Recently, Facebook, which has been in the digital asset industry stash for a long time, suddenly revealed that it is planning to build a collection of maximized, interconnected experiences of the kind found in science fiction on Facebook, a world known as the Metaverse. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook's departments focused on communities, creators, commerce, and virtual reality products will increasingly work to realize that vision whose primary goal is to help bring the Metaverse to life.
With such advances in Internet technology, people are probably no strangers to the metaverse, a concept that first appeared in Neal Stephenson's famous 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash.
The metaverse is a three-dimensional digital space closely related to the real world yet detached from it. Unfortunately, the metaverse has been applied only in various novels and movies.
In 2021, Roblox, the first company in the world to include the metaverse concept in its IPO prospectus, went public in the United States. It was called the "first stock in the metaverse" as its market capitalization soared by 50% on the same day, reaching over $40 billion. It was the rapid growth of Roblox that brought attention to the development of the metaverse and allowed the digital asset industry to discover the value it contained.
The stars are aligning, metaverse and blockchain.
The meta-universe is a new world that carries many ways to realize technological ideals, including 5G, VR, AR, blockchain, artificial intelligence, etc. The earliest jump out from novels and movies was applied to commercial value. But, thanks to Silicon Valley VC and Wall Street capital bigwigs, blockchain technology is the core of the meta-universe.
The purpose of blockchain is the Internet of value, with openness and decentralization to achieve the free flow of assets, and this also coincides with the vision of metaverse. Moreover, blockchain can guarantee the safety of users' virtual assets and virtual identities, conduct value exchange, and ensure the transparency of the metaverse rules. Therefore, the economy is the top priority to maintain the regular operation of the whole ecology, both in the natural and virtual world, and the potential of the metaverse has been stimulated by blockchain technology.
Roblox has said that in the world of the metaverse, there exist eight cores, identity, civilization, economic system, anywhere, diversity, low latency, immersion, and friends, and it is because of these eight cores that set the metaverse apart formally from the page games circulating in the market now.
In terms of the experience of being in it, participants need to have a virtual identity to deal with real people. The most intuitive feeling of the metaverse is immersion, a sense of reality, and the fact that participants from every country or region can log in from anywhere, requiring the metaverse also to have low-latency underlying technology. A sound economic system and security and stability will allow participants to experience true virtual life in the metaverse and enable improvements to the digital civilization together.
The first manifestation of the concept, the value of the metaverse field, is immeasurable.
Since the beginning of 2021, the metaverse concept began to rise in the blockchain industry, and the most widely used example is in the gaming sector. In 2017, the big escape game "Fortnite," developed by Epic Games, began to gradually show the qualities of metaverse after continuous iterations, forming a virtual world beyond the competition. At that time, "Fortnite" was rated as the new Facebook, as millennials and Gen Z are active on platforms like Fortnite.
Fortnite creator Tim Sweeney has said that blockchain technology and NFT are the "most logical path" to a fully emergent metaverse, but due to factors like transaction costs and the speculation that makes up cryptocurrencies today, the dream of a "persistent, real-time digital world" may still be out of reach. However, in the coming decades, a new era of virtual presence will mark the next significant milestone for people as a networked species.
With the explosion of the NFT field and the rise of the metaverse concept, the NFT market's transaction volume in the first quarter of this year exceeded eight times that of 2020. As a result, the metaverse value index also began to rise, with a one-month value index growth of 313% from the end of June to the end of July, according to Companions' data. In addition, the concept of metaverse has attracted many institutions and emerging projects to enter, and metaverse has also changed from the initial pure concept to physical application, and its value is being constantly developed. Economist Carmen Chu has also recognized the metaverse concept as a block of information created by human beings that spans living and non-living integrated systems.
Although the metaverse has the potential to replace the Internet, the difficulty of its development and the incredible commercial potential has raised the threshold of its development considerably, and the developers who can lead the early metaverse must be creative talents who can fully realize the potential of the metaverse and have positive beliefs in the future.
Institutional entry is the next place for soldiers to fight
The United States' sensitivity and acceptance of technological innovation are impressive. The metaverse was first laid out by Facebook, the US internet technology giant.
In 2014, Facebook acquired the virtual reality company Oculus for $2 billion. Although at the time, Facebook's acquisition was for the research and application of VR/AR technology, likely, Facebook had already laid out the metaverse at that time.
In addition to Facebook, the metaverse concept is also closely related to the virtual reality and augmented reality technologies currently being developed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. And giant companies such as Tencent, Byte Dance, Disney, and Nvidia have also opened the layout of the meta-universe field.
It is reported that Google has now started developing built-in screenshot tools for Chrome on Windows, macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS. In addition, screenshot tools for Chrome will be included in Chrome's new shared menu. At the end of 2020, Ma Huateng proposed the concept of "All Real Internet. At the end of 2020, Ma introduced the concept of "full-real Internet," claiming that it could "move from the real to the virtual, helping users to achieve a more realistic experience." In April 2020, Epic Games' shooting game "Fortnite" held an in-game online virtual concert for American hip-hop singer Travis Scott, attracting over 12 million players online and shocking the entire Internet.
In 2021, the metaverse concept began to explode, and on March 10, Roblox went public on the New York Stock Exchange, with its stock price rising 54.4% on the first day and its market value exceeding $40 Billion and it is dubbed the "first metaverse stock." In addition, Epic Games received a $1 billion investment to build a metaverse.
In March, MetaApp, a mobile sandbox platform developer, announced the completion of $100 million in Series C financing, the most significant single round of funding in the domestic metaverse circuit, led by SIG Haina Asia Capital. On April 20, game engine developer Code Qiankun (known as "China's version of Roblox") received a strategic investment of nearly RMB 100 million from Byte Dance. On May 28, cloud game technology provider Haima Cloud completed a new round of financing of RMB 280 million.
On July 3, Wilder World, a decentralized artist DAO and NFT marketplace, announced an investment from Digital Currency Group (DCG) that will assist its vision of building a mixed reality metaverse fully powered by NFT. On July 7, Korea's Samsung and KB Asset Management launched the Metaverse Fund to help investors invest in Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Roblox, Naver, and Hybe, among other beneficiary stocks, which has led some brokerages to follow suit. According to PwC, the metaverse-related economy is expected to see significant growth. The market size is expected to increase from 50 trillion won last year to 540 trillion won by 2025 and 1700 trillion won ($1.5 trillion) by 2030.
In addition, the South China Morning Post, which was born 118 years ago, has also announced that it will participate in the Sandbox metaverse by collaborating with game studios and creators to recreate current and historical locations and artifacts in Hong Kong and the mainland, including combining Hong Kong's past and present into Sandbox's metaverse "Mirror World."
The CEO of Nvidia, Jen-Hsun Huang, said we are on the cusp of a meta-universe, and Omniverse is an integral part of building it. Likewise, Facebook transformed from a social media company to a meta-universe company.
The CEO of Nvidia, Jen-Hsun Huang, said we are on the cusp of a meta-universe, and Omniverse is an integral part of building it. Likewise, Facebook transformed from a social media company to a meta-universe company.
Is it a utopia? Or the achievement of virtual civilization
With institutions entering and the market exploding, the metaverse seems to be rising rapidly, but behind the actual explosion, there are inevitably a lot of speculators mixed with it. On the contrary, with the popularity of the meta-universe concept in the game market, following the trend is prevalent. As a result, many projects have forced their design concepts to follow the hype, making the game market choatic.
Besides, with the entrance of institutional giants, the original decentralized vision of the meta-universe was monopolized from the root, with a central controller behind it all. However, in the Internet mobile era, whether on hardware or software, facts are becoming more and more closed, the original open Internet is forming an unconnected silo, the non-interoperability between devices and the self-copyright closure between information are slowly dividing the Internet, and in such a reality, a utopian metaverse is not likely to be born.
But if the metaverse can be genuinely decentralized and interconnected, perhaps the next virtual civilization will be achieved.