ultiverse metaverse, serves as a comprehensive hub for gaming and leisure from which users can access gateways to various games and apps stored within Ultiverse. Bars, clubs, gaming arcades, a market where players can purchase and trade any object earned or discovered in Ultiverse games, an exhibition hall, an NFT gallery, and other entertainment venues are all present in Terminus City.
Interoperability
Interoperability is a key determinant of how widespread the metaverse may become in the future. Failure to fully interoperate across metaverses and the games and apps that exist within them could lead to a fragmented metaverse in which several virtual worlds serve various users in various locations without ever communicating with one another.
Given the dispersed user base, the possibility for revenue creation will be somewhat reduced in this situation, but numerous big platforms will be in competition with one another. The networking impacts of the end user’s metaverse experience will be significantly constrained in this case, which is not desirable.
In order to sell NFTs created on a variety of blockchains, including Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and others, many metaverse companies are constructing their infrastructure on numerous blockchains from the start.
Thankfully, interoperability is desired outside of the metaverse. Early bitcoin projects competed with one another for market share, but developers now recognize the need for compatibility and interoperability and are hard at work creating connections between different blockchains. By enabling users to move between virtual worlds and bring their virtually owned objects with them, this will only aid in the development of the metaverse in the future.
Interoperability will ultimately allow individuals from varied economic, cultural, and social backgrounds to establish profitable partnerships that might be either personal or professional, or even both.
Using the Bear Market to build
Over $2 trillion, or 73 percent, of the global market cap was lost in the bitcoin market crash that occurred at the start of the year. The current downturn is likely to endure for at least the next couple of years, according to previous bear market cycles and the current health of the world’s economies as they enter recession.
However, there is a benefit to this, since many projects continue to expand their offers without the needless emphasis on pricing changes. The recent seed round of funding for Ultiverse and the other investments made by VCs, including Binance Labs, Sequoia, Three Arrows Cash, Defiance Capital, and Sky Vision Capital, among others, show that venture capital is still pouring into the metaverse field.
Today makes it possible that this is the ideal time to invest in metaverse technologies. The negative market will be very helpful in separating the wheat from the chaff, allowing projects with genuine long-term goals to grow and those with short-term cash grabs to fail.
The metaverse reality will likely return in the next years as we come out of the bear market, built on far more solid technical, economic, and social foundations than we have now. The idea of the metaverse may even have surpassed and eclipsed the fundamental ideas of cryptocurrencies and blockchain by the time of the next bull market cycle, but only if they demonstrate their viability.
