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FEATURE Crypto Weekly
Speculation and reality, What's What with the Metaverse T
hose who use the Metaverse can do anything they do in real life in the virtual world. People transact, create, socialize, and play through hardware, programming languages, smart contract platforms, and a base hardware layer. As emerging digital-physical realities, economies, and communities, metaverses transcend fiction into reality.
the Metaverse is heavily influenced by Decentraland and The Sandbox. ENS is an Ethereum (ETH)-based naming system that drives identity software, essential for verification, security, accessibility, and avatars. The number of ENS registrations increased by around 18%, from 5,158 in December 2020 to 109,280 in December 2021, illustrating its growing popularity.
Among the key characteristics of the Metaverse are its ownership, decentralization, interoperability, opensource nature, and virtual nature, which are also central to Web 3 and the digital revolution. Several key players have been able to improve infrastructure across the Metaverse "stack" so that the Metaverse can become a more personal, continuous, and immersive experience.
OpenSea, one of the NFT trading platforms, heavily influences metaverse marketplaces. Ethereum NFT platforms OpenSea and Rarible have a combined number of approximately 80,5 million NFTs and USD 10,3 billion in sales volume, with OpenSea controlling 99% of the minted NFTs and 97% of the total sales revenue. OpenSea dominates the ETH NFT trading market, but Rarible has been around for over two years. The market for ETH NFT alone has grown year-over-year (YoY) by about 31,027%
With more than 200,000 items alone on OpenSea, the virtual world hosting
to USD 3.1bn in December 2021. Across the entire NFT market, daily transactions increased by 3,192% YoY to just under 520,000 transactions per day. Out of USD 121bn in gaming industry revenue in 2021, the top five GameFi organizations incurred a total of USD 90m in sales volume, with 161,000 users aiming to satisfy 3.2bn gamers worldwide. A centralized service provider controls the application, technology, information, media, and content ecosystem. There are, however, challenges with interoperability, costs, and walled gardens. Clear, concise regulations and technological advancements are needed. The masses can only be onboarded with confidence in businesses and a shift in consumer behavior. Open source blockchain models of "Know Your Customer" (KYC) could be developed, lowering costs and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of verifying identities and activities. Hardware costs should decrease as technology advances, and oracles, sidechains, application-layer adapters, and blockchain-agnostic smart contracts must reduce gas fees and improve security, decentralization, throughput, and convenience. Despite the current hype surrounding Metaverses, advancements and policy changes will take time. Investors and consumers may realize that this hype doesn't live up to its hype this year, which may lead to Metaverse fatigue.
February 2022 | Volume 15
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