What is the metaverse?
Facebook is reportedly betting the future of the company on the metaverse, changing the name of its umbrella company in the process. Meanwhile, supposedly NFTs are the revenue model for the metaverse, making $2.6bn in sales in the first six months of 2021 alone.
The metaverse as most people are talking about it right now is something to do with an interconnected set of virtual worlds, which may or may not be accessible via virtual reality (hence Facebook’s interest: after all, they own Oculus). The idea is that they’d be interoperable to the point where these worlds can lead to each other, and where you can bring objects from space to space - theoretically represented via NFTs.
This particular vision of the metaverse is probably not accurate. It depends on a few different important prerequisites: virtual reality becoming not just mainstream but near-ubiquitous for more than just games (when this is far from true even for games today), NFTs evolving to become truly powerful object primitives for interoperability rather than cartoon pictures of apes that are sometimes used for money laundering, and enough people buying into this new version of the internet that they build worlds, objects, and applications with wild abandon.
Another version of the metaverse is a “digital overlay for our reality” - or as I’ve often described social media, a backchannel for real life. Here, rather than interconnected worlds, we’re maybe talking about something closer to digital platforms that add value to reality. This fits a little closer to Facebook, which could already be thought of in this way.
