These companies are not building the metaverse, they are building metaWorlds.
The metaverse is not built in siloes, not owned by a single company, nor exists on a single blockchain. Hence, no one is building the metaverse. The metaverse is, by virtue of its tenents, open sourced, crowd funded, and a user generated experience.
Users and their avatars can freely explore from world to world.
Metalistings (MLS) is the embodiment of this connected hyper reality.
Virtual worlds have existed since the 2000s in games like World of Warcraft, Eve Online, Runescape, & Animal Crossing…
The difference now is ownership.
With NFTs, people could prove scarcity, non-fungability, and provenance.
If real estate was ownership in real life, then virtual land is ownership of the metaverse.
But the scarcity of attention in the IoT is irrefutable.
Like your iphone home page, valuable digital real estate exists, just in different mediums.
Web2 social media has shown us that people, with their finite attention, aggregate to social hubs.
Such is the case in the metaverse.
Coding new land doesn’t mean people will go there - people go where other people are.
The scarcity of attention is the real reason why virtual real estate will continue to have value.
Hotels.com was worth $11M in 2001. Web traffic, ease of access through SEO, is now foot traffic, and ease of access through genesis plaza. Presently, the virtual Manhattan is on discount.
The easiest way to sell something new is to make it old.
Real estate is an old.
Drawing similarities between metaverses and real estate, we’ll onboard the next billion users.
It’s a place of social congregation and consumption. This is means that the metaverse is a new social layer. A place of experiences.
Land is only as valuable as the experiences that are on the land.
So there is no such thing, now at least, as residential real estate. It’s all commercial.
Game worlds have been a place of refuge and retreat for the business of daily life. If we bring capitalism and financialization of all things into the metaverse, then should there not be a metaverse for the metaverse where people can escape to? In any case, metaverse exodus is a shift in consumer preferences. With enough of a movement, we could see a shift in ecologically nonsustainable consumer preferences move towards more of a virtual consumptive behavior.
The third will be general AI. But before then KYC and pseudo-anonymity are in conflict. Identity within the metaverse is the only user input that is constant throughout all of the different worlds. Property rights is linked to identity. ZK proofs are integral to resolving these differences in the metaverse.
You make it easier to understand their similarities and differences. This overview takes the fear out of learning about the metaverse.
Once you aggregate enough users and worlds, new worlds will look to you to be a launchpad.
Like the NASDAQ, you will get to dictate what traits and entry requirements are needed to be defined as the next Initial Land Offering.
As more worlds come into existence that fit these requirements, these requirements will soon be the similarities that become the portals between each world.
Know that because of these boundaries, people will be more creative for a time. Many worlds will make money, but only a few will survive.
In the end most users will aggregate to a few of the worlds that remain.
These worlds will be interconnected, DAO governed, ushering in the real metaverse.
