By: André Jerusalem

One of the most notable events of 2021 was the change in Facebook's name, which became “Meta”. This change was not a mere fad (or opportunism) due to the growth of projects focused on the virtual environment that has come to be called the metaverse, but rather the result of years of work and investment in technologies that allow users to immerse themselves even more in an online life.  

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

  In case 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 in Decentraland and decides to gather some people she met virtually in that apartment. To receive 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 for which she paid 0.1 Ethereum. On the walls of her digital home there are also some digital works, but to impress the guests, in the center of the room she made available her most expensive work, an NFT of Bored Ape Yacht Club which she purchased for 10 Ethereums (equivalent, in 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 draw another parallel: During web 1.0, people were trying to understand how the then new language worked and the exchange of emails was a great innovation, causing large digital oligopolies such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple to emerge in a short time, and the Internet became, literally, priceless. In the “Web 2.0” generation, the movement to value the Internet became even more intense and the companies called “FAANG” (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) became great powers.  

 It is difficult to predict the extent to which the The metaverse will have, but in a world where millions of people were born as digital natives, that is, they have as a natural coexistence with digital means of communication, payment and entertainment, it is possible that we will soon have exclusively digital living spaces, 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 at the end of 2021, that he believes that in two or three years most virtual meetings will no longer be two-dimensional, Zoom-style, and will become three-dimensional. 

  One relevant point is that the metaverse economy will be based on cryptocurrencies, which are the backbone that will support not only the accumulation of wealth, but also the functioning of the systems themselves, always based on the 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. In addition, new professions, such as digital real estate brokers, NFT stylists and tokenization consultants will emerge due to new market demands, and those who are aware of such demands and anticipate new challenges will have a great competitive advantage over those who do not follow this development.