Happy Sunday From The Metaverse Cat 😺😽 (just found out now xD)
The new charcter, which help you to understand Metaverse Communities and Characters.
Start with the basics
Learn more about Fintech & Web3 if you are not familiar with it yet.
What does Metaverse is?
Let’s learn with the Metaverse Cat…
Metaverse (Open) vs. Virtual World (Closed)
In futurism & science fiction, the metaverse is a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal and immersive virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets. A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connections.
The term “metaverse” originated in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, as a blend of words of “meta” and “universe”. Metaverse development is often linked to advancing virtual reality technology due to increasing demands for social immersion. Recent interest in metaverse development is influenced by Web3, a concept for a decentralized iteration of the internet.
Web3 and metaverse have been used as buzzwords to exaggerate development progress of various related technologies and projects for public relations purposes according to Wikipedia.
In essence we speak about the evolution of the internet in further ways to “be more social, immersive, and far more economically sophisticated than what exists today”.
Metaverse key characteristics:
- decentralized,
- generous with property rights and new frontiers,
- interoperable,
- open, and
- owned by the communities that build and maintain it
Virtual world key characteristics:
- familiar to many people today: centralized,
- closed,
- subject to the whims of corporations; and
- often extracts painful economic rents from its creators, contributors, and inhabitants.
How does an open metaverse looks like?
- It is decentralized,
- allows users to control identity, enforces property rights, aligns incentives, and ensures value accrues to users (not platforms),
- transparent, permissionless, interoperable, and composable (others can freely build within and across metaverses), among other criteria.
Achieving “true” metaverse requires 7 essential ingredients:
- Decentralization
- Intellectual property rights
- Self-sovereign identity
- Composability
- Social Immersion
- Openness/open source
- Community ownership
Builders, creators, investors, and users use to cooperate and strive for a common good.
This miracle of coordination — not possible without the advent of crypto & blockchains — is orchestrated through the ownership of tokens, the native assets of networks.
Beyond the technological advancements created by decentralization, the philosophical implications of a community-owned space is crucial to the success of the metaverse. Across web3, participants in decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, have taken this principle to heart.
The next iteration of DAOs is emerging around creative communities, to enable crowdsourced creativity and coordination (aka “creator DAOs” and similar).
Metaverse does not have to exist in VR/AR, all that’s necessary for a metaverse to exist is social immersion in the broad sense. What’s more important than hardware is type of activities metaverses enable. They will let people remotely hang out, work together, mingle with friends, and have fun, much like they do using Discord, Twitter Spaces, or Clubhouse today.
Property rights, self-sovereignty, community ownership — metaverses can enable people to make a living, engage in business, and attain status. In a typical knowledge worker’s workplace, people collaborate using tools like Slack, while outside the traditional corporate world in the bottom-up organizational movement of DAOs, Discord and Telegram prevail.
Coomunities & Characters
Two ways how communities and characters can form
Communities can form around character creation like I did now in the case of our little Metaverse Cat, whom I have found out to be able to easier explain what Metaverse is; not just creators. Famous characters are for example: Crypto Punks.
Another path to community-owned characters starts with a specific character for example Aku, that already comes with a backstory & identity that inspires the creation of NFTs, then enables a community of collectors to participate in its evolution.
- Those communities can collaborate & bootstrap these characters toward a mainstream audience.
- Communities can innovate on their IP.
- Establish digital identities around them,
- Financially benefit from a character’s market success.
In both of the pathways outlined above NFTs serve as a powerful tool for an artist to test market demand for early representations of their characters. In a sense of the followings:
- audition,
- minimal viable product (MVP),
- pre- “character-market fit” for their creative vision in which the early collectors of the NFT are indicators that the style, attributes, and messaging of the art could appeal to a broader audience.
If there is enough market demand for that character — enough that individuals are willing to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to collect those NFTs — then the creator knows that there is “skin in the character,” and in the game too.
Once the NFTs can sustain a community of passionate early collectors who have skin in the character, the challenge becomes how to grow that community, evolve the character, and distribute it to a broad audience across mainstream media platforms. NFTs and DAOs offer a path forward.
A metaverse cannot exist without the fundamental foundations of web3 tech.
- Openness and decentralization are pillars on which the whole rests.
- Property rights rely on decentralization.
- Community ownership prevents unilateral control of the system.
- The approach also support open standards, which are helpful for decentralizing and composability, a closely related property downstream of interoperability.
Decentralization web3 builders: principles, models, how?
We’ve seen specific categories such as
- decentralized finance (“DeFi”) and core infrastructure projects take off, and
- will soon see decentralized versions of existing web2 categories like social media, video games, music, and marketplaces.
The success of these systems will depend on their ability to deliver the actual benefits of decentralization, including more equitable ownership among stakeholders, reduced censorship, and greater diversity. The more familiar models of decentralization used for DeFi won’t necessarily work for these more complex systems.
Specific models and principles of decentralization
(1) The design challenges of web3 decentralization lies in technical, economic and legal decentralization.
(2) How the components of web3 systems can be used to achieve decentralization?
- Blockchain networks and smart contract protocols: enabling transparency, being open-source public goods, llowing data portability, mobility, and interoperability
- prioritizing composability — elements programmed to interact with each other, making these programs like building blocks that anyone can use.
- Digital assets: Intrinsic & Extrinsic incentives
- Decentralized governance: start with what the DAO is, SubDAOs. Governance minimization. Incentivize participation. Progressive decentralization.
(3) Models of decentralization in practice
- Full decentralization: How to decentralize DeFi and other simple applications, the limitations of full decentralization
- Open decentralization: How to decentralize complex web3 applications. Initial & Ongoing Incentives: one example for the latter in DeFi is Liquity Protocol.
- Web3 versions of web2: Web3 gaming, Web3 social media, Web3 marketplaces
- Progressive open decentralization
- Open decentralization: How to decentralize projects with IP (and third-party resources)
- Open decentralization: How to decentralize NFT projects
- Open decentralization: How to decentralize tokenization protocols
Interested to build a Metaverse World?
Write an e-mail as Metaverse Cat can help with a contact. Let us know.
