Grayscale, a company focused on digital currency investing, notes that crypto Cloud economies are the next “emerging market investment frontier” and the Metaverse is at the forefront or center of this Web 3.0 Internet “evolution.”
As explained by Grayscale, the Metaverse is a set of interconnected, experiential, 3D virtual worlds where people located anywhere “can socialize in real-time to form a persistent, user-owned, internet economy spanning the digital and physical worlds.”
Grayscale writes in its report that the Metaverse is still emerging, but many key components have “started to take shape and are revolutionizing everything from e-commerce to media & entertainment, and even real estate.”
Grayscale’s Decentraland Report and Decentraland Tour intend to make this concept “more tangible by introducing one of the leading blockchain-based virtual worlds—Decentraland.”
According to Grayscale’s report, initiatives such as Decentraland are creating an open-world metaverse where users can “log in to play games, earn MANA (the native token of Decentraland, with which users can purchase NFTs, including LAND or collectibles.”
Users can also “vote on economy (governance), or create NFTs, giving them real world interoperability for the value of their time spent in-game.”
The report from Grayscale further notes that the potential of this Internet evolution has started to “attract Web 2.0 companies like Facebook, which is shifting to a Metaverse company and is changing its name to ‘Meta’.”
At this key inflection point, other Web 2.0 tech firms will mostly likely “need to start exploring the Metaverse to stay competitive, and the spotlight has prompted a new wave of investment in this emerging crypto category,” the report added.
As noted in Grayscale’s report, the Web 3.0 Metaverse worlds are “part of a larger interconnected crypto cloud economy.”
These decentralized protocols interoperate with and offer the appropriate technical infrastructure to support Metaverse virtual economies.
- Payment Networks: Web 3.0 metaverse economies can “use their own digital
currency, like MANA, or the currency of the layer one base crypto cloud
economy platform they’re built on, such as Ethereum (ETH) or Solana (SOL).” - Decentralized Finance: Decentralized exchanges “allow users to trade ingame items while lending platforms allow users to take out loans on their virtual land.”
- NFT Sovereign Goods: Players can “purchase NFTs from other creators and
bring them into other virtual worlds to be put on display or sold.” - Decentralized Governance: Legal frameworks “take back control of the digital
economies from centralized corporations and allow a global network of Web
3.0 metaverse users to decide the rules of their collectively owned virtual
space.” - Decentralized Cloud: File storage solutions such as Filecoin “give Web 3.0
metaverse worlds a decentralized infrastructure solution to store data while
services like Livepeer give virtual worlds decentralized video transcoding
infrastructure.” - Self-Sovereign Identity: Internet-native social reputation coin (“creator coins”)
data from other platforms may be “transferred into the Metaverse and used for
identity or credit scoring.”