Are we in the metaverse yet?
The biggest ideas in tech often lurch into the lexicon before they are truly coherent. Jargon appears out of nowhere, underexplained and overused: the internet of things, the sharing economy, the cloud. In some rare cases, the terminology sticks. A lot of people talk a lot about a lot of loosely related things, and then those things merge into a single semi-comprehensible thing. Then we live our lives within that thing forever. Get ready for the metaverse.  The term comes from digital antiquity: Coined by writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash, then reimagined as the Oasis in the Ernest Cline novel Ready Player One, it refers to a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the analog one in which we live. In fiction, a utopian metaverse may be portrayed as a new frontier where social norms and value systems can be written anew, freed from cultural and economic sclerosis. But more often metaverses are a bit dystopian  virtual refuges from a fallen world. As a buzzword, the metaverse refers to a variety of virtual experiences, environments and assets that gained momentum during the online-everything shift of the pandemic. Together, these new technologies hint at what the internet will become next. Video games like Roblox and Fortnite and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in which players can build their own worlds, have metaverse tendencies, as does most social media. If you own a nonfungible token or even just some crypto, youre part of the metaversal experience. Virtual and augmented reality are, at a minimum, metaverse adjacent. If youve attended a work meeting or a party using a digital avatar, youre treading into the neighborhood of metaversality. Founders, investors, futurists and executives have all tried to stake their claim in the metaverse, expounding on its potential for social connection, experimentation, entertainment and, crucially, profit. Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist and prolific essayist, describes the metaverse not as a virtual world or a space, but as a sort of successor state to the mobile internet  a framework for an extremely connected life. There will be no clean Before Metaverse and After Metaverse, he writes. Instead, it will slowly emerge over time as different products, services and capabilities integrate and meld together.  Speaking to CNET in May, Mark Zuckerberg shared his own Facebook-centric view: We want to get as many people as possible to be able to experience virtual reality and be able to jump into the metaverse and to have these social experiences within that, he said, referring to the companys experimental virtual reality environment, Horizon, which he hopes people will explore using Facebooks Oculus headsets. In a June interview with VentureBeat, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, which makes computer chips, shared more of a vibe than a vision: Well be able to almost feel like were there with each other.  If all that sounds too heady, for now this might do: The metaverse is the internet, but so much more. And though it may still be in the future, if it materializes at all, it seems closer than it has ever been. A world built on blockchain  Earlier this year, in the midst of a crypto boom, the price of a currency called MANA began climbing the charts in Coinbase, a popular exchange for digital currencies. MANA is the currency of a virtual world called Decentraland, where in March plots of digital land were going for the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars. (After two years bouncing around 10 cents, MANA briefly broke $1.60 in April, pushing the combined value of all the tokens past $2.4 billion.) By size, Decentraland is more of a commune  as of July, just a few hundred people are logged in at a time, down from a March peak in the low thousands  made up of user-generated NFTs. Its creators have described the platform less as a place than as infrastructure upon which to build a place. (Decentralands currency and land contracts run on the Ethereum blockchain.) Denizens of Decentraland are constantly creating scenes and experiences for other users, like concerts and art exhibits. There are casinos where you can gamble in MANA, with croupiers who are paid in MANA to show up for work. The sense that Decentraland is a work in progress pervades the sparsely populated grid of half-developed plots and themed zones. Speculators seem less confused; after all, Decentraland is first and foremost an experiment in scarce digital property. This month, Republic Realm, which calls itself a digital real estate firm, purchased an NFT of a 259-parcel virtual estate in Decentraland for more than 1.2 million MANA, or, at contemporaneous exchange rates, more than $900,000.