Metaverse Explained

The idea of a “metaverse” refers to a digital reality that combines aspects of social networking, online gaming, augmented reality (AG), and virtual reality (VR). In the cryptocurrency landscape, many projects are working to integrate the metaverse with digital assets to allow users to interact digitally.

As the ideas, engineering, and creativity behind the metaverse grows, it will inevitably lead to creating online spaces that allow users to meet, work or socialize together in a virtual space.

The term metaverse is not new, however. It was developed in 1992 by Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel “Snow Crash”. But even though the idea of ​​creating a fully digital interaction space was just a futuristic idea for decades, it is quickly becoming a reality. 

Online games can provide many 3D aspects to the metaverse, but they cannot cover all the needs of creating a fully virtual world that covers all aspects of life. For this aspect of metaverse activity, cryptocurrencies can provide important key pieces such as digital proof of ownership, value transfer, governance and accessibility.

In the future, if people work, socialize, and purchase virtual objects in the metaverse, they will need mechanisms that provide proof of ownership and security for their digital properties. Users of the metaverse should also be able to securely send or receive their possessions. Ultimately, they will want to play a role in making decisions in the metaverse.

The metaverse does not fully exist, but many teams around the world are building and strategizing crypto-integrated platforms that can accelerate the formation of a metaverse. Video games offer the closest experience of its kind, and their producers have broken the barriers to create true virtual economies within them.

Here are a few unique characteristics of blockchains that fit well for a metaverse: 

• Digital Proof of Ownership : By owning a digital wallet with access to private keys, you could instantly prove that you own a particular asset.
• Digital Collections : Just as one can prove that someone owns a particular asset, so can one prove that a particular item is unique and original. For a metaverse that wants to incorporate all aspects of daily life, this is very important. Through NFTs, digital items can be created that are 100% unique and could never be exactly copied or lost.
• Governance : Just like in real life, the ability to participate in decision making in the metaverse space will be of major importance.
• Accessibility : creating a digital wallet is available to any user worldwide. Unlike a bank account, when creating a digital wallet you do not need personal data or pay certain fees for it, anyone can access, use, and build with the underlying protocol-level infrastructure that supports a crypto-native metaverse. 

Although crypto is still far from a single unified metaverse, users can already see how the concept is evolving and we are closer to its establishment. Until the day a metaverse fully launches, crypto entrepreneurs will continue trying to build and test metaverse-like projects that experiment with crypto tools and frameworks that make a digitally native life easier and more fun.