Imagining the Metaverse

Exploring the transformation of value in the digital age

By Michael J. Casey, Chief Content Officer

Jan. 21, 2022

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As Web 3 and the metaverse continue to grab headlines, most of the attention goes on celebrities, brands and other commercial projects constructing virtual property in the online world. Very few people look into a far bigger construction project: that of who’s building the narrative that defines the idea of the metaverse in our minds. That’s the subject of this week’s column, which draws from a phenomenal essay by Epsilon Theory’s Ben Hunt.

The metaverse was also the focus of this week’s “Money Reimagined” podcast. My co-host Sheila Warren and I talked with New York Times columnist and author Kevin Roose, who shared his thoughts on whether it will evolve into a more egalitarian economy or whether we are at risk of reinforcing the same biases and distortions of the physical world into this new digital alternative.

Have a listen after reading the newsletter.

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Who Writes the Story of the Metaverse?

Rachel Sun/CoinDesk

IRL.

This acronym has become shorthand for the regular, offline human existence in which we all participate, a realm lying outside ofthat new digital alternative to which investors, entrepreneurs and media commentators are increasingly drawn: the metaverse.

“In real life” evokes a place where our bodies are physically present, one in which we actually live. It also implies, by extension, that the metaverse is unreal.

That might seem perfectly logical to you. If so, Ben Hunt is here to tell you you’re wrong.

The always thought-provoking essayist, whose writings at Epsilon Theory have brought poetry, philosophy and communication theory to the analysis of economic and financial phenomena, has penned a tour de force – the first of a three-part series – that calls on us all to urgently address what’s happening with the metaverse. Why? Because it’s as real as everything and anything that defines our civilization.

Hunt tells us to focus on the narrative-building work that’s starting to give the metaverse shape in our minds. It’s related to an idea we’ve often visited in Money Reimagined’s newsletter and podcast: that the institutions that define who we are and how we live – our religions, nations, laws, identities and, yes, our money – are social constructs, the product of shared stories that we all tacitly and often subconsciously believe in. Like Yuval Harari – whose work on the power of stories I often cite – he knows that, far from being a reason to doubt their legitimacy, the collective belief in made-up ideas is what gives these institutions their power.

Still, as powerful as these narratives are, they can change. They can be supplanted by new ones. Author Neil Gaiman said, “Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.” Hunt reminds us that “slavery used to be a thing. Settling your differences through dueling used to be a thing. The divine right of kings used to be a thing” and that “Littering was not a thing. Owning pets was not a thing. Privacy was not a thing.”

Heck, 30 years ago “the internet” wasn’t a thing. And by that I don’t mean the routers, switches, fiber-optic cables and Wi-Fi modems that connect computers and enable the distribution of bits and bytes. I mean the abstract “place” where public discourse happens, where new forms of communities arise, where life is monitored, assessed and acted upon. That internet is a concept we collectively dreamed into existence.

Similarly, the metaverse will come to occupy a prominent, influential place in our imagination.

This won’t happen instantaneously. Its shape, meaning and impact on our lives will evolve over time – an evolution that individual human beings can and will influence.

Read the rest of this column here.

Off the Charts

Gamers Getting Cold Feet?

If crypto in 2020 was defined by decentralized finance (DeFi), 2021 was all about gaming. The sudden popularity of play-to-earn blockchain-driven games like Axie Infinity led to a surge of demand for decentralized applications (dapps) that ran these games. That, in turn, fueled predictions that gaming and collectible non-fungible tokens (NFT) would drive adoption that would pave the way for a commercialized metaverse.

The chart below, which Shuai Hao pulled together from DappRadar’s industry overview data, puts the dominance by these two sectors into perspective. Also, let’s be honest, it raises some concerns about their continued growth. The chart confirms that gaming took over DeFi as the biggest driver of dapp usage midway through 2021, but it also shows both sectors undergoing a rather steep correction at the moment.

This decline could simply reflect lower recent prices for crypto tokens, which reduces the appeal of both play-to-earn games and DeFi speculation and could suggest there’ll be a recovery in activity if prices recover. A related, more troubling conclusion – one that’s especially telling for gaming – would be that we’re seeing the effect of diminishing returns for those who join these markets when there’s limited prices of the related tokens, collectibles and digital gaming assets are peaking. The concern is that if the only added benefit of a blockchain-based game is the prospect of gains in the value of the digital good then, like multi-level marketing schemes, the marginal benefit for new participants diminishes as the network grows.

This is why people are taking a second look at the argument that gaming is the killer app for NFT adoption. It’s not that they’re writing off the goldmine prospect from a global gaming community that’s estimated at more than three billion. It’s that creativity will be needed to create cool games to draw them in, games for which blockchain features bring lasting benefits beyond short-term speculation.

The Conversation

Bitcoin, Energy and Lawmakers

The very important topic of cryptocurrencies and energy usage got a congressional hearing Thursday, as the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations subcommittee grilled witnesses on the topic. But what could have been an important debate instead offered a lesson in the politics of these kinds of events.

As the hearing took its time getting started, Jake Chervinsky, the head of policy at the Blockchain Association, reminded people that this was about lawmakers fishing for public responses – on Twitter and elsewhere – as much as anything else.

Jeff John Roberts, of Decrypt, was underwhelmed from the start:

But if the discussion lacked substance, it was instructive on social justice issues relating to crypto. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) noted that the witness panel was all-male, leading female crypto to support her complaints.

As to whether bitcoin is “destroying the planet” with its energy use or incentivizing green energy solutions, the panel didn’t offer much substance. But Twitter was rich with some interesting takes on these issues. Here’s one that caught my attention from Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille, who used a sports analogy to make the case that policing people’s choices for how they use energy is unwise:

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Relevant Reads

Web 3 All the Time

Returning to our newsletter’s main theme, one indication of how NFTs, the metaverse and Web 3 continue to draw so much attention is that on Thursday evening all five of the featured opinion articles on CoinDesk’s home page addressed one or all of these topics in some way. And each, in some way, offered a cautionary tale of the challenges faced by this nascent industry.

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