META: The Metaverse Of NFT

A few short months ago, Facebook came out to the world with a shocking announcement. Facebook, the company said, would no longer be called Facebook. Instead, it would be called something else — it would be called Meta and would be focusing all its energies on building something called the Metaverse.

In the few short months since then, the NFT market has exploded as people are starting to see a clear use case for their non-fungible tokens. They will now be property in the Metaverse.

To the uninitiated, Facebook’s decision to upend years of branding around its iconic name and logo, Facebook, sounded like a strange decision. After all, Facebook is a perfectly good name and had a perfectly good logo — even if a bit boring. Why would anyone want to change it?

But people like that were in for a bigger shock as they soon learned that, not only was Facebook changing its name to Meta, but the name change also signaled how important other changes in the company were.

For one, the company had decided that its social media-based ad business was going to take a new turn and believed that the technology to facilitate that turn was already available.

According to Zuckerberg, Facebook would now be investing a bulk of its time and resources (with a pledge of investing around ten billion dollars a year) into the metaverse, which is the internet, but in 3D.

The Metaverse is essentially a shared online 3D virtual space that Facebook (or sorry, Meta) believes will be the future of the internet and the future of connecting people. The attempt by Zuckerberg to change the name of his company to Meta was a result of Meta trying to own that future shared 3D online universe.

As Zuckerberg said when the change was announced, the company wanted to be seen as the metaverse company, and nothing else.

It’s usually so difficult to predict the future of technology. For example, who knew, in 2004, that Facebook would, in less than twenty years, be worth a trillion dollars? Who knew that TikTok would reach a billion users faster than any other social media network in history? No, one.

However, the metaverse presents a rare opportunity for us to accurately predict the future. Whether we like it or not, the metaverse will be a huge deal in the next decade. We don’t know how much of a deal it will be, but it will certainly be a part of our lives. The only question now is what that metaverse will look like because it’s certainly coming.

The nature of the relationship between the Metaverse and NFTs is relatively simple to grasp. It will be an online 3D space where everything and anything — including people, will be virtual.

And if we are going to have virtual characters, we will need virtual property. That’s precisely where NFTs are poised to come in.

Ever since the explosion of the NFT market, detractors have posed an important question. While that question has come in many shapes and forms, a central element to it is this; what can NFTs be used for?

It’s not uncommon to find people, today, who think that any NFT is rendered useless by a screenshot and that paying thousands, or even millions, for a token, is essentially paying for a few kilobytes of data that anyone can reproduce by simply pressing the screenshot button.

While there have been constructive rebuttals to that argument, the biggest rebuttal is perhaps the existence of the Metaverse. In the Metaverse, you won’t just be able to screenshot a token and then own it.

In the Metaverse, you’ll need to have the NFT to own real estate or assets. And this isn’t just some prediction — it’s already happening. There are already certain applications that require users to buy and own “lands” — which are just NFTs that give you the occupancy of a virtual space in virtual reality.

Asides from that, many of these NFTs confer certain rights to their owners. Some of these rights include community access, the right of first refusal to certain offers, and even rights to things as basic as merchandise.

There are already blockchain games that require you to own NFT avatars — that is, avatars that can be used by you and you alone, recorded on the blockchain, and backed by an NFT.

It’s little wonder the NFT industry saw its highest expansion in 2021. In 2020, the total value of all NFT sales was around 100 million dollars. By 2021, that number had more than quadrupled and was now around 23 billion dollars.

The growth of NFTs and the creation of the Metaverse also have telling implications for the future of cryptocurrencies. Most NFTs exist on the Ethereum blockchain, and this influx of investments into the NFTs is currently ballooning not only the adoption of Eth as a means of making financial transactions but also the price of the coin.

As companies continue to invest money in building the Metaverse, NFT adoption will only continue to grow, as use cases for NFTs are almost limitless in the Metaverse. There are already brands and creators working on creating NFTs for fashion items that can be worn in the Metaverse. There are even already shoes backed by NFTs.

The surest way to know that the Metaverse of NFTs is the future of the internet is to look at how much work and resources the biggest corporations of today are putting into it.

Facebook has already set the pace, but other companies like Walmart and Twitter are already throwing their hats in the NFT ring. It’s still early days, but it’s already clear that NFTs will have an extraordinary role to play on the internet of the future.