LONDON (Bywire News) - The metaverse is Mark Zuckerberg’s big plan to dominate web 3.0, but Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is less than convinced. Despite the concept remaining undefined, he said, corporations like Facebook will struggle to emerge as dominators.
In the early hours of Sunday, Vitalik expressed his opinions on where the Metaverse space could be headed next. While he believes the Metaverse “is going to happen” he doesn’t think that “any of the existing corporate attempts to intentionally create the metaverse are going anywhere”.
Large corporations have been keen to get in on the act in the Metaverse. The most obvious is the rebranding of Facebook’s parent company to Meta – done, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg, to demonstrate their commitment to embracing the “Metaverse”.
Vitalik, though, is unconvinced about Meta’s efforts so far. “Anything Facebook creates now will misfire,” he tweeted, arguing that Metaverse companies will fail due to the fact that “it’s far too early to know what people actually want.”
It is no surprise to see Vitalik speaking on the matter as he has often used his Twitter to voice his opinions on how impactful decentralisation could be and it's potential for Ethereum. He has also commented on NFTs but has rarely commented on the Metaverse.
The metaverse is widely referred to as the “next-generation internet” that will allow users to play, work and connect through virtual realities. Even so, considerable doubt remains about what it will actually look like.
It is widely believed that the metaverse will include elements of augmented reality, virtual reality and blockchain as a whole.
Games like Fortnite and RuneScape have been held up as examples of what Metaverse worlds could look like with blockchain-native projects like Decentraland and The Sandbox emerging at the forefront of the Metaverse space.
Decentraland and The Sandbox both let players own digital land plots and explore the virtual world by incorporating their own tokens and NFTs representing in-game items or characters.
Companies like Adidas and Coco-Cola have also been acquiring digital land and dropping NFTs. Arguably, the metaverse hype peaked in October following the announcement that Meta had planned to explore the space with a range of features such as supporting NFTs on Facebook and Instagram.
Zuckerberg said that the company's Metaverse arm, Reality Labs, would invest $10 billion into the space following a later report of an 11-figure 2021 loss. 2022 has been no better with Meta revealing its first revenue drop and a $2.8 billion loss on Reality Labs in the second-quarter earnings report.
(Writing by Samba Jallow, editing by Tom Cropper and Klaudia Fior)