What is the metaverse? Definition of metaverse

Edwarda Hayes
8 min readNov 2, 2021

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The metaverse is intended to revolutionize the Internet as we know it so far, and the world’s leading digital corporations are working intensively on its development.

After all, it is about a lot of money and power, because a virtual, three-dimensional space in real-time, and that is exactly what the metaverse is, offers worlds and simulations with identities, objects, stories, rights, and payment options.

In the metaverse, there is a separate society paired with rules and norms. It is a further development of the mobile internet and blockchain as well as VR and 5G will soon make the metaverse possible.

So far it has mainly been movies, computer games, and visions from leading entrepreneurs, above all Mark Zuckerberg. He doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel but wants to be the first on the market to turn his social network into a metaverse and thus hold market power.

When three-dimensional avatars collide and play comic book-style games, the whole thing becomes a surreal event. You should then be able to buy virtual objects or special authorizations with real money or digital cryptocurrencies.

These are cheaper than their real counterparts and stimulate people’s urge to collect. We already know your desire to own something unique from the NFT hype, where buyers spent crazy sums of money on digital pictures or the first tweet from Jack Dorsey.

In the Metaversum there are concerts, talk shows, streaming, live events, sporting events, and exhibitions. You can have incredible experiences here that could never exist in the physical world. At the same time, greed for sales hovers over the heads of the avatars like the sword of Damocles.

Because of course this beautiful virtual space will not be made available to us without thinking about a multi-million ecosystem.

In summary, one could also say that the metaverse is the escape into a better world. Away from reality, but with a few good features from this very same one.

Our human existence is supplemented thereby an imaginative avatar that allows us to look the way we want. Due to the potential of the blockchain, there are almost no limits and we can use and trade all currencies, data, and valuables in the metaverse.

What does Facebook do with the metaverse?

Mark Zuckerberg had announced in an interview that he would found a team of experts in which all members would deal with the development of a metaverse.

Facebook wants to create its very own version of the metaverse for this, which is perhaps why it bought the VR glasses developer Oculus for 2 billion US dollars as early as 2014. The metaverse is also about generating data, and valuable data at that.

People spend more and more time in the digital world and of course, Facebook does not want to lose sovereignty over the data of its members or share it with competitors.

Virtual rooms with avatars, shops, and objects are ideal playgrounds for companies like Facebook.

The platform is certainly also planning to enter NFT, which would not be surprising because, in the metaverse of the future, every object and every value can be digitized with the help of the NFT.

How long has the metaverse existed?

The term metaverse was founded in the early 1990s by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson. The metaverse appeared for the first time in his novel “Snow Crash” and was, just like today, a cyber world.

As it was then, collective space is now more of a dream than reality. So a metaverse will not be presented tomorrow.

But yes, a clear “but” has to pop up: The author would have thought the Internet and Facebook were sheer madness at the time and could probably never have imagined that around 30 million people are already using the Twitch platform belonging to Amazon every day.

Who needs a virtual environment?

When all systems are coordinated to create a seamless environment, it can be difficult to compare them to the real world.

Mark Zuckerberg also currently sees the social acceptance of this technology as a challenge. And the size of the current headsets also makes it difficult to imagine, we will soon be walking around with them for hours.

So miniaturized frames are needed, perhaps as if they were slightly thicker glasses.

Content creators become key figures in the development and create the worlds that are supposed to cast a spell over millions of people.

What can the metaverse do?

A company-independent metaverse would be welcome, but Mark Zuckerberg’s advance already shows that there will be a race and that we as users will have to deal with several virtual rooms.

It will then not be possible to transfer data via the various providers, for the time being, it will probably take years before full interoperability is achieved and this will only exist if the various companies work together accordingly.

The future of the Internet is shaped by networks that merge into one another and by platforms with multifunctional offers.

We will certainly see high competitive dynamics in the next few years, but at the same time, this can be a driver for innovations and technologies.

Media and technologies become a unit with sales, in which the complete vision of the metaverse lives.

For many technology giants, the metaverse has become the new macro target. Technologies like these will make our ideas of virtual spaces a reality and shape our future by combining the physical and digital world.

Will the Metaverse Abolish the Internet?

The visions of science fiction writers may never be achieved in this form, but the metaverse will most certainly produce trillions of dollars in value as a computer platform or as a content medium.

It is one of the key components for physical platforms to the next life, the virtual worlds. While the internet has no owner, the Metaverse is likely to be in the top 10 most valuable businesses in the world.

And it is precisely this that brings immense economic advantages. New products and services will emerge, from payment processing and identity verification to personnel search, advertising, or content creators to data security.

The metaverse is changing the way we use modern resources and how companies know how to monetize them.

The Internet is not going to go away because there is currently no technology in which hundreds, let alone millions, of people, can share a synchronous experience together at the same time.

There are already mass events and concerts in which millions of participants were digitally connected, but not in a single virtual room, but each one in his own environment.

We simply don’t have any infrastructure for the Metaverse right now. And even if the Internet was never developed for this or a similar experience as in the Metaverse, we will of course also need the Internet in the future to transfer files from one computer to the other.

However, the metaverse needs conditions for permanent communication in precise real-time from countless participants. Even if the first steps in this direction can already be seen.

Does the metaverse need the blockchain?

Digital identities, virtual spaces, affordable added value, and digital ownership would not be possible in the metaverse if it weren’t for the functioning technologies from the crypto-economies.

Take the token economy and the NFT, they enable the transfer of digital assets or the SSI, which can guarantee unambiguous identification.

Both, as well as the verification of originals and the marking of copyrights, are ideally geared towards decentralized blockchain solutions. And middlemen like Facebook would be superfluous here, at least in the long term.

Should Facebook really succeed in leaving its competitors miles behind, as announced, then there would be a gigantic dependency on its own metaverse.

The design of our digital life would therefore depend to a large extent on a corporation.

The four-dimensional Internet, the Metaverse, can be understood as a huge, collectively used virtual space and the blockchain could provide the technology for a digital and almost tamper-proof cash book that drives cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Important properties and possessions that define the respective character, i.e. the avatar, can be stored permanently and transparently on the blockchain.

Access to the data would be possible from anywhere and at any time, in line with the metaverse.

The metaverse is coming — do we really want that?

The online world Second Life started back in 2003 and became a huge hype. One could also see this online world as a forerunner for the idea of ​​the metaverse of the future.

The digital parallel world should consist of many universes and unite several digital worlds. Basically, the metaverse turns the Internet into real space, a space that can be experienced and experienced with its own rules.

With increasingly lighter and more powerful VR glasses and servers for virtual environments that can be used by thousands of people, the metaverse is no longer just a vision or an obsession with Mark Zuckerberg.

Blockchain technology enables digital money, from which users can buy virtual objects that they can take with them to the various metaverse.

This is exactly where blockchain, NFT, and metaverse merge into one universe, a space filled with investors and visionaries. They all have a commercial interest in the metaverse and want to make some money.

First and foremost, now also Facebook, precisely the scandalous company that is less interested in an open Internet for everyone.

In any case, the crypto sector is keeping a very close eye on the latest reports about a metaverse, because the necessary technologies such as tokenization, DLT, or smart contracts already exist.

The future could look like this that there are open Internet services that are just as autonomous as Bitcoin or Ethereum. With tokenized governance systems, the user becomes part of the team and has a say in the metaverse.

With microtransactions, for example on the IOTA tangle, users could generate a wide variety of income streams and be rewarded for their work in the Metaverse.

However, privacy is also protected through the use of DLT and is less prone to abuse than a centralized metaverse from Facebook, for example.

The infrastructure should not come from a single or a few corporations, but a free market for innovation and growth should emerge. The metaverse could lead to a new dynamic in which DeFi, for example, is also establishing itself.

In the end, free markets also mean opportunities and freedoms for users. So it would be good if the metaverse could take these basic ideas into account.

In the end, however, we users are the ones who can decide for or against a centralized metaverse.

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Edwarda Hayes

My name is Edward Hayes, and I am an author on medium.com. I have cultivated a strong passion and knowledge for everything within the remote work realm.