Why and How Crypto Will Rule Metaverse
Rabindra Ratan, Associate Professor of Media and Information, Michigan State University, and Dar Meshi, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, Michigan State University.
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You may think the metaverse will be a bunch of interconnected virtual spaces – the world wide web but accessed through virtual reality. This is largely correct, but there is also a fundamental but slightly more cryptic side to the metaverse that will set it apart from today’s internet: the blockchain.
In the beginning, Web 1 was the information superhighway of connected computers and servers that you could search, explore and inhabit, usually through a centralized company’s platform – for example, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Around the turn of the millennium, Web 2 came to be characterized by social networking sites, blogging, and the monetization of user data for advertising by the centralized gatekeepers to “free” social media platforms, including Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, and TikTok.
Web 3 will be the foundation for the metaverse. It will consist of blockchain-enabled decentralized applications that support an economy of user-owned cryptoassets and data.
Blockchain? Decentralized? Cryptoassets? As researchers who study social media and media technology, we can explain the technology that will make the metaverse possible.
Blockchain is a technology that permanently records transactions, typically in a decentralized and public database called a ledger. Bitcoin is the most well-known blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Every time you buy some bitcoin, for example, that transaction gets recorded to the Bitcoin blockchain, which means the record is distributed to thousands of individual computers around the world.
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