What is a Metaverse?

The word “Metaverse” is perhaps the most popular in the field of IT and Web3 in recent times. According to Google Trends, the popularity of the metaverse greatly increased at the end of 2021 and began to decline only a couple of months ago. Facebook, Microsoft and Fortnite promise to turn their products into metaverses, and popular clothing brands prepare to release their products digitally.

But what is a metaverse? How does it differ from the current user experience on the Internet? Is it so adorable and, to be honest, do we really need it?

How is the metaverse different from what it is now?

Venture capitalist and the modern ideologist of the metaverse Matthew Ball identified 7 of its main features:

1. Infinite existence. The metaverse never resets, suspends, or ends.
2. The metaverse works in real time and does not depend on external factors, although developers can create and plan events in it.
3. There is no limit on the size of the audience and the number of simultaneous users. Everyone can connect to the metaverse at any time and participate in its life on an equal footing with others.
4. The presence of a fully functioning economy. People and companies can receive some kind of remuneration (analogous to money) for “work” that brings “value” recognized within the metaverse. And then spend and invest the earnings.
5. The metaverse unites the physical and digital worlds, open and closed platforms, private and public networks. This is a “single digital whole”.
6. Availability of compatibility of data, objects, assets, content transferred between digital worlds. For example, a user should be able to transfer his Axie from Axie Infinity to his Minecraft world or sell it on Facebook.
7. Metaverses should be filled with content and experiences created by its own users: individuals, groups or commercial enterprises.

As you can see, a number of requirements are met in modern social networks or online games, but not all of them are fully met and not all of them together.

There are aspects of the current experience that prevent full immersion. Users are constantly reminded that the current version of the Internet does not belong to them for development and construction, but belongs to those who create this experience for them. For example, players cannot take their rare rifle from CS:GO to Fortnite, their activities are limited to centralized platform owners. Twitter is separate from Instagram, although there are social channels linking them. However, there is still no formal transfer of information between them, since they are created by separate companies. Instead, they exist in limited isolated spaces that are more of a meta-room than a full-fledged metaverse.

Ideally further development of the metaverse will allow combining all disparate ecosystems into a single holistic virtual environment defined by seamless interaction between each individual aspect to create a sum that will be larger than its individual parts.

In addition, the metaverse in its ideal form should guarantee users the right to own digital assets in the same way as it works with offline assets. Having bought something in the metaverse, you will own it completely and will be able to transfer it to any part of the metaverse seamlessly. It would be strange to buy a shirt in Canada, come to US and find out that the shirt does not belong to you there. Or it has disappeared altogether, because Canadian shirts are not transferred to the US.

This lays down two basic points, without which the metaverse will not be able to exist — compatibility and true digital property.

Metaverse and Meta-Economy

Today, the largest companies in the world provide the transfer of digital goods, relying on business models focused on receiving subscription fees. Users are not the owners of their tweets, Facebook posts or even accounts that represent their virtual characters. All this is rented by the user through subscription or hidden costs, usually in the form of advertising or collection of personal data.

Thanks to blockchain, cryptocurrencies and NFT, users have the opportunity of verified digital ownership. This is the main catalyst for the metaverse and the meta-economy owned by users. Digital goods can exist outside of the projects that create them and persist in the event of a project failure, just as you can own old shoes from a company that doesn’t exist anymore.

Another distinctive feature of blockchain networks, such as, for example, Ethereum, is their unsurpassed compatibility. All blockchain-based projects are able to interact with each other thanks to a common underlying infrastructure, which leads to the creation of connected ecosystems that create a common user experience.

Thanks to blockchain technology, users can take out loans using DeFi protocols, play play-to-earn games and buy NFT — all on one single platform. In each case, the user gets access to an interconnected ecosystem in which NFTs can serve as collateral for loans, or the income from games can be used to purchase NFTs and so on.

Technologies

We will not go deep into the technical nuances, but we will still note a couple.

As we said above, the metaverse must exist continuously, in real time and without a limit on the number of audiences. This places a considerable burden on both hardware and software.

A lot of work will be required on the construction and optimization of server capacities, connection speed and many others.

In addition, it is necessary to create a mass of data transfer protocols, including cross-blockchain standards. They have already been partially implemented today, but this is still extremely small for the metaverse to look like this.

Conclusion or Why do we need a metaverse?

Over the past few years, the appearance of the metaverse has moved from the category of sci-fi movies into a quite tangible reality of the near future. The combination of existing technologies makes it possible to create a metaverse quite soon, but this will not happen in a moment. For the emergence of the metaverse, there is still a lot of infrastructural work to be done, the formation and consolidation of a new economy, and then a new sociality.

Now it is very difficult to predict what the metaverse will turn out for us and what it will become, since it is still in its infancy. Our forecasts now will be similar to the forecasts from the 80s about what role the Internet will take. But some things we can say with confidence.

The formation of a new economy will create new types of work. Values in the metaverse will be different from the values of the real world. This, in turn, will lead to a different form of capital allocation and perhaps the creation of new forms of income generation and as a result will create a different attitude to investments, savings and so on. All this will form new social layers and a different stratification of society, which in itself will change many cultural aspects and will certainly affect art and society’s cultural values.

The appearance of the metaverse is no longer a matter of expediency, it is a matter of time. Though creation of metaverses is something inevitable it’ll be greate to get depeer into the one of the most promising metaverses — Farcana.