NFTs and The Metaverse, The Next Big Step For Art and Culture

Have you ever held onto an event ticket from a memorable night? How about saving receipts, trinkets, or other artifacts in an attempt to preserve a cherished memory forever?

Web3 projects are taking steps to preserve our culture and transform the way we interact with art in society. Specifically, through the way we store and connect with precious mementos that mean the most to us.

Preserving Culture

When we think of preserving culture traditionally, we imagine libraries, museums, books and photographs. About 2% of people, on average, visit a museum once a month and only 15% of people visit one annually. Museums and libraries are often difficult to reach and inconvenient, while being completely inaccessible to others. Books and photographs provide a simpler solution, but arrive with their own problems including physically handling, maintaining and securing the item.

Almost everything we know of the past has been recorded and later learned from books. Without these books and knowledge of history, what would civilization look like? Most likely, we would be centuries behind where we currently are socially without learning from past mistakes or knowing what already happened. Preserving our culture is necessary for thriving future civilizations and the advancement of the world.

Preserving culture on-chain is the easiest and safest way to guarantee access in the future, whether accessed by a loved one in half a decade or by future world leaders ten generations from now. Securing artifacts and ideas on-chain offers plenty of opportunities for improvement on the way things are currently done, as well as exciting and attainable possibilities down the road.

An art and design group called Alter Ego is building a metaverse world specifically to preserve culture. With plans of including all 1154 UNESCO World Heritage sites, this new metaverse will strive to carry art, literature and architectural wonders into the future. Aiming to become the Alexandria Library of the twenty-first century and offer recorded lectures, the MMXXII metaverse will be essential to preserving our culture and knowledge. Projects like these are required for advancing the generations to come and will drive innovation and sustainability efforts for centuries.

Transforming a Traditional Society

NFTs are transforming society as we know it, from supply chains to branding to art and music. The rapid pace of innovation is startling for some and exciting to others. From streamlining business processes and simplifying product inventory to authentically owning physical art or musical verses, NFTs are disrupting our traditional way of looking at society and the way we interact with everything around us.

There are still large inefficiencies throughout our civilization in 2022. Trustless, decentralized and convenient solutions are the best option to solve these inefficiencies for everyone from business owners to everyday people. Have you ever ordered a product online, only to later be told that the same product is now unavailable? How about purchasing a counterfeit product while trying to find a good deal?

Some Web3 companies are assisting businesses through product inventory management, providing authenticity for highly counterfeited products and offering all-in-one company branding throughout the ecosystem. Companies like SHOPX are changing the way consumers and businesses interact entirely, from the checkout process to actually owning the physical product, shaping the future of commerce.

The Metaverse Is Disrupting Civilization

Imagine a metaverse that replaces screen time, versus replacing physical interaction. The average person spends 30-70+ hours infront of a screen every week between TV, cell phones, computers, and other devices. What if we could replace this screen time with a virtual reality metaverse, allowing you to feel like you are next to a friend instead of video calling from different countries?

We can all imagine an unimaginable virtual world where flight and anything else is possible, so why is it so hard to picture a digital universe where we feel like we are next to people who are thousands of miles away? What is realistically the next step towards innovation after the rise of social media, FaceTime and Zoom?

The future metaverse might not be a clear vision for many, but it will impact and benefit everyone around the world, changing the way we live our daily lives. From being able to visit historical places to listening in on famous professors' lectures no matter where or who you are, the world will offer many new opportunities through these digital worlds. With the average person spending so much of their time in front of a screen, the world has never been more ready for the metaverse.

Twenty years ago, had you told someone that the average person spends double-digit hours in front of a screen all day in the future, they would have called you crazy. After the startling pace of innovation within technology over the last two decades, society has only continued to grow and advance at even quicker rates. Since 2020, the metaverse market size has doubled to over 100 billion, the number of AR and VR (augmented reality and virtual reality) users has doubled to over a billion users and 38% of US adults claim to be very or somewhat familiar with the metaverse in 2022.

Preserving our culture and helping shape the future of society is at the core of Web3 values and initiatives, driving innovation meant to advance for decades to come.