Thursday 09 December 2021 1:04 pm

The metaverse allows us to embrace ch-ch-changes

By: Crypto AM: Mixing in the Metaverse with Dr Chris Kacher

Some of you may recognize these lyrics…

And these children that you spit on,

As they try to change their worlds,

Are immune to your consultations,

They’re quite aware of what they’re goin’ through.

– David Bowie ‘Changes’

The newer generations are far more likely to agree with Bowie’s lyrics. Already a number of under 25s have become nearly overnight millionaires by trading NFTs and crypto, getting in at near zero entry prices then seeing the price soar into the five, six and seven-figure levels such as in the case of the CryptoPunks NFTs which were offered for free in 2017. Vitalik Buterin was just 18 years old when he created Ethereum. Recent accounts of young teens trading their crypto accounts into the millions in the UK underscore this point.

Crypto addresses most all markets as it is about removing gatekeepers while providing a more efficient, egalitarian digital economy. Crypto infuses value into the web’s vast networks of information, people, goods, and services. Massive cost reductions and soaring efficiencies are the result. Digital is eating the world.

Learn-to-Earn (L2E) Spawned from Play-to-Earn (P2E)

Ultimately, crypto will create new economies and jobs via gaming such as play-to-earn (P2E) which is just the beginning thus is the reason I put what I consider some of the best crypto companies for gaming on the crypto list which have been soaring including SAND, TLM, ENJ, MANA, ILV, and UFO.

The next iteration from P2E will be what I call L2E “learn to earn” as in one earns by learning and will result in uncensorable social organisations. NFTs are the platform that will facilitate L2E thus will revolutionize education. Already, NFT tokens are being created for specific courses. One buys the NFT token as the cost of tuition. Then as one possibility, if one performs sufficiently well on the final exam on a timed basis and set by a curve, they then recoup part or all of the cost of the original NFT token.

Additional tokens can be awarded to top performers on a sliding scale, or awarded if a student then teaches what he has learned to others by conducting peer learning workshops or running interest-based clubs. Everything is recorded on-chain, so it’s easy for your peers (or anyone) to verify that you did those things.

Another project – Genopets – is pioneering what’s called ‘move-to-earn’ gaming. Just as with Pokemon Go which required the player to move in ‘meatspace’ to capture Pokemon, Genopets monitors how active you are in the real world. It integrates P2E economics so you can earn crypto in the game. Your activity is captured through a wearable device like a Fitbit or Oura which earns you QI, the in-game currency. You can then use QI to buy food and clothes for your Genopet. With your permission, your health data is anonymized and sent to medical researchers to aid in their research.

The symbiosis brought to economics, jobs, healthcare, education, and fitness among other facets by way of the metaverse and gaming is nothing short of remarkable.

CryptoFuture

The future of crypto will oscillate between the metaverse (digital worlds) and IRL (in real life) with a blurring border. Given enough time, nation-states will become decentralised communal states. Marketing will shift a big portion of ad spend from IRL brands to the metaverse. Real estate will be tokenized and include IRL and digital real estate. This is why Sandbox (SAND) and Decentraland (MANA) have skyrocketed. Entertainment will include gaming (P2E, L2E, etc), sports events, concerts, art (traditional and NFTs), and media (shows, music, movies, television, etc).

The cryptospace brings endless open source possibilities along with digital scarcity. Ethereum et al address a $400 trillion+ market spread across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, the metaverse, and DAOs. Ethereum has already flipped Bitcoin if you look at the number of users, use cases, devs, transactions, and applications built on its blockchain. But Bitcoin’s liquid, lightning, taproot, and other evolutions should be carefully watched as Bitcoin’s network effect still towers over the rest of crypto. Bitcoin’s devs aim to provide a platform that would make Ethereum redundant.

Layer 1s: zkRollups

Indeed, the race is on. But with zkRollups, execution, settlement, and data availability (E, S, DA) are the three main metrics that will put to rest the layer 1 debate. Users will exclusively use E layers, while S & DA layers will be infrastructural under-the-hood. The future is multi-layered. Twitter’s @epolynya predicts:

~1,000 execution layers (rollups, volitions, validiums)
~100 data availability layers (data sharding, decentralised committees)
~10 settlement layers (maximally secure, sustainable & decentralised)

“Specialised execution layers like rollups bring >100x computational efficiency, 10x-100x data compression. DA layers increase throughput with greater decentralization, parallelize ~1,000x. 1,000,000x more efficient than L1s long term. To put it another way, if the blockchain industry was multi-chain w/ many L1s, it would be a fragmented mess: horrible UX & heavily crippled scalability. With a modular, multi-layered approach, we’ll have far superior UX, and ~infinitely higher TPS. Only way to globally scale. The era of monolithic blockchains (L1s) is ending.”

If there are to be 10 settlement layers, ETH and SOL should potentially be at the top. Ethereum is uniquely positioned to offer the highest security, decentralisation, and data availability making it the defacto standard host for rollups. Rollups + data shards in tandem increase the overall capacity of the Ethereum ecosystem by several orders of magnitude more than the previous sharding solution. If there’s a competitor that offers better security and data availability than Ethereum which is doubtful at this time, then rollups will be well incentivised to migrate. Meanwhile, other crypto technologies will emerge and build on whichever blockchain or blockchains provide the best utility, security, and cost while big strides are made into solving the trilemma of scalability, decentralisation, and security.

The metaverse is in good hands. Watch this space.

(͡:B ͜ʖ ͡:B)

Dr Chris Kacher, bestselling author/top 40 charted musician/PhD nuclear physics UC Berkeley/Record breaking audited accts: stocks+crypto/blockchain fintech specialist. Co-founder of Virtue of Selfish Investing, TriQuantum Technologies, and Hanse Digital Access. Dr. Kacher bought his first Bitcoin at just over $10 in January-2013 and participated in early Ethereum dev meetings in London hosted by Vitalik Buterin. His metrics have called every major top & bottom in bitcoin since 2011. He was up in 2018 vs the median performing crypto hedge fund at -46% (PwC) and is up quadruple digit percentages since 2019 as capital is force fed into the top performing alt coins while weaker ones are sold.