Need Metaverse blockchain to ensure widespread use?
Many are excited about the prospect of Metaverse with its virtual worlds that can be used to play online games, but also to train surgeons on 3D body models and enable students to visit recreated villages in ancient Greece that are amazingly vibrant.
Many also assume that blockchain technology will play a key role in Metaverse, along with other new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR). But is the use of blockchain really a matter of course?
Stanford University professor Jeremy Bailenson recently moderated a World Economic Forum panel with some of the world’s leading thinkers of Metaverse and blockchain. “The first question asked to the panel was ‘Do we need the blockchain for the meta-verse?'” Bailenson, founder of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, told Cointelegraph. “The consensus was that Metaverse could exist without a blockchain.”
As an example, Bailenson offered metaverse pioneer Second Life, founded in 2003, which has 70 million current registered accounts and adds an additional 350,000 new accounts each month to its online multimedia platform. Second Life has developed “a robust economy where digital assets are bought and sold,” Bailenson said. “The typical GDP for Second Life is about half a billion dollars every year. And the world is running robustly without using the blockchain. “
“Can the next iteration of the internet exist without blockchain technology?” asked Tonya Evans, a professor at Penn State University’s Dickinson Law School. “Yes, it can,” she told the Cointelegraph. After all, distributed decentralized ledgers and cryptographically secured assets – including smart contracts – are just one part of Web3 technology, along with AI, 3D printing, VR, augmented reality, the Internet of Things (IoT) and others.
Exclude it at your own risk
But omitting blockchain technology, even if it is possible, can still be a mistake. “Metaverse without blockchains would probably just promote the ball for Big Tech,” Evans added, and it would go to the detriment of the same people left behind by Web2 – “the same people that a truly decentralized network would empower.”
Yonatan Raz-Fridman, founder and CEO of SuperSocial – which develops games for Metaverse – agreed that blockchain technology is not absolutely necessary. “No, you do not need a blockchain to activate Metaverse,” he told Cointelegraph. There is nobody a priori the reason why avatars can not be made in 3D and games are played with closed platforms, such as Second Lifes.
But Web3 is undoubtedly a reaction against the FAMGA companies – Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon – with their privately owned platforms, and Raz-Fridman predicted that companies like Meta will have to compromise on the issue of interoperability if they expect to participate. This means that avatars can travel freely from one Metaverse project to another – along with all their digital clothing and jewelry. As NYU Marketing Professor Scott Galloway recently put it:
«Why buy clothes if you can not use them out of the store? Why buy a Birkin bag if you can not display it in Metaverse? »
Consumers now demand a Web3 / Metaverse more like the one depicted in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow crashadded Raz-Fridman, “where everyone owns their digital assets and has the freedom to take them with them when they move from one place to another.”
Interestingly, the author Stephenson is himself the co-founder of a recently launched metaverse project Lamina1, “which will use blockchain technology to build an ‘open metaverse’ – one that is open source and decentralized,” the Washington Post reported.
All about people, places and things
The meta-verse is an elusive concept – different parties define it differently. However, most agree that it involves immersive three-dimensional virtual worlds with many games and role-playing games. Bailenson, for his part, finds it useful to break Metaverset into people, places, and things. In each of these areas, he sees a potential role for blockchain technology.
“Human beings are avatars, the bodies we wear while immersed in the digital world, “he explained to Cointelegraph. Here, blockchain technology can provide “crypto-DNA” that “ensures a one-to-one mapping of person to avatar.” For example, it can be used to guarantee that a person cannot inhabit ten avatars at the same time, or to allow someone else to “take my own avatar on a trip.” Add Bailenson:
“Although an obvious use of blockchain would be to verify clothing and jewelry for an avatar, I have always believed that the killer app here documents and verifies human animations.”
Places, in Bailenson’s view, are set areas in a grid of a virtual world. For Metaverse to work, a world “must be sustainable: it is there, even when you are not, and consistent: if you buy a plot one mile from Snoop Dog, it can not move further away based on an arbitrary re-mapping of world.” Some platforms already use blockchain technology to document these maps, he noted.
Finally, the most obvious application of blockchain technology is in Bailenson’s realm of things, which include three-dimensional models, two-dimensional images, audio files “or any digital asset that can be housed in a virtual world.” Blockchain technology can be used to verify transactions “without a centralized body monitoring the transaction” and also to ensure “that goods have unique value based on supply – one can not just make thousands of copies to counterfeit an asset.”
Need interoperability?
As things stand now, major Metaverse players and / or challengers – including Sandbox, Decentraland and the FAMGA companies – offer “very little exchange between their web platforms and other platforms,” Lik-Hang Lee, assistant professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and technology, told Cointelegraph. This lack of interoperability, characteristic of Web2, is a shortcoming that must be addressed if Metaverse is to reach its full potential. This includes at least the following elements, according to Lee:
- Anyone should be able to build a virtual world that can be connected to the rest of Metaverse;
- Any device or browser must have access to Metaverse provided it meets certain predetermined specifications;
- Ownership of digital assets should be registered and maintained across multiple servers and clients;
- A single avatar should be able to communicate with avatars on other servers;
- People should have the ability to produce, display, buy and sell their digital assets in Metaverse.
“In view of the growing number of metaverse initiatives that are incompatible with each other, it is more important than ever to build standardizing organisms,” Lee told the Cointelegraph.
However, interoperability may not be easy. Meta, Google and others “will fight hard not to lose their dominance,” said Raz-Fridman. It may also take time for the public to understand what lies in a user-owned Internet, but when they do, “consumers will demand more control.” FAMGA companies will have no choice at that time other than to give in, at least somewhat, to interoperability.
Raz-Fridman was asked why crypto people in particular seem to be so interested in Metaverse. Is it because they think it will potentially increase the use of cryptocurrency? “If you look at it historically, there has always been a struggle over the narrative – different versions of what the world should look like,” he replied.
At one extreme is the crypto-maximists who envision a decentralized, blockchain-based and open source world where people own and control the data and digital assets. Raz-Fridman has sympathy for this position, but in the end he does not think it will win overall at least. Facebook, Google and others “own a large piece of economic activity over the internet, and they will not be overthrown overnight.”
In the same way, the continuation of private, closed platforms is not realistic either. In the short term, one can expect a kind of “civilization clash” between the two visions, Raz-Fridman continued, with a possible middle ground that emerges when consumers themselves decide to what extent Metaverset is decentralized.
Meanwhile, as Metaverse evolves, Bailenson expects to see many free use of blockchain technology “where the technology works, but is not critical.” As time goes on, “however, a set of killer apps will emerge where blockchain is the only way to do the job right,” Bailenson told Cointelegraph.
All in all, a Metaverse without a blockchain is both conceivable and feasible. But, “if the goal is to democratize the Internet, not to mention accessibility, transparency, composability and platform interoperability,” Evans said, “then Metaverse must include blockchain.”
