Metaverse Creates Business Opportunities and Trillion Dollar Market

By: André Jerusalem

One of the most striking facts of 2021 was the change of Facebook’s name, which was renamed “Meta”. This change was not a mere fad (or opportunism) due to the growth of projects focused on the virtual environment that is conventionally called the metaverse, but rather the result of years of work and investment in technologies that allow the user to immerse themselves even more in a life online.  

To the most unsuspecting readers, it is important to highlight that metaverse is not a simplistic concept in which users will have an immersive virtual experience along the lines of “The Sims” or “Second Life” games, but rather a complex parallel reality, in which acts of life everyday life such as buying a property or a work of art will be done completely digitally. This kind of multifaceted and decentralized online reality is being called Web 3.0., however, to facilitate the understanding of the differences between what Web 3.0 is and Webs 1.0 and 2.0, below is a comparison between these universes: 

  If the concept of metaverse and web 3.0 is still not clear, let's try to give an example: Imagine that a certain user has an apartment on Decentraland and decides to bring together some people she met virtually in that apartment. To welcome her guests, she will use virtual reality glasses made by Oculus and her digital avatar will wear a combination of clothes made in NFT by Stella Mccartney that she paid 0,1 Ethereum. On the walls of her digital home there are also some digital works, but to impress guests, in the center of the room she made her most expensive work available, an NFT from Bored Ape Yacht Club which she purchased for 10 Ethereums (equivalent, as of January 2022, to US$32.000,00).  

 It is possible that even after the explanation and examples above, understanding what the metaverse means is still somewhat nebulous, so we will make one more parallel: During web 1.0, people were trying to understand how the then new language worked and exchanging emails was a major innovation, meaning that in Before long, large digital oligopolies such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple emerged, and the Internet became, literally, invaluable. In the “Web 2.0” generation, the movement towards valuing the internet became even more intense and companies called “FAANG” (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) became great powers.  

 It is difficult to predict the extent of the metaverse will have, however, in a world in which millions of people were born as digital natives, that is, they have as a natural thing to coexist with digital means of communication, payment and entertainment, it is possible that we will very soon have spaces for coexistence exclusively digital, in which several companies will have more remote employees (or rather, in the metaverse), than physically in offices. Bill Gates himself stated, in an article closing the year 2021, that he believes that in two or three years most virtual meetings will stop being two-dimensional, Zoom-style, and will become three-dimensional. 

  A relevant point is that the metaverse's economy will be based on cryptocurrencies, with them being the backbone that will support not only the accumulation of wealth, but also the functioning of the systems themselves, always based on blockchain. Several brands, including luxury brands such as Nike, Adidas and Gucci, are already developing products (in NFTs), with digital assets that will fill the metaverse. Furthermore, new professions, such as digital real estate brokers, NFT stylists and tokenization consultants, will emerge due to new market demands, and anyone who is aware of such demands and anticipates new challenges will have a great competitive advantage in relation to to those who do not follow this development.