Per reporter: Zhang Lingxiao
In October last year, the news that social media giant Facebook had changed its name to "Meta" swept across the internet, sending the concept of "metacosmity" to an unprecedented height. Apple, Microsoft, Tencent, NVIDIA and other technology giants have announced their entry into the meta-universe field.
The metacosm, also known as the "super universe", refers to an artificial space parallel to the real world, which has its own evolving cultural content and economic system, and always maintains a safe and stable operation, while also meeting the needs of individual social, gaming, and economic life. In this space, people have their own virtual identities and are able to create the "real" in the virtual world.
So how far are we from parallel worlds?
The Daily Economic News reporter spoke with Don Tapscott to interpret the present and future of the metaverse from the perspective of the metaverse infrastructure - blockchain. Don Tapscott is a globally renowned new economist, master of business strategy and international futurist, known as the "father of the digital economy". After the publication of one of the books, "Blockchain Revolution", it quickly caused a boom.
Don Tapscott Image source: Courtesy of the interviewee
Blockchain, the cornerstone of the metacosmic economic system
"The metaverse is not a new concept, and over the past 200 years, science fiction authors have come up with different versions of the idea." Tapscott told the Daily Economic News reporter.
Today, with the development and evolution of the Internet, people have long been accustomed to online social networking, digital penetration into various fields, online and offline are highly interconnected, providing the possibility for the further integration of virtual and real worlds. In this context, the metacosm is considered to be a new experimental scenario that integrates blockchain, extended reality, 5G and cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), digital twins and other emerging technologies to achieve the integration of virtual reality, and is the next stage of the global Internet.
From another perspective, the metaverse may be a better version of the virtual world game Second Life. When Second Life was launched in 2003, it advertised itself as an online virtual world. There, people can use avatars to interact with others. Residents of the virtual world can participate in activities, build, create, or shop. They can also trade virtual property and services with each other. But within a few years, almost no one was there.
Dave Baszucki, co-founder and CEO of Roblox, an open-ended game creation platform that is regarded as the "first share of the metaverse," has summarized eight characteristics of the metaverse: identity, economy, immersion, open-air, low latency, diversity, civilization, and friends.
The realization of the metaverse is inseparable from the support of software and hardware, and the evolution of underlying technologies such as AR/VR, cloud computing, and blockchain is the only way from games to metaverses.
If AR/VR technology focuses on providing a realistic experience, then the blockchain is an important means to completely record the value of the metaverse, the digital world, and lay a solid foundation for the economic activities of the metacosm. In Tapscott's view, blockchain is the first digital value medium, just as the Internet is the first digital information medium.
"Blockchain gives us a way to peer peer-to-peer, digitize and manage our property rights online. Digital assets, often referred to as tokens, allow us to hold digital goods and be able to transfer them between platforms. These digital goods can be currencies, securities, and other financial assets, or collectibles, intellectual property, identities, or hitherto unimaginable things. Tapscott told the Daily Economic News reporter.
Tapscott further introduced that the metacosmity needs to build a decentralized platform based on community standards and protocols, which will be achieved through blockchain. "Metacosmity needs to protect and exercise digital property rights, and this requires web 3.0 to be built on top of a blockchain network." Traditionally, Web 3.0 is a new phase in the development of the Internet.
He believes that blockchain will play a key role in the clarification and protection of rights in digital property rights, as well as the widespread interconnection of digital assets and applications. "The underlying technology of Web 3.0 is public blockchain platforms like Ethereum and Solana, which allow us to create, move, and manage digital goods and interact with them through decentralized programs."
On the internet side, interoperability protocols allow users to seamlessly transfer assets between different metaversms. For example, Cosmos, one of the interoperability protocols, supports IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol) and builds the Blockchain Internet, a network that allows multiple chains to connect to each other so that assets and applications can operate across chains and metaversities. More than $125 billion in assets are currently interconnected through IBC.
In addition, blockchain is also conducive to optimizing the experiential sense of metacosmic economic activity.
Tapscott told the Daily Economic News, "On some 'Layer 1' platforms, we can build additional blockchains to help scale, so that users can avoid latency issues." For 'Layer 2' platforms, such as Polygon, by moving some transactions out of the main chain, it helps to reduce costs and increase the replacement of protocols such as Ethereum. ”
(Editor's note: Layer 1 refers to the underlying primary blockchain architecture; Layer 2 refers to the network that sits on top of the underlying blockchain.) ）
NFT, the meeting point of cryptography and the metaverse
Many people believe that 2021 is the first year of the meta-universe. At the beginning of 2021, Soul App proposed to build a "social metacosm" for the first time in the industry. In March 2021, Roblox, known as the first stock in the metacosm, was officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company was working to create an "enterprise metacosm." In August, Nvidia announced the launch of the world's first simulation and collaboration platform that provides the foundation for the metaverse. On October 28, The American social media company Facebook announced that it has changed its name to Meta ("meta" in the "metacosm") to show its determination to build a metacosm.
The competition in the metaverse market has gradually become fierce, and companies from various fields are trying to share a piece of the pie and explore different forms of development of the metacosm. In the blockchain field, the metaverse-related scenarios that are currently attracting more attention are mainly related to the application of NFTs (non-homogeneous tokens) and cryptocurrencies, that is, digital asset transactions.
According to market research agency Chainalysis, the size of the NFT market has reached at least $26.9 billion in 2021, or about 170 billion yuan.
For the application of blockchain technology in the metaverse, Tapscott told the "Daily Economic News" reporter that the combination of metaverse and encryption technology still has a lot of room for exploration, and there are more innovative combination methods to be discovered and applied. "NFTs are heavily used in the field of art and collectibles, but in fact we can use NFTs to achieve greater goals. For example, NFTs may be able to drive the development of metaversics of shared state and hyper-immersive shared online state (perhaps one day combined with surreal virtual reality) technologies that, applying, allows us to transfer digital objects between platforms in real time. ”
In March 2021, The Associated Press sold its NFT artwork "Blockchain 2020 Presidential Election – From an Outer Space Perspective" for 100.888 Ethereum (about $180,000) on the OpenSea platform. The NFT artwork commemorates the AP's first report on the U.S. election on the blockchain, depicting the visual effect of viewing an election map from space. On December 20, the famous NBA star Stephen Curry launched the "2974 Series" NFTs, each with a separate number, a total of 2974 NFTs, and a single NFT sold for $499.
In the gaming space, blockchain-based games such as virtual platforms Decentraland and The Sandbox saw their virtual land prices skyrocket last year. On November 23, 2021, a piece of digital land on Decentraland was sold for $2.43 million, or about 27,000 yuan per square meter. Hong Kong real estate giant and CEO of New World Development Group, Zheng Zhigang, has purchased one of The Sandbox's largest digital plots, and he has invested about $5 million in the virtual land.
In December, Snoopy Dog, the American Rap King, announced its entry into The Sandbox, and launched the Snoopverse land sale on December 2, Beijing time, selling land near Snoop Dog's virtual real estate.
Axie Infinity, the head product of blockchain games, also provides innovative ideas for metaverse applications. Axie Infinity is a Pokemon-inspired NFT game that allows users to collect, breed, and battle iconic Axe monsters through tradable and sold NFT game assets. Axie Infinity is currently the largest Ethereum game, and it will be all the rage in 2021, with even more than 2 million daily active users at one point.
"Decentralization, a trend in the era of the digital economy"
With the current technology of the metaverse gradually maturing, many institutions have a more positive attitude towards the development of the metacosm.
Bloomberg has estimated that the meta-universe market size could increase to $800 billion by 2024.
Bank of America ranked the metacosm as one of 14 technologies that could have a revolutionary impact on human life, and in a report noted that the metacosm will become a solid economic model, covering work and recreation, and that various industries and markets that have been developing for a long time, such as finance and banking, retail, education, health and other fields, will change. Bank of America believes that the metacosm will attract consumers to spend more in the virtual world.
With the increase in the creation, exchange, consumption and other activities of digital products in the meta-universe market, the transaction volume of digital assets and digital currencies has greatly increased, promoting the development of the digital economy.
Tapscott believes that in the era of the digital economy, decentralized business, institutions and networks are the development trend.
"Blockchain enables us to create new asset classes, business models and governance systems for the digital age. It makes the new distributed governance system more inclusive, participatory, transparent and credible. Tapscot told the Daily Economic News reporter that the blockchain is a distributed tamper-proof transaction ledger maintained by multiple parties, which ensures the authenticity of the ledger. Blockchain replaces the records of banks, companies, and large tech companies, which are an important medium for the operation of the digital economy.
At a time when blockchain is still being questioned, the challenge of applying this technology more widely to the decentralized network of the metaverse is self-evident.
In Tapscott's view, the real challenge that blockchain brings to finance is that the decentralization of finance will bring about huge changes, and all fields will be affected, after all, finance is the lifeblood of all industries. The power of digital assets lies in the fact that people can own, trade, and transfer them in different environments and jurisdictions. "Unique and scarce digital assets, such as our digital identities, can be freely transferred across the internet without the risk of being copied or confiscated by a central platform, which is a profound shift from the way finance works today."
Looking to the future, Tapscott said that encryption technology has extremely high application value in digital economic activities such as metaverse. Digitizing all financial assets and many other types of assets through tokens, this "tokenization" represents a new way of capturing value in economic activity, not just the cryptocurrency itself. After a decade of development, the industry is expanding rapidly, and the market value is now more than $2 trillion. Crypto assets create more value than every unicorn that emerged after the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
Reporter: Zhang Lingxiao
Edit: Gao Han
Vision: Liu Qingyan
Typography: Gao Han Ma Yuan
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