Into the Metaverse: The Promise of Decentralized Digital Worlds

The metaverse is upon us. Well, sort of. As blockchain technology enters the mainstream, cryptocurrencies continue to boom, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) gain more traction, all of these inter-related blocks will become the eventual foundation for what many futurists are dubbing the “metaverse”.

“Metaverse” was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 sci-fi book titled “Snowcrash” which referred to a virtual reality world where various users’ avatars were able to interact with one another. The term has since transformed to be regarded as a digital world where anything and everything users can imagine will exist, following necessary processes of course.

Think of: The Oasis from the hit movie “Ready Player One”. For the longest time, video games have been shunned as pointless avenues that people simply waste their time on. This is no longer the case because video games are now a part of real-life — or at least serve as routes to be extensions of it — especially within the context of the global pandemic.

Over the past year, the outbreak of the coronavirus drastically accelerated the world’s digital transformation. You’ve seen prestigious universities worldwide hold campus tours and even virtual graduations on Minecraft. Music artists performed concerts in-game like Travis Scott did on Fortnite. The list continues to grow, signaling the imminent arrival of the metaverse.

Moreover, the metaverse will also become a world where digital assets from art to real estate can be created, bought, and sold. This is where NFTs will come into play. The best part? It will be governed by the blockchain, anchoring all of the digital world’s (or worlds’) operations on decentralization.

Most people who show their support for the metaverse believe that it will one day become a huge economy, not just digitally but globally. In fact, the sales for digital items have already grown to become a $10 billion market at the least.

The popular video game Fortnite has already sold more than $1 billion in digital items. Unfortunately, those items are currently exclusive to the platform itself, which means they could cease to exist the moment Fortnite developer Epic Games chooses to shut the massive game down. This is why NFTs are so crucial to the development of the metaverse as well.

NFTs are certified, unique digital assets stored within the blockchain that are not interchangeable. To put it in much simpler terms, NFTs are essentially digital collectibles. Case in point: a particular NFT can only be owned by one individual at a time, but it can still be bought and sold on an open market.

In the past, buying NFTs used to be a complicated and arduous process. Just like there are crypto exchanges, NFT marketplaces and auction platforms have also popped up making the buying and selling of these assets much easier and more accessible.

Perhaps the biggest undertaking to create a genuine metaverse is developing an extensive “omniverse” that will allow all virtual worlds to become more open across all platforms, devices, and engines. Much like the current setup of the internet today, which is a “multiverse”, there are numerous apps and spaces that function exclusively within their own realms.

This makes most information and data sharing extremely limited if it’s allowed at all. The advent of cryptocurrency and decentralized computing are massive steps towards the collapse of these barriers. While peer-to-peer file-sharing could have been utilized to achieve the same environment decades ago, cryptocurrency was the sole ingredient that’s been missing for years.

The creation of the metaverse can essentially be viewed as a public service that anybody can contribute to. Technically, nobody wants to do difficult tasks for free. As the Wu-Tang Clan said, “cash rules everything around me.” Cryptocurrencies can function as the incentives that world-builders and users need to maintain the upkeep and development of the metaverse.

Ultimately, the metaverse is just as much an anti-establishment movement as well, given its highly decentralized nature. Among those at the forefront, driving the multiverse forward are identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, whom many would recognize as the main antagonists against Mark Zuckerberg in the film “The Social Network”.

The Winklevii, as they are more commonly referred to, lost the battle to gain ownership over Facebook years ago, which led to them being shunned in Silicon Valley and the big tech industry in general. Now, they’ve positioned themselves at the center of the multiverse movement with Gemini and Nifty Gateway, a crypto exchange and NFT marketplace, respectively.

“The idea of a centralized social network is just not going to exist five or 10 years in the future,” said Tyler when asked about Facebook. “There’s a membrane or a chasm between the old world and this new crypto-native universe. And we’re the conduit helping people transcend the offline into the online,” he added.

An irony of being the chief architects of a decentralized multiverse is that eventually, their necessity will cease. As more people — and eventually artificial intelligence technologies — pile on, the metaverse should ideally become self-sufficient and progressive. The Winklevii are untroubled by this fact, continuing on their path regardless of the gains or losses.

“Decentralization is a spectrum,” said Cameron. “Our goal was not to be the gatekeepers.”

While the blockchain revolution is still pretty young, the Winklevii are not letting up. The twins have already invested in over 25 digital startups, most of which are poised to become the building blocks of the multiverse.

The questions surrounding the multiverse are no longer centered around “how” but “when”. Soon enough, life will spill over into the online world, but this does not necessarily entail the promise of a dystopian future. Instead, a vast digital world filled with creative economies and innovative operating models is just over the horizon. The metaverse truly is upon us.

References: Forbes, The Verge, Medium