Peeking at The Future of The Metaverse

For all the hype surrounding the term “metaverse” in the past year, many could be forgiven for assuming it was simply another trendy buzzword to emerge from the blockchain and cryptocurrency space.

However, behind the metaverse hype is a technology of real substance; one which is expected to attain a global market value of $1.6 trillion by the end of the decade. The money pouring into the metaverse right now is building the virtual infrastructure for a digital space that could one day lay the foundations for the bulk of future economic activities, as well as an open, accessible realm where people can meet, interact, and entertain.

What Defines a Metaverse?

For a single, open, interoperable metaverse to become the dominant interface through which we conduct day-to-day activities, it will have to meet numerous specific standards. An all-encompassing metaverse is expected to have a comprehensive economic system where financial interactions can take place as easily as they could at a shop counter, a bank, or a vending machine.

What’s more, the seams between the physical and digital worlds will need to become so invisible that people will, in time, stop noticing any distinct differences between the two. Of course, for this to be possible, numerous security issues will need to be addressed.

Digital identity in the metaverse, for example, will need to be made equivalent to a user’s real-world identity, and this identity must be able to be confirmed in a safe manner. This will ensure that user data isn’t exposed unnecessarily, while also giving metaverse users and administrators the ability to oust malicious actors from the platform.

Strong protocol and governance rules around user ownership will also need to be established to make sure users truly own what they buy, and that what they own can’t be replicated. This is where NFTs and the metaverse meet, with NFTs helping form the technological scaffolding for financial interactions due to their immutable, unfalsifiable characteristics.

Graphical Fidelity

Popular metaverse worlds like Sandbox and Decentraland have already produced alpha versions that allow players to explore and interact to some extent, but the graphical fidelity of these early iterations of the metaverse will soon be improved and expanded upon.

Upcoming metaverse projects like Ultiverse, for example, utilize the Unreal Engine 5 to deliver virtual realms with the same level of graphical detail as the latest mainstream AAA games. Unreal Engine 5 has been adopted by popular games such as Fortnite and will be the foundation for upcoming releases like The Matrix Awakens, and the next sequel in The Witcher series.

In the case of Ultiverse, the metaverse will be able to be experienced in as immersive a way as possible thanks to its compatibility with Virtual Reality (VR) hardware. With VR already a major component of the mainstream gaming industry, one expects it to be integrated with metaverse worlds as standard in the coming decade.

Contained in the Ultiverse metaverse is an entire virtual city dubbed Terminus City, which acts as an all-encompassing gaming and entertainment hub from which users can enter gateways to other games and apps hosted within Ultiverse. Terminus City includes entertainment venues like bars and clubs, gaming arcades, a marketplace where users can buy and trade every item won or found in Ultiverse’s games, an exhibition hall, an NFT gallery, and more. A built-in DJ center even allows guest DJs to provide music for gamers in the virtual realm.

Interoperability

One of the main deciding factors on just how prevalent the metaverse might one day be is interoperability. If metaverses - and the games and apps within those metaverses - fail to achieve full interoperability, it could result in a fragmented metaverse space where several virtual worlds serve different people in different locations, without ever interacting with each other.

In such a scenario, the potential for revenue generation will be diminished to some extent, given the scattered user base, but will see several major platforms competing with each other. This isn’t the ideal situation for the end user, as the networking effects of their metaverse experience will be naturally limited.

That’s why many metaverse projects are building their infrastructure on multiple blockchains from the get-go, selling NFTs minted on a multitude of blockchains such as Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and others.

Thankfully, the demand for interoperability spans beyond the metaverse realm. While early cryptocurrency projects sought to compete with each other for market share, developers have since recognized the necessity for compatibility and interoperability, and they are busy forging links between previously disparate blockchains. This will only help future metaverse development by allowing users to traverse between virtual worlds while taking their virtually-owned items with them.

Ultimately, interoperability will enable users from various economic, cultural, and social backgrounds to form mutually beneficial relationships, based on either business or pleasure - or both.

Building in a Bear Market

The cryptocurrency market crash that hit at the turn of the year wiped over $2 trillion off the global market cap, equating to a downturn of 73%. Previous bear market cycles, and the present state of global economies as they enter into a recession, suggest the current downturn will last for at least the next couple of years.

There is an upside to this, however, as many projects continue to build out their offerings without the unnecessary focus on price movements. Venture capital hasn’t stopped flowing into the metaverse space, as witnessed in Ultiverse’s recent seed funding round, and the plethora of investments made by VCs, including Binance Labs, Sequoia, Three Arrows Capital, Defiance Capital, and Sky Vision Capital, among others.

For this reason, now might be the best time to invest in the future of metaverse technology. The bear market will be extremely useful in separating the wheat from the chaff, allowing those projects which were focused on short-term cash grabs to die out, and those with genuine, long-term aims to truly flourish.

As we emerge from the bear market in the next couple of years, we can expect to see a reemergence of the metaverse realm built on even stronger technical, economic, and social principles that we see right now. In fact, by the time of the next bull market cycle, the concept of the metaverse may already have overtaken and overshadowed the foundational concepts of cryptocurrency and blockchain - but only if they prove their utility and achieve the organizational and technological requirements mentioned above.