What is The Metaverse

A metaverse, to put it simply, is a space where humans can participate in a shared virtual universe. The term originated from the novel ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson, where humans interact with each other as avatars in a 3D space. Recently, the movie 'Ready Player One' depicted people who can go inside a virtual world and become a 3D being, an avatar, in it. The players experience things that they wouldn’t be able to do in the real world, like performing extreme physical feats or driving technologically advanced vehicles.

So far, virtual worlds haven’t brought about a societal apocalypse. Nonetheless, virtual worlds have made it possible for us to engage with communities of people online. Gamers would recognize these as being Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) worlds like World of Warcraft. There, people chat with their friends and raid the dungeons to destroy creatures for loot. Their avatar is the warrior, sorcerer, thief, healer or other being with supernatural powers that make up a game character.

The Metaverse, with a capital M, is the idea that there will be one single virtual reality that humans will become avatars in. They will engage in this shared virtual reality space, talk to each other, hang out, play games, watch movies, even browse the web. It will be a new internet. Instead of this flat World Wide Web that people surf through every day, the Metaverse will have texture, dimension and color. People will meet, watch shows, hang out, visit virtual museums, ride virtual parks, go to websites all within the same Metaverse.

It has become increasingly likely that if this all-encompassing Metaverse were to come about, that it would be powered by blockchain. NFTs, non-fungible tokens, have made it possible to have full ownership of a digital asset.

So if a fully-fledged Metaverse, one that is a 3D, even a virtual reality internet, that you can plunge into at a moment’s notice, where websites are floating spaces in another world, then it must have some form of ownership associated with it. With blockchain technology, you can own a digital asset and the cryptographic token will ensure, without a doubt, that the artwork, in-game item, digital property and so on will be yours. The user's assets are also decentralized and peer-to-peer, not subject to a centralized authority like a government or bank.

This is massive. Not only will people surf a new internet with this technology. People will begin owning digital properties if NFT technology were to be implemented with the new internet. Not only will it have three-dimensional texture, color and immense interactivity. The Metaverse will also be a place where people buy and sell unique assets with a level of decentralized peer-to-peer ownership that wasn’t possible before.