Development of blockchain technology has opened doors to many possibilities and one of that possibility that came to fruition is metaverse. Also, after Facebook rebranded its name to meta, there is now a great level of interest in metaverse from different types of industries.
There are now many companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Epic Games, who have started building their own metaverses. There is also recent NFT purchase by VISA worth over $150,000 the purchase was made for its own metaverse.
To build a metaverse different technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality is used and one of the most required technologies to make the metaverse mainstream is blockchain technology. Using blockchain the metaverse companies can enhance the user’s experience within their metaverse.
Metaverse was first coined by Neal Stephenson in his book “Snow Crash”. In short metaverse is a digital universe where users can immerse themselves with the help of virtual reality and augmented reality.
Here the user view himself as a digital avatar and can become a part of the metaverse. The user can play, socialize and earn in metaverse. With the help of the digital avatar users can give themselves an identity in the digital universe.
Right now, users are just used to share documents and information through internet. But, when metaverse becomes mainstream we can expect a widescale participation and users can even socialize among themselves. Users can also trade digital assets and can create value in metaverse.
The major goal of metaverse is to engage its users and higher level of interaction among its users. This is where the role of the blockchain technology comes into place.Blockchain enables the metaverse to monetize its platform and helps the users to create monetary value by showcasing their skills.
There are also now many popular artists like Marshmello, who have adopted metaverse technology and have performed digital concert with the metaverse. These concerts are viewed by millions of people worldwide. We can expect the metaverse to be mainstream in 2-4 years and for that to happen wide scale adoption of blockchain technology is required. Blockchain helps the metaverse companies to make their digital assets valuable and it also comes with many other benefits.
The major use case of blockchain in metaverse is digital ownership, with the help of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) users can verify their ownership of digital assets within the metaverse. This gives way to different opportunities for the users, instead of just playing games in the metaverse, users can also build designs or online applications and can monetize it with the help of NFT marketplaces.
If we want a wide scale adoption of metaverse then it is important that the assets of different metaverses are interconnected in value. So, metaverses can have their own crypto tokens and these tokens can be traded in common NFT or crypto exchanges. The common digital marketplaces make it easier to buy and sell the tokens or digital assets.
This provides a transparency and can help the users to move their digital assets from one metaverse to another.Blockchain also helps the users to transact freely from one metaverse to another using the crypto tokens provided by the metaverses. So, there is no need for a user to be locked in within a single metaverse, at any time the user can shift from one metaverse to another without any hindrance.
The first kind of metaverses to gain popularity are the gaming metaverses like Axie Infinity and Decentraland. These kind of metaverse platforms focus mainly on play to earn format where players can earn crypto by playing these games.
There are now millions of users playing these games worldwide, the games gained exponential growth during the period of pandemic. There are also countries like Philippines where many players play these games to bring some food to their table.
We have all heard about Bitcoin, Ethereum and many other popular currencies. The major backbone for these digital currencies is blockchain and similarly metaverse companies can also release their own currencies with the help of blockchain.
For example, Decentraland has a currency called MANA which can be used to buy digital lands within the Decentraland’s metaverse.
At the time of writing this article the Market Cap of MANA token is over $6 billion. We can see from this that there is a lot of value in metaverse companies and using blockchain these companies can realize their true value.
We are now used to spending hours online and for this we don’t get any reward. But, in metaverse there is recognition for talent. The recognition is given as a reward in the form of crypto tokens.
Users can showcase their talent within the metaverse and other users can reward the performer with crypto tokens. These crypto tokens can be exchanged for fiat money in popular digital crypto exchanges.
Like Instagram, users can also generate followers within the metaverse. So, we can expect powerful influencers from different metaverses.
For example, if a user is good in playing music, he/she can perform within the metaverse using their digital avatar. Metaverse gives the user an opportunity and the user can earn crypto tokens from other users who are viewing the performance.
We can see from the above points that blockchain plays an important role in the development of metaverses. In-fact it is the core concept of the metaverse and it helps in making the metaverse popular among its users.
We can also see that many things become a possibility within the metaverse using blockchain technology. There are many use cases like users can own the digital assets, users can trade their crypto tokens, metaverse companies can release crypto tokens for fiat exchange.
Blockchain started its path with just a single virtual currency called bitcoin and with improvement in technology, today blockchain is impacting all types of industries. Metaverse is said to be the next internet and blockchain technology is playing an important role in the development of Metaverse.
Image by Julien Tromeur from Pixabay
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