How does Ethereum build "brick by brick" for the Metaverse?

Author: William M. Peaster

Translation: MetaCat

Typesetting: MetaCat

The ethereum metaverse is not a bad place right now, and despite the challenges, the potential for an open and interconnected metaverse powered by ethereum and NFTs remains as promising as ever. In today’s article, let’s review why the Metaverse is still Ethereum’s next frontier!

When it comes to the metaverse, I think Ethereum and related on-chain infrastructure (DeFi, NFT, L2, etc.) is one of our best means of achieving an open metaverse.

What does an open metaverse mean? Well, a full-fledged metaverse doesn’t exist yet, and neither does an open metaverse. “Open” here refers to a specific vision and set of values and corresponding technologies to build metaverse software in an open source way for the benefit of all.

This open style is in stark contrast to the closed style of traditional corporations, which are ultimately established for the benefit of shareholders and often engage in rent-seeking as much as possible political environment to increase existing wealth without creating new wealth).

Therefore, an open virtual world should be built by various rebels on different pillars, such as freedom of transaction, freedom of speech, open standards. To achieve these goals, Ethereum + L2 can serve as a neutral and effective cultural economic backbone, connecting the virtual world to the real metaverse over time.

However, Ethereum and its ilk aren’t the only things poised to play a pivotal role in the rise of the Metaverse. And of course the Internet, consider how we could see almost 3 billion people online in the next decade, or consider augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, etc. The continuous advancement of technology.

All of these threads are converging towards the popular concept of a “full-fledged” metaverse, not a single virtual world, but new and different virtual aspects of our lives, which will also be experienced virtually from many different sources. peak.

Having said that, the potential of the Metaverse and the potential of Ethereum and NFTs to contribute to its realization is as great as ever. But it’s no secret that metaverse projects in the cryptoeconomy have struggled recently. Some reasons for this are as follows:

*These virtual worlds are part of the crypto economy, which is currently in a bear market, so with liquidity drying up in the crypto space recently, most stats are down across the board for most projects.

• Most of these projects are fairly rudimentary in every way, so they haven’t gained many active users yet.
• Some of these projects have created their own virtual land crisis because their land is too much like physical land, which in turn leads to excessive speculation, high prices, hoarding, etc., which stifle community development.

Some of these problems are nothing new. For example, the Ultima Online game, launched in 1997, first experienced a virtual land crisis 25 years ago due to the huge demand for its scarce housing. For us today, the free land experiment can help in this regard, and the virtual world land tax + citizenship bonus can help in this regard, but we must understand the past to know why these avenues are worth pursuing.

Well, in my opinion, the key to the present and future of the Ethereum Metaverse project is to take stock of past problems, take stock of current successes (e.g. VRChat’s mainstream growth), take stock of where the future is headed and try to do just that.

Of course, there’s no magic wand to wave here. The metaverse won’t be built in a day, or through just one realm, it will take a lot of work and coordination going forward. There are a lot of “big picture” considerations at play for us in web3, like the three shifts ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin outlined in his blog on June 9:

Taking a closer look, these three changes are: **1) Ethereum Layer 2 expansion solution, 2) Smart contract wallet, 3) Better privacy solutions. As Buterin pointed out, these transitions have presented many challenges, and the Metaverse project is not immune and needs to evolve with others. **

The good news is that we still have a way forward. For example, Decentraland and The Sandbox have already adopted the Polygon network, and as Polygon 2.0 approaches, they are well prepared for the ongoing migration to advanced L2. Additionally, the rise of standards such as ERC-6551 and ERC-4337 will help NFT users and projects increasingly accept smart contract wallets.

Combining these advances in web3 with ongoing advances in areas such as hardware (e.g. the new Apple Vision Pro) and AI agents (e.g. AI programming, NFT owning wallets and holding NFTs and tokens, etc.), the Metaverse experience around Ethereum will become more and more impressive.