Facebooks huge „Metaverse“ initiative and the speculative role of IOTA
Facebooks huge „Metaverse“ initiative and the speculative role of IOTA
The “Metaverse” is a term coined in 1992 by science-fiction author Neal Stephenson and describes the vision of a full connection between our physical world and virtual- and augmented reality. It is a fully interoperable plethora of places that are interconnected, inviting the users to seamlessly switch between platforms, games and places within a shared virtual world and with the ability to carry all kinds of assets from one place to another. Similar ideas were artistically depicted in movies like “Ready player one”.
Big news today: Facebook just announced to create an wooping 10.000 highly-qualified jobs in Europe in order to build this very Metaverse. However this Metaverse would however not be owned or controlled by just one company. It will be a permissionless super-platform in which all other platforms, companies, shops and individuals can settle in and create their own landscapes and niches.
Crypto is essential for the metaverse!
If you want to build a digital world, you need the ability to create and trade digital assets. This can be currencies (as most crypto-projects are today) but also NFTs and tokenization-technology. You need digital representation for everything that you want to trade digitally, which is, in Metaverse´s full vision, literally everything. These digital assets can furthermore not be controlled by just one or even a few big companies, since there would never be enough trust in the likes of Facebook, Tencent or Amazon, to represent privately owned digital goods, digital identities or even governmental assets.
The solution must be decentralized crypto.
However, not many crypto-projects out there actually have a vision big and complete enough in order to build the fundamental layer of something like a Metaverse.
A base-layer of the Metaverse must have:
