NFT Trades are increasing day by day as the more and more general public gets involved with them. For anyone unfamiliar with NFT, NFTs stand for non-fungible tokens which are essentially like certificates, which link the assets with the owner. It can be used as a validation of the ownership of an asset.
There are many advantages of owning/investing in an NFT, like
- No middlemen and hence ensures maximum profit to the artist.
- It is easily accessible and requires not a lot of connections
- The NFTs can work as appreciating assets and hence can prove to be a good passive income source.
There also lie many investment opportunities in the form of NFT. The most popular forms of earning an income through NFTs are,
- Reselling the asset when it appreciates
- Staking the NFT
- Lending the digital asset for someone to use, like game equipment.
- Investing in NFT marketplace tokens.
- Generation of passive income streams through trades aided with smart contracts.
This has increased the adoption of NFTs by many industries and many application of it has been developed. One of the most important and well-known application/use cases of an NFT is Metaverse.
What Is Metaverse?
We have been a part of web 2.0 till now, where we used to socialize using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube where we can read as while as write data as compared to only read data in web 1.0. Now we are entering web 3.0, which is interoperable. Metaverse is a big part of web 3.0.
A metaverse is a virtual universe working according to a set number of rules and regulations. In the universe, players can interact with each other by using their avatars and can talk, express emotions, move, and do many more things, without having to do anything in the physical world. Consider the example of any online game nowadays like fortnight or GTA, where players communicate with each other and play. GTA 5 has become one of the best online games, cause it allows the players to do absolutely anything by collaborating with other players.
Even Fortnite has played a huge part in this. Recently a report stated that players have invested more than 10.4 million years of their cumulative time playing Fortnite.
This engagement of players with the game is a cause of the structure of the game which allows interaction with other players. The application truly seems to be infinite. Recently, Travis Scott had a full virtual concert in Fortnite, which was watched and experienced by millions.
This metaverse phenomenon can be understood well by taking the example of Ready Player One movie, where characters used to interact with each other virtually by using V.R sets, and that would impact physical real life in some way.
Exploiting this technology, many developers have developed an application that works well in a metaverse. The popular examples are NFT games like, upland, decentraland, Facebook Horizon, etc. which have universes of their own, where players can interact with each other.
Upland and Decentraland are two online NFT games/play-to-earn games that have metaverses of their own and in which players can interact with each other to carry out the transaction. Upland has a metaverse that is identical to our earth including aspects like in-game time, and addresses of land. The players can interact with each other via discord and using their characters and can buy real estate in the virtual world having the same address as that of the real world.
Even Facebook, with its Facebook Horizon, is trying to create a metaverse similar but better than Sims city. In Facebook’s Horizon, players will be able to interact with each other by communicating with speech and movement. Facebook will probably use their virtual reality headset Occulus for an immersive experience for the players in the metaverse.
This helps us envision a future in which, real estate transactions like transfers or sales can be done online in the metaverse, such that even in the physical world the changes would take place, and in the real world, the real estate will be owned by the buyer. The transaction will be super fast, secure, easy, and can be done at the comfort of your home. That is why NFT metaverse is getting such a push and that’s why it grew so much during the covid lockdown, as the transactions were happening online in a decentralized manner and by expending less amount of time and effort.
NFT and Metaverse?
The great thing about metaverse is that it can be connected to multiple metaverses and hence share data and resources with each of them efficiently. Since all these applications are developed on blockchain technology and many of them are interconnected by decentralized applications and services, the assets can be effectively traded and used within each other.
Some of the examples of services whose utility is connecting to different metaverses are getting the popular cause of the interoperability they offer. One of the examples of such trending services is the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). With you investing in it, you are not only buying the Bored Apec NFT- a unique digital collectible but also it double to be yacht club membership, grants access to members-only benefits, and will have many more perks to it with time.
Metakey is also one of such services which helps involvement with multiple metaverses. It acts as a single key to access multiple metaverses and then transfer one NFT asset to another and use it in the other metaverse. One of the examples of the application of Meta key and its application of metaverse is Decentraland. For us to access a place in Decentraland, Justin Lou’s art pieces are essential. Now imagine using a weapon from one game to another, using the skin of one game to another, use vehicles from one service into another, using a Meebit character from one game to another, this is all possible due to services like Meta key.
