Demographics and behaviour matterResearch out of the investment bank Goldman Sachs shows that in today's modern world the average US person spends approx. 8 hours a day watching TV, playing games, or on social media.
The statistic of greatest interest is the breakdown of the demographic. Facebook is more than aware of this as it struggles to keep Gen Z users engaged and is seeing increasing competition from rivals such as Snapchat and TikTok who have seen explosive growth of late.
A new paradigmA big part of the shift to decentralised finance is also a reflection of the times with Web 2.0 being centrally owned and controlled by big tech against Web 3.0, which is democratically owned and controlled by global users.
The tantalising prospect for the future is this new paradigm allows users to own their digital assets as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), trade them with others in the game, and carry them to other digital experiences, creating an entirely new free-market internet-native economy that can be monetized in the physical world.
The crypto cloud economyGrayscale does a great job breaking down the ecosystem into a succinct way.
Payment Networks: Web 3.0 metaverse economies can use their own digital currency, like MANA, or the currency of the layer one base crypto cloud economy platform they’re built on, such as Ethereum (ETH) or Solana (SOL).
Decentralized Finance: Decentralized exchanges allow users to trade in game items while lending platforms allow users to take out loans on their virtual land.
NFT Sovereign Goods: Players can purchase NFTs from other creators and bring them into other virtual worlds to be put on display or sold.
Decentralized Governance: Legal frameworks take back control of the digital economies from centralized corporations and allow a global network of Web 3.0 metaverse users to decide the rules of their collectively owned virtual space.
Decentralized Cloud: File storage solutions such as Filecoin give Web 3.0 metaverse worlds a decentralized infrastructure solution to store data while services like Livepeer give virtual worlds decentralized video transcoding infrastructure.
Self-Sovereign Identity: Internet-native social reputation coin (“creator coins”) data from other platforms may be transferred into the Metaverse and used for identity or credit scoring.
Find out more on the history and timeline to adoption
Earlier this month I spoke to Matthew Cheung, CEO of fintech firm iPushPull about the Metaverse and Web 3.0. You can watch the full conversation by registering for the hub on the button below.
Further in-depth discussions with industry leaders on decentralised finance and Fintech feature in our
Summer Analyst Training Programme.