Citibank estimates that the Web3 metaverse could be worth $13 trillion by 2030 and have up to five billion users. Web2 allowed us to create and share data in the form of documents, photos and videos. Web3 built on blockchain enables us to own or profit-share in our creations. Blockchain provides guaranteed authenticity and chain of title (ownership). Countless examples abound such as:
=One can join any of the countless DAOs being created, own its tokens or NFTs, then play a role in its upside whether it be by governance tokens where you can provide guidance by way of vote or by security tokens where you share in its valuation.
=Join a gaming or music platform and you can instantly transfer your gaming items or music playlists onto any other gaming or music platform. Your tracks are not held hostage on Spotify.
=Profit-share in a brand’s value. The Hundreds announced it would pay royalties to owners of the NFTs that were used in some of its clothing collections. Every new clothing line that used that emblem would give you a dividend. Partially decentralising the brand’s value in this way spurred The Hundreds’s community to go out of their way to promote it. Sharing ownership incentivizes everyone to become a builder and contributor.
=Be an early investor in unknown artist or musician that shows great potential by buying their NFTs. If they become a star, their NFTs will soar in value. This is analogous to the way people buy “rookie” cards for athletes. The NFT could also grant special rights to such NFT holders such as free attendance to their shows, special merchandise, members only channels, or participation in royalties. This spurs community involvement.
=Launch a Web3 subscription based business where a DAO can be created that offers a subscription-based product, say a newsletter. Two or more tiers of NFTs can be issued to subscribers. Tier 1, whose NFTs are unlimited, grants the subscriber access to paid content for a set amount of time. Tier 2 NFTs on the other hand are limited meaning there’s only a certain number of customers who can purchase this tier. Members of this tier receive dividends from the revenues of Tier 1 purchases, so are economically incentivized to help market and grow the Tier 1 customer base.
Because of the way Web3 is designed, one can build on every Web3 company. This means the community around a platform can co-create enabling the platform ecosystem to grow even stronger.
Essential freedoms
The metaverse is a social and ownership layer on the internet that connects people, places, and things. One has self-sovereign identity. This means one cannot be censored unlike what we saw Big Tech do to certain individuals or to certain words or subjects such as COVID. Orwell’s “1984” rings true once again. The mere mention of the word COVID could penalize the user across major social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. These sites don’t have choice as the great reveal showed communications between the CIA and these companies telling them what to prohibit. Freedom to communicate, share, and exchange value are the key use cases of Web3. Without these freedoms, all other freedoms collapse.
Metaverse is transformational
The Web3 metaverse is powered by a combination of VR/AR, 5G networks, blockchain, and AI. It will transform how we live our everyday lives, impacting every industry from retail and advertising, to education and entertainment, to science and invention, to governance and voting. Over the next decade, users will be to Web3 what software engineers were to Web2.
AR/VR/AI glasses will become a standard. A projected holistic screen that is voice recognition enables and touch sensitive will enable us to easily tell our browser what to do, what program to run, what game to play, where to shop, or whom to call in a fun and highly efficient manner.
Your AI knows your detailed body measurements so can create a fashion show featuring multiple copies of your avatar wearing the latest 20 designs on a runway. Your AI knows the dimensions of each room in your home so can suggest furniture that might suit your tastes then give you a 3-D tour of each room.
The future of collaboration whether it’s Thanksgiving dinner or a board room meeting will also never be the same. Each member at a dinner party could be in a different part of the planet but represented in real-time in virtual space by their avatar. The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the workplace and sent the vast majority of employees home to work using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Slack and other collaborative tools leading to their meteoric adoption and use. A new generation of virtual and fully-immersive collaboration environments will arrive over the next few years following the release of Apple’s AR/VR headset and the next generation of eyewear.
On metaversal green businesses: Cellular agriculture & ReFi
Over the next decade, ethical, nutritious, and environmentally sustainable protein production systems will become widely available. Cellular agriculture will birth stem-cell based meat and reduce the cost of producing a single molecule of a cell-based beef burger from $1M/kg in 2000 to about $100/kg in 2020, and is expected to fall below $10/kg by 2025. This will create mass adoption at a minimal cost to the environment while greatly reducing animal slaughter.
Similar cost reductions are being seen in stem-cell based chicken and fish. This technology will allow the production of beef, chicken, and fish anywhere, on-demand, and will be more nutritious and environmentally friendly than traditional live-stock options. Companies such as OMeat and JUST are now scaling production.
In fact, regenerative finance is taking off on Web3. We all know about CeFi and DeFi but now there is regenerative finance, or ReFi. Web3’s ReFi is the environmental iteration of DeFi. It rewards those who create positive effects on the environment while charging those who create negative ones. ReFi includes UBI, lending, and data ownership among others including environmental projects such as Toucan which tokenizes carbon credits with over 21.9 million tonnes of CO2 bridged to date, and Loam which creates a marketplace for farming data to incentivize farmers by way of token reward to engage in regenerative practices that will help the environment.
Web3 makes things more efficient, transparent, and composable so others can easily build on the existing structure. Some cryptowhales have found it much easier to buy tokens to offset carbon footprints than it has been to buy carbon offsets from traditional brokers.
Onwards!
It is much easier to launch a product in Web3. Even an unknown entrepreneur can build products that plug into an existing network without permission from an established platform. Web3 is trustless so there is no need to trust the company or people behind a project. The code itself is what is important. Some recent fundraising campaigns supporting humanitarian aid efforts in Ukraine, for example, by way of NFTs and have been run through smart contracts that automatically transfer all funds received to the Ukrainian government or associated charities as can be seen on the blockchain.
Web3 provides permissionless and open technologies which spur permissionless and open workforces. Anyone can join and contribute to the communities or businesses via a DAO or NFT. Location, age, race and even past experiences are irrelevant. What matters is whether you can provide value to the community. If the DAO issues a token, that token will rise in value if the DAO offers utility. The token is an automatic way to fundraise for the DAO. This could take various forms such as a DAO that offers tokens to farmers who are environmentally conscious, proven out by various metrics such as carbon credits.
Tokens are the oil in the blockchain virtual machine. Web3 has the potential to unlock a more valuable internet for everyone. New companies can build on Web3 infrastructure to create communities around their brands and product concepts much more easily than in previous iterations of the web. And even established platforms can leverage these forces by plugging into blockchain-based content networks and giving their users some ownership over their data. Meanwhile, anyone can build on any platform as the Web3 metaverse carries the properties of composability. All of this means that the next era of the web will likely look a lot different, and be far more open and even faster growing than the one we’re living with today
