Dear Bankless Nation,
The world’s biggest brands are pivoting to the metaverse. Yet these corporations are undoubtedly doing so just for that reason, their brands.
We here are skeptical they’ll actually work for an open metaverse, like elements of the Ethereum community currently are.
But these big brands should realize Ethereum is metaverse infrastructure and ETH is metaverse money. And that all roads lead through Ethereum if they want to balance their own business goals with the demands of an open metaverse.
-WMP
Ethereum: toward an open metaverse
“The users are revolting against the feudal lords of the internet,” Ryan Sean Adams noted of crypto earlier today.
Throw DeFi, NFTs, L2s, and DAOs in the mix, and it’s clear we’re revolting against the feudal lords of coordination, culture, finance, and more, too.
These new possibilities are starting to bring in serious mainstream attention just as Ethereum is spearheading the way into the modular blockchain era, making it positioned to support widespread mainstream adoption of the cryptoeconomy’s open gardens going forward.
Zooming out, these realities are also coming to the fore as humanity is racing toward the metaverse for new virtual frontiers for play and work.
Of course, it seems we’re still in Act 1 Scene 1 of this wider metaversal migration. At this point what most call the metaverse for the sake of simplicity is really many disparate virtual worlds and metagalaxies.
Many of us here fear that Facebook’s or Microsoft’s “metaverse” will really just be a closed garden VR world. A world that wouldn’t afford users the same freedoms and guarantees that their open metaverse alternatives do and will. Another siloed enterprise arena for a big brand to pen their users in and take advantage of them.
All that said, I consider Ethereum to be the best infrastructure we currently have to connect metagalaxies into an open metaverse over time.
With ETH, we have a native metaverse money in the making. With new Ethereum L2 advancements around things like validiums and volitions, supporting billions of users is coming. And with DeFi and NFTs, we have credibly neutral infrastructure for connecting metagalaxies with a common, interoperable railing for culture and economies.
That ETH is metaverse money and Ethereum is metaverse infra is not about financializing every nook and cranny of the metaverse. Rather, it’s about supporting the open metaverse with the possibility of cultural and economic exchanges that aren’t dominated from start to finish by corporations and states.
It’ll take all kinds of folks to build the open metaverse. And the open metaverse is for all kinds of folks. And because Ethereum, DeFi, and NFTs foster arbitrary programmability, these technologies will support all sorts of metaversal communities and projects in the years ahead. That’s the big idea, i.e. metaversal freedom.
We’ve much more work to do and need to ally ourselves with experts in other related fields of interest, like WebXR. Yet if we can do these things, we can ensure that the open metaverse is our future, not a corporate-dominated Metaverse Inc.
Action steps
- ⚔️ Read Metaversal Barbarians at the Gate by Metaversal
- 🔶 Read Ultra Scalable Ethereum by Bankless