Today, digital assets related to the metaverse are on the rise.
The prices of crypto metaverse tokens are soaring as much as 100% in the wake of Thursday’s news that Facebook was rebranding to ‘Meta’ in a bid to “bring the metaverse to life”.
MANA, the token powering the browser-based video game Decentraland–a kind of hybrid of Minecraft and Second Life–is currently trading for $3.39, up 100% from yesterday.
SAND, the native token for The Sandbox, a community-driven metaverse where users can make their own NFT gaming worlds, has rallied 35% since yesterday.
SAND hit an all-time high of $2.41 in the early hours of the morning UTC before retreating 30% to its current price of $1.73.
The Metaverse Index token, a tokenized index fund that tracks the price of top metaverse tokens, climbed 20% overnight and 50% in the past week, according to data taken from Zerion.
The Metaverse Index token is priced according to the values of several underlying tokens that are linked to metaverse products, including SAND, MANA, and AXS–the native token for the Pokémon-styled blockchain game Axie Infinity–the price of which sunk 11% overnight to hit $136.
What is the Metaverse?
Facebook’s (now Meta’s) announcement on Thursday was a clear indication that the company wants to establish itself as one of the leading developers in the metaverse, but the’metaverse’ isn’t a Facebook invention.
The metaverse is a new version of the internet in which the two-dimensional surfaces of today’s web have been replaced by immersive 3D virtual reality environments.
In its keynote address, Facebook proposed a metaverse for social interaction and commerce. Meeting and exercise rooms are examples of virtual environments. Recreation could include 3D online shopping, gaming, or live music events.
Given that the crypto community has pioneered both fungible and non-fungible digital assets and embedded them in 3D open-world contexts such as Decentraland and The Sandbox, it’s natural to expect crypto to play a significant role in the metaverse in the future. The role of NFTs in Facebook’s metaverse designs was acknowledged in the company’s keynote.
However, in a YouTube keynote address, John Carmack, the CTO of Facebook’s VR hardware arm Oculus, clarified that crypto’s inclusion in Facebook’s metaverse will most likely be limited.
The crypto community generally views the metaverse as a collection of interoperable online protocols, with blockchain serving as the technology that enables all of this. Some believe that Facebook’s attempt to create the metaverse on its own contradicts this vision. Nonetheless, since Thursday’s announcement, investors have been placing large bets on the metaverse. It makes no difference whether Meta believes in cryptocurrency or not. The point is that the metaverse is now a buzzword in the tech world, which means that cryptocurrency will almost certainly play a role in some capacity.
