Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618)
Wen | Wang Lin
Cover source | Visual China
You don't know the metaverse yet? Never mind. Look at the ambitions of Microsoft, Meta, and Nvidia to appreciate the vastness of the metaverse.
On January 18, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, the largest acquisition ever made in the Internet space. Tech giants have money and game companies have experience, and Microsoft hopes to catch the train of the meta-universe.
Two months ago, FaceBook was renamed Meta, and even though The video of Zuckerberg surfing was ridiculed, Zuckerberg's will was not affected in any way. Nvidia, a well-known graphics card manufacturer, hopes to use Omniverse to open the door to a market value from $760 billion to trillions.
The grand vision of the Internet companies seems a little confused - because with today's level of technology, the beautiful vision of the metacosm is no faster to achieve than the colonization of Mars.
This does not affect more and more companies and people to join this "feast". Benyamin, a 12-year-old boy in the UNITED Kingdom, earned 3 million yuan in a summer vacation by relying on NFTs in the Werid Whales series, and these whale digital collections are just ordinary memes. Virtual land bought by a blockchain company in 2018 is now worth 100 million. On the trading platform Opensea, the reserve price of a piece of virtual land on The Sandbox has reached 3.42 Ether, about 70,000 yuan.
Nothing is impossible.
But ordinary people do not have the dream of transforming the world, they think very simply, whether they can make money. However, in a playground full of bubbles, it is somewhat delusional to realize this dream except for the gamers.
The principal of 100,000 rose to 100 million
To make more money in the metaverse, you need to be exposed to it earlier than anyone else and invest recklessly, even if it's impossible to predict its future.
At the end of 2018, a gaming platform called Somnium Space was launched. In this world, users can buy a piece of land for as little as $55, where players can build VR houses and various buildings.
According to Somnium Space, this is an open source social VR world based on blockchain and completely user-led. It hopes to help players create a functioning economy in the virtual reality world, so as to facilitate the immersive experience of players in the virtual world.
A new concept is always not noticed by more people at the beginning, but this does not affect the pursuit of blockchain enthusiasts, especially in the second half of 2018, when the price of Bitcoin was slashed, and the new concept proposed by Somnium Space made some people shine.
Zhang Kun also began to notice Somnium Space at that time. With the mentality of trying it out, since 2018, he has successively bought hundreds of pieces of land on platforms such as Somnium Space and The Sandbox, spending 100,000 yuan.
Zhang Kun is a loyal "believer" in blockchain, running a blockchain technology company with a scale of more than 10 people. After 8 years in the industry, he has long been familiar with the story of wealth freedom in the circle, and he told Tech Planet that he bought virtual land in the early days purely out of belief.
It's like investing in an entrepreneurial project, even if the probability of failure is as high as 99%, but as long as the track is right, the luck is still there, and there is a chance to break out.
In November 2021, virtual land transactions in the metacosm exploded. In November, unprecedented traffic and trading activity appeared on the likes of The Sandbox , a virtual land trading platform , with virtual land trading volume reaching $228 million , the best month to date and nearly 700 times higher than the previous month, according to DappRadar data.
Now, on the trading platform Opensea, the reserve price of a piece of virtual land on The Sandbox has reached 3.42 Ethers, about 70,000 yuan.
"The land in our hands has now risen 1,000 times (worth 100 million yuan), but we are not going to sell it, and our team is not short of money," Zhang Kun said.
Not only Zhang Kun, but also some people have also made money.
In 2021, a meta-universe company generated a net profit of more than 100 million yuan with less than 100 people. They have just obtained a new round of financing, the process is very smooth - only an hour of chat with investors, throw out a glossy financial statement, in just 1 month, the institution completed the whole process of due diligence, payment, etc., and in the past this process took 3 months.
However, this company is not an ordinary person, more like a game maker, where the 100 million profits come from, the other party refused to answer. But they were founded for more than 10 years, and in the founders' own words, metaversmic technology is not much new, no different from the previous blockchain, and the well-known people in the blockchain circle he knows.
Zhang Kun did not abandon his land at a high point, he wanted to become a land developer in the virtual world. "Just like in the real world, you can build a house, earn rent, sell outdoor advertising outside the house, and so on." He happily introduced the monetization method of virtual land, "the other party can pay me digital currency or other virtual assets."
In his view, this is the prototype of the application of virtual land tomorrow. "You can't see the day after tomorrow, but at least you can see what tomorrow will look like," he explains why he doesn't throw away the land.
Restless people
No investment target can soar 1,000 times in a short period of time, even if the housing prices in first-tier cities have risen by only 5 times in the past 10 years, except for bubbles.
More and more young people are attracted by the light reflected by the bubble, and as the story of missing out on the mobile Internet dividend and realizing wealth freedom by relying on company listing options is nearing the end, they choose to single-handedly push open the door of the meta-universe.
What if you can make money? They thought to themselves.
A college student who is still 5 months away from majoring in marketing plans to give up his major to join the metacosm. A recently graduated computer science graduate whose starting salary is fifty or sixty thousand a month, may be even more critical. A person who has been doing logistics for ten years, after learning blockchain for more than 1 year, was invited to a game company responsible for developing meta-universe games, and he did not explicitly say about the treatment, but replaced it with a sentence of "unlimited prospects, unlimited income".
Metaverse, a fashionable concept like a Velcro, seems to be able to make the stock price soar as long as it is pasted. In 2020, the reds economic company "TianxiaXiu", which was registered in A-shares through the backdoor, announced on October 28 that it would launch the "Honnverse Rainbow Universe" virtual social meta-universe product, and then its stock price experienced a dramatic moment of 80% increase in 17 days and 7 stops.
In the first round of the line cap volume edition virtual real estate reservation rush activity it opened, the number of reservations on the first day exceeded 10,000 within two hours, and the server crashed due to the large number of people who snapped up.
Even if Tianxiaxiu did not actually participate in the research and development of AR, VR, MR and related hardware technologies, and did not have related hardware technology reserves or patents, speculators believed that this was the meta-universe, and it was too late to get on the car.
A player who has invested in virtual assets for many years told Tech Planet that many of the land in the Rainbow Universe was given directly to early investors, but due to the lack of investment value and the lack of meaning after the experience, he resold it to other players.
The warning letter of the Shanghai Stock Exchange issued on November 19 has put to the death of some speculators' dreams of making money. But the stock price of Tianxiaxiu is still at a high of 10.59, you know, before dabbling in the meta-universe, its stock price was only 8.49 yuan.
In order to catch the train of the meta-universe, an A-share listed company has invested in research and development for half a year since the technical team, but it is still uncertain, and finally decided to find outsourcing. An internationally renowned oil company decided to develop its own NFT, and even BYD claimed to be related to the metacosm.
In fact, the most in the meta-universe industry is still a startup with less than 100 people. An employee in the byte education research and development line once received a call from a meta-universe startup, the other party invited him to be a CTO, the treatment is 40,000 per month, he felt very outrageous, so he gave up the opportunity.
But that's not the most surprising. On boss direct hiring, Metacosm is recruiting a CTO that may only need to pay him 20,000 yuan per month. Extremely low salaries mean that either teams are mixed or more of their income needs to be obtained through other sources.
"You will find that the industry is very short of people, he needs to understand technology, understand games, understand design, in fact, the people of Tianmei Studio are the most suitable, they are not willing to come out," a founder of Metacostem told Tech Planet. There are a lot of young people in the industry, but there are basically not many people who understand technology.
Large companies, medium-sized companies, small and micro enterprises; engaged in science and technology, entertainment, oil... All of them plunged into the metaverse, a hot mixed market.
Ever-changing wind outlet, unchanging game of cutting leeks
The speculative boom in the metacosm didn't last long. The number of trades on The Sandbox platform fell from a peak of 833 to 236, a drop of more than 70%.
But speculation is just the beginning.
"When the industry does it, it's all a bunch, and you'll find that the original batch of people are doing hot wallets, and then they all go to do cold wallets, then go to speculate, and now they are frying NFTs." The outlet basically changes in 3 months, and if you catch it, you will catch it, and if you can't catch it, you will miss it. Yang Bin sighed, "Now the NFT is very volumey, I think there will be 10,000 companies engaged in NFTs this year."
People have created countless new concepts with a highly consistent end-purpose: to make users money before they wake up.
Xu Lei, an employee of a meta-universe game development company, has witnessed the impetuousness of the circle. "In some hot chain games, at the beginning, it takes three months for players to return their money, slowly become 20 days, and finally become a few days, and some games have hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars every day."
The increasingly short cycle of returns makes people irrational, and finally some game companies will completely end the harvest for various reasons such as crashing and being hacked. In fact, these games are not very advanced, many are just a web game, but because of the addition of the concept of metaverse and blockchain to attract attention. Their experience wasn't great, but the players didn't seem to care, they didn't want to.
"A lot of people in this circle don't have a clean money, and they end up with only two endings: either go in or go out." Xu Lei sighed. He had witnessed the rapid accumulation of wealth in a short period of time by many people, most of whom were extremely anxious because the money did not come cleanly, and some even lost sleep at night.
The bubble will continue, new concepts will come out again, and new leeks will get on the bus. "The beginning of any new thing is a bubble, and that's what it's worth." A metacostem founder concluded.
If it is just a game of drumming and passing flowers, it loses its value. What can really drive the meta-universe industry to make great strides is always the breakthrough of technology, although it seems that the breakthrough of technology is difficult now. But it's better to cut through the thorns in the real world than to binge in the virtual world.
And when more and more people work hard for scientific and technological progress, those empty concepts and bubble scams will gradually disappear.
(Remarks: The article Zhang Kun, Xu Lei, and Yang Bin are pseudonyms.) ）
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