The metaverse

The metaverse is an infinitely expanding galaxy of virtual worlds and lands, made from software, supervised by blockchain, augmented by hardware and accessed via the internet.

It’s highly immersive because many of the lands utilise a gamified 3D environment that’s experienced through virtual and augmented reality wearables, and haptics if you’re a real enthusiast.

It’s a place where just like Neo and Trinity, you can access super powers and enjoy highly immersive on-line experiences.

Once in the metaverse (whether in 2D or 3D), you can join software based communities to communicate, socialise, play to earn/live, and exchange value. You can even buy land. It’s where you get to do your daily business as if you were a player in a game - sound appealing?

Interactions in the metaverse can be tracked in time and space with programmatic immutability, the implication being that there’s no need for a centralised agent or middleman to record those interactions.

Instead, the sentinel/regulator is replaced by programmatic rules that everyone in a particular world, land or community signs up to from the get-go.

And, the immutability and trust that underpins these interactions and exchanges of value in and between metaverse worlds is based on blockchain and distributed ledger technology.

The purist view of the metaverse (which is not shared by all) is that its real estate and infrastructure will ultimately be open, inclusive, and made up of interoperable blockchains and distributed ledgers (software), with seamless on and off ramps.

And if you can imagine the open metaverse as a shared digital space hosting an infinite number of decentralised, yet interoperable sovereign states or communities, you would find that each state would be defined by:

• a socio-economic manifesto (shared ideology rules based constitution).

• programmatic contracts (system of voting, consensus and agreement).

• unique digital assets in the form of non-fungible tokens or NFTs (identity, culture and things that are valued by the community which can be fractionalised and bought, sold, swapped, lent, collateralised and utilised to share experiences and transfer wealth, inclusively).

• cryptocurrencies and assets (payment gateways used to buy and invest in community assets and port wealth between countries if you get tired of one manifesto and want to sign up to another).

Why has Player One taken this long to be ready?

One concept of the metaverse was described in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, which was written over 10 years ago.

It poses the gamified escapist world of the Oasis, which you can think of as a virtual reality headset with Illuvium, OpenSea and Swyftx pre-loaded.

The story contains many eerily similar constructs which our world faces today, including poverty/inaccessibility, climate change, debased currencies and failed centralised institutions.

Albeit, in the story, humanity has failed to stem climate change, and that plus the economic realities provide for its dystopian undercurrent.

Also, while the Oasis can be controlled by one party, the purist view of the coming metaverse is that it will be decentralised and controlled by no one, and owned by all of its users.

But why has our metaverse notion taken so long to hit mainstream?

It’s because blockchain, NFTs, mixed reality wearables and the web 3.0 creator economy, have only recently emerged/converged, and this convergence has for the first time enabled true digital asset ownership.

That means creators will be able to retain and programmatically manage their digital ownership rights (like programmable and immutable royalties), thereby:

• creating brand new decentralised, self-policing and creator generated communities/worlds,

• getting rid of expensive institutional agents/middlemen, and

• building a brand new layer of GDP - almost all of which is yet to be developed and claimed.

It’s also happening now because the leader of a 2.8 billion army just renamed his company to Meta Platforms. And overnight, 2.8 billion became aware of the metaverse according to Zuck.

Why should you care about digital identity and ownership?

Good question. Seems like you’ve already done that when you joined facebook or Instagram, right?

But the answer is simple and as always, rooted in demographics.

Global demography is changing. Boomers are retiring, we Xers are a small cohort, and the Millennial/Zoomer cohorts are now redesigning and merging community and culture into a more authentic construct, in their honest opinions.

These younger cohorts no longer want to only have one source of income via a nine to five gig working for the man. They’re learning fast.

Distrust, and betrayal of the author/creator for the benefit of centralised institutions and the middleman/platform economy (aka web 2.0 platforms like facebook, but even the egregious fees charged by the apple store) are high on their list of mortal sins.

Also, with demographically less spending and consumer goods disinflating, new GDP needs to be found if the world is going to be able to service its debt load. That’s if we’re ever going to see interest rates normalise to provide some level of inclusive financial independence for non-risk assets.

Suffice to say that the institutional world of the Boomer is quite a dystopian place for a Zoomer, and even the younger cohort no longer wants to surrender digital identities and content to the Zuckerverse.

So, Player One is finally ready, and the Zoomer/Millennial redesign of, and infusion of new culture into communities means you’re going to get slowly drawn into it, like it or not.

And one day when sufficient regulation is in place and adoption has matured, you’ll be fully immersed and you won’t even know it because the rails it runs on will be hidden and asset prices will have stabilised.

You’ll just tap glass or onboard via your wearable and you’ll be instantly known and proven by reference to your digital identity.

So, the care factor only comes into play if you want to future proof your life, work and wealth platform.

If you don’t, then you don’t have to worry about it and you can just go back to saying that bitcoin is a Ponzi and that bored apes are naff. But I know that’s not you. And if you’ve got this far, it’s definitely not you.

Plus, you don’t have to believe me. Just look at what’s going on in web 2.0 and the centralised world to see how the smart money is repositioning for web 3.0 and industry 4.0.

Fight for the Metaverse

If you’ve followed the above, it should come as no surprise that gaming and technology companies are positioning themselves to benefit from this ‘turning’ in how GDP is created, and who gets to control and/or share digital identities, assets and wealth transfer.

The purists (mostly gamers, crypto projects and decentralised autonomous organisations, or DAOs) see the metaverse as an open and interoperable universe that is controlled by pre-agreed manifestos, owned by their builders.

These purists include Epic Games, Animoca Brands, Decentraland and a flotilla of gaming, DAO and immersive experience (ix) others.

Conversely, Mark Zuckerberg with his newly re-minted facebook, Meta Platforms, has different ideas about who or what should control, and in turn benefit from the metaverse.

He’s creating a sovereign state at the intersection of oculus rift, Diem (the old Libra) and his 2.8 billion strong facebook army.

Don’t laugh. If you think of Meta Platforms as a central bank, you can quickly work out that it (via facebook) could preside over more financial accounts than the Federal Reserve, ECB, BoJ and BoE - and that’s why they’re scared.

In other words, he’s focused on the Oasis golden egg prize, i.e., control of a metaverse that he envisions, but which does not resonate with open source digital natives.

So in 2021, he went on the attack with plans to fold his web 2.0 army into a totalitarian metaverse onboarded through oculus rift. That said, Meta Platforms’ plans around control, consensus and monetisation rights are yet to be shared so I guess it’s not hard to jump to conclusions.

Still, how does a web 2.0 juggernaut give digital ownership rights back to its users?

And even if if does, advertising would no longer be needed because the community would be incentivised to grow itself, and web 2.0 advertising would be a thing of the past.

Also, Diem is a stable coin and given regulators have suggested that stable coin regulation will require the coin to be backed by fiat currency (to protect fiat, of course), Diem will likely become as debased as the U.S. dollar and Euro are.

So, a few problems and challenges to work through.

Still, no one really knows where all of this is going, but you can read more about the growing battle for the metaverse in our November blog, by clicking here.

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Ready, player one?

Mike.