Although the term ‘metaverse’ It began to be coined thirty years ago, the advancement of technology and the recent involvement of large companies have brought this term back into fashion, with many analysts believing that its impact on the economy could be greater than that of its day. had the very Internet.
The first question that the metaverse must answer is the union between virtual and physical experiences: it is essential to achieve a technology that allows us to blur the line that separates both spectrums to offer a truly immersive experience to the user, where actions in virtual worlds have a reflection in the real world.
The industry that is at the forefront of the metaverse is gaming, where both hardware and software have been advancing for years to an immersive model with their own business models created around the identity of the players.
One of the supposedly promising technologies to achieve that interoperability and create those business models are the cryptocurrency wallets, both for its ability to authenticate the identity of users and to transfer my assets and wallet from one platform (or metaverse) to another. In my opinion, we are still in a phase of great experimentation and proliferation of alternatives without users having converged on a single solution that is accessible to the majority of the population: until usability and the cost of transactions are reduced, it will be difficult to see massive adoption.
The industry that is at the forefront of the metaverse is video games
You also need to be careful about how the economy might develop in the metaverse. In recent years we have seen how the purchase of digital assets, especially among the youngest, has become almost as common as the purchase of physical goods. If most of our time is spent on online experiences, owning certain digital goods has the same meaning as wearing certain clothes as an expression of our personality.
But the sense of exclusiveness Possessing a certain digital good is given by its scarcity, and this collides with one of the advantages of virtual worlds and the web: the marginal cost of reproducing that information is practically nil. One of the most recent examples is the land of the metaverse, where we are witnessing in some cases a certain gold rush to acquire them. Something similar happens with NFTs, where it is not clear what exactly is acquired from a legal point of view and yet there are transactions of hundreds of thousands and millions of euros. This artificial scarcity may make sense in certain fields and industries, but why create scarce land in a virtual space where there is no need to limit it? I think we should all ask ourselves these questions.
Another relevant aspect is the financialization of (almost) everything. One of the promises of this new revolution is the possibility of turning every consumer into an investor in the brands and products they consume. As we mentioned in the case of digital goods, this may make sense in certain fields or industries, but it is doubtful that a person who is not immersed in these issues wants to have tokens of everything with which he interacts in his day to day. .
Of course, there is still a lot of work to be done and doubts to be answered. Now, what is certain is that those companies and investors that are capable of imagining and implementing new business models in this new reality will benefit from a unique opportunity that we are just beginning to glimpse today.
By Ramiro Martínez-Pardo, CEO and co-founder of Heytrade
