During an interview in 1981, a young Steve Jobs metaphorically described computers (or Apple computers) as the “bicycle of the mind”.  Indeed he was right.  For the next 40 years (and perhaps many to come), computers have tremendously improved the efficiency in many aspects of our lives.  However, there is one caveat, while these efficiencies enabled us to “cycle” instead of walking through our existing life paths, they don’t provide us with completely new type of paths to begin with.  After all, we are still just a small part of the mankind history who are living in a modernized, civilized and centralized era.

The metaverse will be a game-changer to this, but it has to be approached in the right way. It will be decentralized, but probably not in the form of some existing “Axie Infinity wannabee” P2E games. While these games are innovative in the sense that they leveraged the concept of “GameFi” by providing players with digital asset ownership via NFTs and equities, they are afterall top-down centralized productions that are similar to traditional games, where player experiences and in-game economy are centrally controlled by a single organization. It’s unlikely that a metaverse in which we all want to participate in the future will start from here.

Put differently, from a long-run perspective there’s not much point in creating a virtual world that’s just an “optimized” version of our existing physical world. We as human want to participate in a virtual realm that allow us to experience something completely different - not just from a technological perspective (e.g. better UX with more sophisticated VR hardwares), but more importantly from a humanitarian perspective - namely, starting a different type of life journey on a completely new, undominated universe from its singularity.

Hence, in my opinion the correct way to building the future metaverse should follow a decentralized bottom-up approach, where everything is built from scratch under a self-sustaining ecosystem that is completely transparent and truthful. This is possible due to the informational and transactional efficiency that the blockchain technology provides. Under such virtual world, a successful ecosystem may start as an inconspicuous sapling that over time grows into a towering tree through developments of different layers of communities, cultures and nations.

In order for such ecosystem to be sustainable and successful in the long-run, we need a finely-tuned game economy design with intuitive incentive mechanism that promotes player retention. Specifically, through incentives of different parties and communities, the economy of this virtual world should reward well-designed layers with self-reinforcing virtuous cycle, and punish poorly-designed layers with self-reinforcing vicious cycle. I will discuss this in my next post, so do stay tuned if you are interested!