Towards the Void: The Universe Where Crypto and the Metaverse Meet

To a large extent, this is an article that only Alex can understand and translate with full marks in the Chinese-speaking world.

As an "old" player native to Metaverse and a young person in the real world, I write this article to tell you what Open Metaverse is and why crypto plays a vital role in it.

firstfirst, I'll tell you whyWe are decarbonizing into silicon and entering the era of "digital species", and roughly where we are in that history.

In this process, the game will be the core carrier.after,I canTalk about the origin of the Metaverse concept, and see how it has changedAfter reading this article, don't look elsewhere to see what the Metaverse is, okay.

nextnext, as an old gamer and crypto player, I will talk aboutSeveral possible characteristics of the Internet in the futureWhy crypto is a necessary tool to go to the Metaverse/Future Internet.

ThenThen, let's take a lookSeveral core driving forces in the development process of Metaverse, and why even crypto technology is so important in the digital world

, everyone still doesn't know much about crypto. Let's take a look at its possible large-scale application, unlock new business models, and talk about wealth codes.

Crypto plays a huge role in the Metaverse. This is the part that those who are optimistic about the Metaverse need to understand the most, but they don't understand it the most.It's easy to forget that it's been a while since ARPANET (the world's first operational packet-switching network developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the granddaddy of the global Internet) popped the word "login" before it collapsed. 50 years have passed since the two letters.Living in a world where the Internet is highly developed, it is hard for us to imagine that the first message sent by the predecessor of the Internet was just "lo".

This happened in the year of the moon landing, a full 20 years before the Internet.As it turns out, the impact of this technology is truly astonishing, but we're also accelerating. In just under fifty years, it has connected 63% of humanity to each other. Now, digital codes make up the thoughts in people's heads, words that have been typed into your brain by strangers with whom you have absolutely no contact in the real world.

The ability to communicate complexly is the main difference between us and other living things, and it forms the core foundation of social organisms.In our short human history, vast information networks have been the absolute infrastructure for human beings. over the years,

Both the nature of the information network and the relationship between people and the information network have undergone great changes.

From the earliest transmission of knowledge by our ancestors through cave paintings and storytelling, to the advent of written language, and finally to the Gutenberg Revolution. Over the years, photography and telephony have pioneered ways of transmitting information through time and space that were initially strange. Now we, especially our generation (post-99 kids), take all this for granted.Of course, the pandemic has reminded us of our overreliance on it.In the face of this radiant digital brocade woven by nearly 5 billion people with modern life, we still need to reflect.We are recording and transmitting information to each other across the globe at all times without knowing where, who, or even when the recipients of these messages were alive.Information is stored and accessed on an almost unprecedented scale, and connections to people's thoughts and other things are becoming easier and more flexible.

In ancient times, the best option for disseminating information might have been a letter.With the development of communication technology, more emotions can be conveyed by voice. A phone call with a loved one may deepen your relationship. Even better, we can now video conference and see each other. Behind the scenes of virtual reality, we're now starting to realize,By actually seeing the world on the other side of the screen, we can communicate with others as if they were there.Even if you are thousands of miles apart, you can be in the same environment and the same space as other people because of advanced communication.

If this technology develops into a dominant communication technology, what else will it change? What's next?One of the most human-exciting features of the Internet is that it allows us to play with millions of people at the same time. The broad appeal of the Internet to humanity has been a major driving force behind the evolution of networking and graphics technologies. There are currently more than 2.7 billion video game players in the world, which means that 1 out of every 3 people plays video games.

The Internet, which is flooded with a lot of information every day, attracts people's attention and attracts global thinking to meet here.Throughout the history of gaming, despite its ups and downs, the concept of video games and virtual environments has been deeply rooted in people's minds. New business models require entirely new infrastructure, and entire industries are fundamentally changing. Perhaps the most telling statement is,

The increasingly powerful online distribution channels and the emergence of mobile phones in the late 2000s have jointly promoted the leapfrog development of the Internet industry.The technology of the big game publishers has become more powerful: data science tools (Excel is the most typical, but also data analysis tools such as SAS and Apache Spark), synchronous web services (this type The service can respond to queries immediately, and users have to wait for the server to send back a response message), a wide range of low-latency database interfaces, including user support, content management and real-time customer service innovation, as well as overwhelming marketing activities.There are more and more options in the game, and the fickle nature of players is becoming more and more obvious.

—Brett Seyler, ex-Unity, founder of Forte LabsOnce again, the torrent surged on the bottom of the sea.As these “battle-tested” business models become more entrenched, innovation has begun to wane.

Every year, media headlines provide us with ideas that seem innovative but are not. Crypto as a new technology provides new tools. I believe that decentralized networks and new crypto-economic systems will have a huge impact on video games and change the mainstream perception of virtual goods.

In the newly constructed space, the standardization and true ownership of game assets, new monetization mechanisms, new tools for users, cross-game economies, multi-directional value flows (from publishers to players), and universal virtual identity authentication layers can all be implemented. accomplish.Last year, the total spending on video games was $174.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 19.6%, which is twice the total revenue of movies and music in the same period. This is the opportunity.While the VR user experience is constantly upgrading, the ratings of e-sports are increasing rapidly and the next generation of game consoles are also being promoted and launched. The established general trend of this industry will most likely not cool down in the short term.Times have changed, and while it's still early days, statistics reflect the direction of the Great Migration:

People will spend more and more time in the virtual world. Continuing to see this industry as "just video games" can only represent a lack of imagination.Although it is difficult to predict what technology Metaverse will use to evolve and develop, it may be a certain technology or a combination of several technologies, but

Rough evolutionary paths can always be foreseen years in advance.For example, Marshall McLuhan began to imagine and make a big fuss about the evolution of interactive media before human beings even stepped into the information age. At that time, the Internet was still early. . As a philosopher and professor of media theory, he views human history through the lens of four eras: the Acoustic Age (spoken), the Literary Age (written), the Printed Age (post-Gutenberg), and the Information Age ( We've only seen the tip of the iceberg). His first book, Gutenberg Galaxy, popularized the term "global village" - which means

Technology brings people together and gives everyone the same access to information:“Whatever the next medium will look like—perhaps an extension of human consciousness—television will be its subject, not its carrier,” he wrote in 1962.

As a tool for research and human communication, computers will greatly enhance human retrieval capabilities, completely eliminate large libraries, search personal encyclopedia functions, and upgrade it to a method that can "quickly transform customized data into the secret weapon of becoming a commodity".The phrase "the medium is the message (the medium is the message)" that everyone is very familiar with actually includes McLuhan's core argument——The technology by which we ingest information(that is, the "media" that everyone talks about all day long) has alreadyIt becomes a new organ for us, profoundly influencing our thoughts and behaviors.

When an important new medium appears, it will shape us into a whole new individual, and even shape a whole new society. Some other McLuhan musings have become direly prophetic:

Once we relinquish control of our self-perception and nervous system to the private manipulation of "those who try to profit by renting our eyes, ears, and nerves," we are paupers, paupers without any rights. Renting out our eyes, ears, and nerves to make money for others is as outrageous as "letting private companies teach people how to speak everyday" or "giving the earth's atmosphere to a corporate monopoly."

The above paragraph has been written long ago, probably 20 years before the first generation of personal computers became popular in millions of households, 30 years before the Internet was invented, and 40 years before Facebook was launched (Old Versailles). Although it is hard for McLuhan to imagine the dizzying situation of various social networking platforms today, and it is also hard to imagine that the whole world has succumbed to the business model of Internet giants selling user privacy and exploiting user attention for advertising fees, but he is obviously very Be clear about the building blocks of it all (McLuhan: I just need to know what will happen, not how or when it will happen).What a powerful driving force will be formed after information technology is controlled by private companies, and what a profound impact this power will have on society.

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Since the early 1980s, technologists of all stripes have speculated about the emergence of a "successor" to the Internet. A number of concepts have served as successors to this, beginning with cyberspace, first proposed by William Gibson in Burning Chrome—although it is a commonly recognized illusion in computer networking— — This is also a central theme in his 1984 book Neuromancer.Later, people talked more and more about cyberspace, and finally took it directly to represent the Internet. laterCyberspace gradually replaced by Metaverse, the word first appeared in Neal Stephenson's "Avalanche" (Snow Crash) -Metaverse is a compound word of meta and verse. In Greek, meta means "beyond (beyond)", and verse means "universe (universe)"

. Although the actual content and form of the Metaverse are still unclear to everyone, the fledgling ideas and increasingly powerful technologies are very likely to produce some unbelievably good jobs in the next few decades.With Spielberg's "Ready Player One" in 2018 (adapted from Ernest Cline's Ready Player One in 2011), more and more mainstream people began to understand the Metaverse.

In addition to pure speculation about the Metaverse, there have also been some magical experiences that continue to expand the boundaries of our imagination, and these experiences continue to push people who are curious about this world to continue to explore.A very recent example is the Travis Scott concert held by Fortnite. At that time, 12.3 million players were online in real time, watching him release new songs.

This concert is a fusion of popular culture, video games with strong social attributes, and the most cutting-edge concurrent infrastructure-Fortnite turned players into stars, and at the same time turned stars into players.In recent decades, when people talk about the Metaverse, they seem to be saying different things. So to make this clear,

We have to define the Metaverse first:The final part comes from Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games (which owns both Fortnite and Unreal Engine). He said,

If Metaverse wants to become a real Metaverse, it must first have an unprecedented user base and provide a new-age substitute (next-gen successor) for a large number of interactive media that appeared before it. This is not based on the existing digital experience. addition.

——Naval (Founder of Angelist)To some extent, the Metaverse is not fully knowable to humans today, at most we can only understand certain core attributes she may have in the future (knowing that you don't know is valuable). Entertainment and media guy Matthew Ball is a great writer, he always inspires me - in terms of clarifying the Metaverse (it is not easy to explain such a vague concept), he may do better than most.

In general, we think of the Metaverse as:

- Who should decide these things?The last question I just asked, "Who should decide this matter?" is very important.In the pre-internet era, those major decisions, such as security, privacy, and user autonomy, were not democratic at all.But we also know that such decisions, once made, often have far-reaching and irreversible consequences.The consequences of these decisions will be felt throughout the electronic world for decades to come.

Likewise, as we become more digital, we are about to face a new environment that we have never seen before. Crypto technology is still a potential solution worth exploring, but it seems that this is the upper limit.Decentralized technology can indeed limit illegal operations on a large scale by providing a suitable incentive mechanism, but how to formulate and implement such a design is still centralized.We human beings are standing at a critical crossroads, preserving thousands of years of intellectual memory to the left, challenging and integrating modern thought to the right.

If we choose to integrate, we must also prepare for what values ​​and qualities we should pass on to the next generation when they are facing higher digitization.

Once we relinquish control of our self-perception and nervous system to the private manipulation of "those who try to profit by renting our eyes, ears, and nerves," we are paupers, paupers without any rights. Renting out our eyes, ears, and nerves to make money for others is as outrageous as "letting private companies teach people how to speak everyday" or "giving the earth's atmosphere to a corporate monopoly."If you are not familiar with non-homogeneous tokens (NFT), I strongly recommend you to read Opensea's article "NFT Bible: Everything You Need to Know About NFT", after all, NFT will play a ruthless role in the future Internet .Essentially, all current digital goods exist separately in databases in vastly different formats and cannot interact with anything else. mutual

Other basic elements on the Internet already have their own set of standards, such as the TCP/IP protocol for sharing data packets, or file formats such as GIF/MP3.For the first time, NFT has realized a decentralized and universal digital asset representation and ownership layer. With the support of these characteristics, the scarcity, uniqueness and authenticity of virtual goods can be transparently managed.

If the Metaverse economy wants to flourish, it must first have shared standards and widely recognized protocols to ensure the issuance and circulation of virtual goods.The elements in the above picture will combine five stars into one, creating a new era of Metaverse, and everyone should have no objection to this. However, I think crypto is the basis for the rapid development of many of these elements, even though most of the so-called "mainstream" market participants do not recognize crypto. As an early investor, I am very concerned about and optimistic about the application of crypto in the virtual world——

Listen carefully to the voice of the market, and then do the opposite. After all, non-consensus is the basis for making money.Compared with small applications,Other essential elements of building a Metaverse, such as massively concurrent infrastructure, new-age media, are often dominated by whales who control large economies and R&D budgets.

It can be said that the wheel of history has already started to turn, and those who can get on the car have already been ridden away. From an investment point of view, this is a game that most people have no chance to participate in (after all, the opponent is too strong and the threshold is too high).Although there is still a long way to go in all aspects, I think,NFT and crypto contain one of the most elegant solutions,It can be used to overcome digital scarcity (a plausible limitation imposed by software on digital information, goods or services that can be accessed and used exclusively digitally), digital uniqueness, digital property rights, large-scale coordination across various virtual environments, and robust systems with a focus on privacy,

Such a system cannot support the few at the expense of the many.Without a strong economic membrane assumption, the whole concept of the Metaverse falls apart very quickly.In the rapidly growing vertical field, crypto's economic incentive system takes out the bait of interest, rewards early users with real ownership, and allows users to manage their favorite projects through these rewards.

For the first time, we're seeing the rise of community-owned protocols, networks, and games, three things that give birth to users enthusiastically spreading the word about the Metaverse, while also removing the need to trust those that seem increasingly dubious and opaque Platform operators, these operators will always be driven by some unreliable rewards.It goes without saying that the original digital cryptocurrency will make the value transfer process of the entire digital world unimpeded.To drive the rise of a true Metaverse, digital assets and crypto seem to be the most urgently needed but least explored of the aforementioned verticals.

Therefore, I took the time to analyze how everyone uses digital assets and crypto step by step, what the parts that can be invested in these two things look like, and what new business models they can unlock.If you want to understand why NFT can revolutionize games and other digital economies, you must first admit the structural flaws of the current virtual economy and its huge scale.

The entire virtual goods market is about 50 billion U.S. dollars, and it is expected to grow to 190 billion U.S. dollars in 2025-this is only a conservative estimate, and a considerable part of the economic activities related to video games takes place in the "hidden" unofficial secondary market Therefore, the actual market size is likely to be larger than this (this phenomenon is also called Revenue Leakage).There are three main reasons why gray markets are widespread in these virtual economies:(Just do something with all your might).

After all,After all,Currency is a mechanism by which we communicate value.For all of us, time is the most valuable thing in our finite life. therefore,Any form of money can be thought of as an allocation of time.

This concept can be easily applied to cyberspace, and in some cases even more applicable to cyberspace.Over the years, playing gold coins and ranking in massively multiplayer online games has proved this concept, and in many third world countries,Playing games, and then selling the game currency obtained by fighting monsters and upgrading to others, makes more money than doing a job in the real world.And in fact, they started to earn more than the average Venezuelan doctor every month, almost 10 times more.

All right,All right,The foundation of a "country" is being solidified step by step. It is probably not the kind of country you imagined - it is called Metaverse, a fast-growing digital country. No matter what background, anyone can enjoy the opportunities it provides.

Most of these minted gold coins are traded through third-party in-game currency buying and selling software, but they still exist in many real-world activities in poor countries (such as Venezuela and Pakistan).

more importantly,more importantly,Those who do this kind of power leveling and playing services have tasted the sweetness from the abnormal environment brought about by the epidemic.

While people had to stay at home, the demand for boosting and buying game currency surged, and in March and April 2020, the price of the game currency (RSGP) appreciated by 50% in USD value. Imagine, if this is a liquid market that can be traded aboveboard, people can buy and sell game coins without worrying about being scammed or banned by RSGP intermediaries?We sawSome netizens take advantage of the time allocation attribute of making money to engage in prohibited services such as hanging up to play games and selling accounts, and profit from them.These "cheating" behaviors of hanging up can save users hundreds of hours of customs clearance time in a few minutes. For example, in early 2020, someone used HxD, a free and open-source hex editor, to hack the code of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, directly unlocking equipment, skins, point cards, and other customizations. If you are a 2G player, tell you,

This type of game has achievements and equipment specially designed for Gandi, which can only be achieved and unlocked after playing for hundreds of hours.The operation of hanging up the phone sounds very simple, but many people don't know what's going on, so they find "professionals" to help them hang up the phone. There are hundreds of videos on YouTube, up hosts their Discord channel, and thousands of users pay $100 for each level to be played by up hosts. do not forget,The real technical work is a matter of a few minutes, and it depends on how you sell your business.

The people behind the scenes generally make YouTube videos, demos, link to Discord channels, and then use various forums as distribution channels. The associated video alone has more than 32,000 views in three weeks. If we assume the minimum fee is $100, then the conversion rate is 1.25% (as of this article, the conversion rate of the Discord channel is 5%). Just netted $40,000.The agent user "xLegehnd" has his own seemingly reasonable overlord terms, such as "only accept cash, APPLE payment!" and "you will bear the consequences of being banned, no refund". I don't want to find a job by myself. You help me find games, and I help you find markets. These users are everywhere.

These dangerous fringes may be the form of value exchange we expect between the analog and digital worlds.Most game companies are suppressing the "scalpers" who seek personal gain in the game to maintain the order of the game. Specifically, there is "zero tolerance" for on-hook mining, buying accounts, and finding proxy games. Governance resources.All kinds of games have a gray area market where "middlemen earn the difference". These manipulators have spent decades studying game mechanics and player psychology.

Each of them has their own network of contacts to support the various operations of these black market activities, and usually has dozens or hundreds of full-time employees (probably more than game companies).One could argue that these markets are somehow not the arena for the fragile. Manipulators will always be one step ahead of the platform in fixing strategic bugs, playing a game of cat and mouse. If developers can monetize more game assets (such as in-game land, items or skins) and make continuous income through the secondary sale of these things, you know what I mean?

When a startup consumes an incumbent, it usually starts with a small but useful market that the big players ignore. The big players shrug it off, well, they don't even know what they're missing.

Of course, don’t just stare at the game. Sooner or later, all kinds of content output will appear on NFT and Crypto media. Experts and people in the currency circle have already started to send various tokens for tweets, blogs, music, and community access rights. Hypermedia has given birth to a non-linear medium covering information transmission pictures, audio, plain text and hyperlinks. With encryption technology, the reform of media digital property rights is just around the corner.When the Internet we have today becomes a historical relic, we'll be able to see the rich history of everything we interact with online: origin stories, personalities, and webs of things.

We are well aware that most digital content will be tokenized, linearly increasing interconnectivity - each item has a separate creator, history and owner.If users can't decide whether to keep these investments, because they don't really own them, we can't expect more users to invest a lot of time and money in digital empires.

Establishing trust in the Metaverse's economic system is the most basic, and the use of distributed ledger technology is the best guarantee at this time. The point is, digital assets inherit the security of the decentralized network from which they were issued. These technologies are also in their infancy, and it is difficult to predict which projects will stand the test of time and win, but the ERC-721 NFT on Ethereum sets the standard baseline. The entire network NFT is valued at US$540 million, and 200,000 users behind it are creating, trading, and playing games.That being said, Ethereum still can't carry when peak users are used, ruining the user experience of many applications. It's not yet known if these technologies will make it to mainstream adoption, and the technical burden of engineering internal solutions in-house is likely to be a nuisance to most developers. Several other well-funded problem-solving blockchain projects (such as Flow) are coming to market to solve these exact problems, butEthereum has a huge network impact on the network in the form of user lock-in, developer share, and the rapid growth of collaborative "DeFi".

It has built strong ecosystem support for wallets, exchanges, fiat gateways and regulatory familiarity. None of these key elements will emerge overnight, and any challenger will have to achieve them all while competing with Ethereum’s growing momentum.Like it or not,good laThe rise of yer 2 solutions tends to significantly dilute the value proposition on scalable alternative chains.

In the end, Ethereum perfectly represents two core ideas - decentralized ownership of assets and trustlessness. In favor of good network health and decentralization, the network and its citizens have always eschewed short-term scalability upgrades. These technologies are a bit dumb, but the goal is to achieve a secure, non-seizureable, censorship-resistant system, which enters the next phase of the Metaverse.These technologies can also maintain world peace.

YouTube deleted comments on sensitive content in some countries, or the social controversy over Zuckerberg’s refusal to delete Trump’s Facebook post promoting violence in 2020, all show that even the world’s largest social platform can’t stand alone in the political whirlpool . Once the power of arbitrary censoring users is abused, it can easily lead to negative effects on competition, politics or society.The scandal between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook (Cambridge Analytica joined forces with FB to steal 87 million users’ information for the Trump campaign) should be enough to illustrate who is controlling speech in today’s society, and who is talking about democracy. It is not surprising that there are so many examples of accounts that are banned or quietly banned for "dangerous speech", and the recent example is even more extreme. The President of the United States, right? Your number is gone, I will teach you how to be a human being. These all show it.

We have to distinguish between self-censorship and external restrictions in the creative act, which manifests itself differently in different parts of the world.A lack of self-censorship can also be harmful to the social fabric, as it is easy to over-interpret and mistakenly assume that speaking is irresponsible.Therefore, we need to find the appropriate degree and think about what this degree looks like in a decentralized network. The social platform can be so horizontal, but also because the state governments are backing it as a weapon in political struggle. Horribly, social platforms often bow to pressure from state governments and, as a result, ban certain users or release private data. As more and more value is transferred online, so do the consequences of censorship.

All of this alarmism is only going to grow in an increasingly immersive, popular, connected digital environment.

We need to think carefully about how to design powerful systems that reduce errors and reward users. The fundamental difference between crypto economic systems and other technologies is that they have both technological as well as social and economic breakthroughs.

This is a technological breakthrough, because it makes up for the original disadvantage of the Internet - omits the digital native P2P value transfer protocol (technology). This breakthrough both enabled and was driven by cryptoeconomics, and each other - the combination of cryptography and game-theoretic motivation (economics) is the core idea of ​​​​this revolution. The fusion of digitally native value transfer protocols with cryptoeconomic incentive systems opens up new frontiers for large-scale P2P coordination (society).In the past, access to any resources and services had to be coordinated by a trusted third party. Inherent privacy, censorship, and transaction costs were all controlled by the third party. Now there is no middleman in the encrypted economic system to make the difference, so there is no need to rely on In the case of less trustworthy third-party institutions, it can be solved by relying on the ancient human profit-seeking instinct.Now we have the crypto tools to create fundamentally better systems that allow more people to participate in this economy, create value and enjoy it.As the Internet and our interactions with it continue to evolve, new technologies and technologies present more meaningful ways to implement them. that is,Cryptocurrencies have been warned - anywhere of value there will be scams.

——Liu CixinThe emergence of blockchain-based NFTs enables true ownership of virtual assets with an unlimited duration and is not controlled by the creator.

This underrated breakthrough technology has fundamentally changed the nature and scope of the virtual item space, which is already worth tens of billions of dollars annually. Take Fortnite as an example. At its peak in 2018, this game made a huge $2.4 billion, most of which was driven by one-way transactions of game decorations. Do you want to be the prettiest boy in this game?"Leaving aside the fact that NFTs would fundamentally change the current business model, imagine this: If you were not just buying and selling Fortnite skins on the blockchain on the open market, but configurations and their rare collateral gear, could The kind that helps you make money (maybe buying the newest battle pass)? Fortnite charges a fee. Shockingly,Players continue to spend time and money on in-game items that exist in heterogeneous centralized services owned by a single company that provide no ongoing cash flow and provide investors with no real ownership or management rights.

When better jobs come out, these will definitely be absorbed by the transformation.

Of course, NFT is not only used in the game world. After opening up the creator's direct monetization mechanism, it has radiated to the field of digital art.NFT can now not only issue tokenized works on the chain with complete provenance and certification, but also sell their own works directly in the global art market, and even charge secondary sales fees (royalties) all the time. In fact,

NFT can be a powerful tool for issuing, tracking and monetizing almost all creative artistic output.

To better understand the near-omnipotence of NFTs, I highly recommend an article by Jake Brukhman explaining why all digital content will be traded on-chain. He also talks about why NFTs can be understood as an intellectual property that encapsulates the assets they describe, and why we are heading towards an era of "liquid IP" that will unlock billions of dollars in value, and control over intellectual property new methods that were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive.

As the real world and the virtual world continue to merge, the original digital representation standards of things, and the economic rails that originally supported them, are likely to be woven into the Metaverse.It's important to recognize the enormous opportunity that NFTs represent. Those already familiar with Bitcoin have likely heard of its notion of soundness as money:

Bitcoin embodies the optimal combination of the characteristics of an ideal currency. These characteristics are realized through its precise mathematical model, through its predetermined distribution plan and unforgeable production cost. Armed with the ability to resist inflation.Importantly,The Metaverse is likely to rely heavily on Bitcoin as its economic foundation: the world's first internet-native reserve currency.There is a view called Grechen's Law: any currency in circulation, in the game of "good" and "bad" currencies (such as copper coins and silver coins have the same value), the "good" currency will soon lose Dominated by "bad" currency. This manifests as

People would rather spend the less sound money first, then spend the money that has been developed, and finally let the original sound money out of circulation.Interestingly, if you think about it in terms of collectibles, the idea easily extends to virtual goods. It is worth noting that collectibles were the precursor to money.Money is a social technology that allows human civilization to move forward.Throughout the emergence of the first human tribes, members of the tribe used currency as a medium to communicate with each other. The task of keeping track of human preferences increases as the tribe grows in size, becausePeople spend money on things they like, so the flow of money can make people aware of what their group likes.

Those tribes without a cooperative system eventually died out, but those tribes that discovered popular preferences through the monetary footprint scaled steadily and eventually prospered.Before this, however, human civilization has evolved to seek out collectibles with specific desirable properties that would help solve these cooperation problems.While currency has become our primary tracking technology, collectibles have endured, spanning across all cultures, historical periods and ages.

Today, trillions of dollars of value are still locked away in physical collections around the world.Szabo, in Shelling Out, explains how Menger discovered what he describes as "intermediate intermediate goods,"

These observations would have had more reliable integrity, but at a lower cost.As Tony Sheng pointed out, pre-crypto digital goods can be considered very volatile compared to physical goods that can be held, authenticated and sold.

They have always existed in siled databases and walled gardens, without actually offering users a future of ownership of these digital goods, often with a license from the issuing company."Holders" of Pre-crypto digital products face huge cash flow and trust risks.

Pre-crypto digital products are issued by the authority that manages digital commodity monitoring rights (risk 1), can increase supply at will (risk 2), and generally limit the ability to trade commodities (risk 3). A robust digital collection should be worth at least an order of magnitude of risk resistance.From the perspective of Gresham's law,we shouldThe expectation is that people prefer robust digital collectibles.

Users will quickly get rid of non-crypto collectibles and hoard crypto collectibles, using them to store trillions of dollars. The chances for sound (digital) collectibles are at least as good as for "digital gold".

In conclusion, the blockchain provides sound money and digital goods. Both opportunities are in the trillions of dollars, and if realized, the ramifications would be far-reaching. Funding and collectibles are problematic today, but the path to mass-market adoption remains unclear, with significant execution risk.While users should prefer stable and sound digital goods, just as they prefer sound currencies, existing users are unlikely to support the adoption of crypto, and the unproven social world of natives in the crypto space will cost a lot of money time and energy.

Despite these challenges, there has been a huge pull and flow toward robust digital goods, a win for users.In the short term, many actions may be spurred by opportunities that arise suddenly.Previously busted bubbles have made crypto users stronger, and while the crash of 2018 is vividly remembered, most of those who stayed are doing well now.

In this system, there is still a considerable part of the funds waiting for the opportunity to exist.The Nonfungible 2019 report predicts that in 2020, $250 million worth of transactions will be in the form of non-financial transactions, which turned out to be an underestimate. So the occasional headline we see, like a $750,000 art piece or a $113,000 NFT car, inevitably grabs the attention of everyone around us. Broadly speaking,

So far, four categories have begun to appeal to different audiences: art, collectibles, virtual worlds and video games.The art world is always moving forward and willing to engage with new technologies, I am cautiously optimistic about this phenomenon, because it can inspire meaningful experimentation in art itself. Interestingly,"Crypto art" appears to be the first NFT category to truly find product-market fit, where the technology needed to realize its core value proposition has worked.

Due to the reduction in exchange frequency, when it comes to on-chain migration and changing art, the channels of dissemination and diffusion will be smoother, and the user experience will be okay without causing too much damage to the user experience. Creators who have already attracted large audiences in the crypto art space, such as Beeple, sold $3.5 million in art in one weekend. Since then, sales on the secondary market have nearly doubled.Another category that is about to blossom is the collectibles market, where branded IP such as the NBA, Global Soccer League, and UFC are releasing their own tokens to fans. Part of a global fantasy football game, Kylian Mbappe recently sold for $66,000 and is rumored to be raising money at a $300 million valuation, Ja Morant's slam dunk with the Phoenix Suns sold for $100,000 , both collectible games have seen significant growth in 2020, and the NBA hit has already beaten its first-year sales in the first 3 weeks of January.

Sports series in the collectibles market is another area that attracts large audiences and will likely attract some of the most passionate sports fans in the world.In other areas, blockchain-based virtual worlds, users have a piece of land, are free to build anything they like, and after the first wave of prosperity, they can sell their houses for $50,000. Other crypto-infused VR worlds, such as Somnium Space and Cryptovoxels, are already interconnected to a certain extent, so that you can nesting dolls and playing with one VR world within another.These places and platforms are like games, as if they are resonating and connecting with groups that are not running in sync with them.

Gangs, groups and even large corporations are starting to develop virtual headquarters, where their employees and fans can meet in virtual worlds.Axie Infinity is a Pokèmon-inspired digital pet game where users can trade, breed, fight, and even develop virtual real estate.

It appears to be entering a phase of parabolic growth, fueled by a sound economic backbone and an enthusiastic user base. Axie is probably our best example of a game that demonstrates the power of crypto economics, especially in terms of incentive structures that lead users on board (user base grew 11.6x in 2020), drive user loyalty, and spread the word.Axie Infinity upholds the spirit of blockchain games, and third parties can access all data and game assets, allowing other parties to create tools and experiences for the Axie universe. Additionally, the team is working on making Axie Infinity the first game to be truly owned and operated by players. Therefore, our goal is to slowly transition to a decentralized organization.To achieve this, the game has (and will continue to) issue something called a governance token to players in the ecosystem, roughly proportional to their level of participation.

This token grants holders voting rights to determine how funds are distributed from the gaming community's treasury (on the smart contract chain).Let's take a closer look and think about this idea:

What if players could vote on the distribution of resources, such as new maps, weapon adjustments, cross-game cooperation, and maybe even ultimately which development team will work on the next season of the game?Axie Infinity presents a distinct "play-to-earn" (P2E) ecology. Different from existing games, playing gold coins is only a loose embodiment of "play-to-earn", and a greater extent and a wider range of "play-to-earn" Playing and earning" does not conflict.Axie Infinity has become a sensation in the Philippines, where playing the game has allowed many families to earn more than they would from a "real" job throughout the pandemic.

This technology is fascinating, and it makes people realize that virtual game worlds can really balance economic development on a global scale.Don't underestimate how quickly word of mouth can spread through a community when more and more people stumble upon these opportunities. We’ve heard hollow echoes of “banking unbanked” in the crypto industry for years, but what if that’s one of its manifestations?

- L'Atelier, The Virtual EconomyOne thing that woke me up in Play Money, the documentary that tracksHow the early evolution of the virtual economy allowed ordinary people to dominate their own games and lives.

Of course, people will think that after helping some people from western countries to play game gold coins for 10 hours, the leveling from developing countries may be very tiring, and they don’t want to see anything related to the game for a while. Interestingly, this is not the case. After helping others to level the game, they will log in to their personal accounts and continue to play gold coins.I often hear,Once the game becomes play-to-earn, with the purpose of making money, the game is no longer a game, because the game is simply to have fun.I haven't seen anything that proves this. I know a lot of players on the front end of MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) make extra money from these games. Top-notch FPS players also often make money through live streaming on third-party platforms or other games. Although I have never experienced a life where my income is completely dependent on playing games, I think

The addition of money can actually make the game more fun, and this seems to have happened in the ecosystem of games like Axie Infinity.In the end, I think it would be remiss of me not to let everyone know who the early core players are behind such a unique system. For example, Dapper Labs, the well-known CryptoKitties developer, raised another $12 million round in 2020. Currently, their total funding is $50.9 million,There are traditional big-name VCs such as USV, Samsung Ventures, a16z, Venrock and Warner Music Group behind it.

They are currently developing the largest encrypted game so far (transactions in U.S. dollars) and the scale limitations experienced by networks such as Ethereum. Based on this, they have built the Flow blockchain mentioned above (FLOW token is the original asset of the Flow blockchain. .This token is a low-inflation, low-circulation supply reserve asset, which is used by verifiers, developers and users to participate in the traffic network and obtain rewards).In addition to giving enough money, the combined influence of these supporters also creates a strong partnership.Some of them I've noticed, they've partnered with big names like Dr. Seuss, NBA, UFC, and Ubisoft. It's also inspiring to see prominent sports personalities such as Spencer Dinwiddie invest in Dapper and André Schürrle invest in Sorare, a global fantasy football powered by limited-edition NFTs like the Mbappe player cards that have already sold game. It is unclear whether these purpose-built influence chains have a better chance of expanding user base than Ethereum, but

Dragging big brands from the real world into this nascent world is a victory for the entire virtual world ecosystem.

In the medium term, we hope these companies can achieve some high-impact achievements (we are particularly bullish on Axie) to prove the viability of these business models, which may bring large studios and various creatives to participate in this cause Come.Most consumers today are so convinced of their ingrained habits that people still don't know or care about any other options.

I think the crypto industry needs to bring people an immersive and compelling experience to showcase these new capabilities. In this way, the restrictive old model will be in stark contrast to the emerging new model that is open and emphasizes collaboration.If we can do this, I believeThe granularity with which these technologies can self-perpetuate, permeate, and use tokens to incentivize and reward certain fan behaviors is unprecedented.

Although not strictly using NFTs, projects such as Socios are using tokens to make football fans feel more involved and feel like they are part of the football team's shareholders.A recent example of this is the fact that Juventus fans are now able to participate in the decision-making process for home goal background music.All these have been done to create a value experience for the customer group, and at the same time provide the company with predictable, safe and transparent future income.

Ultimately, this type of business model can form a platform that connects customers. For example, augmented reality games such as Pokemon Go can motivate users to complete certain real-world characters, or prove that NFT can enable consumers to obtain certain limited edition products in the future. admission ticket.Now what limits the application scenarios of this technology is actually our imagination

, when the world becomes more and more familiar with Zhongxin tools, I believe that we will see all kinds of complaint rooms that enhance user experience, laying a solid foundation for us to move towards a more interactive digital age in the future.A similar area that has recently emerged is social tokens, which have many similarities with NFT, but pay more attention to the coordination, interaction and maintenance of user groups.

This token provides an unprecedented path to invest in influential creators, such as Internet celebrities. In addition, these tokens can be used to reward fans for participating in the entire creator's community, such as subscribing to a newsletter, participating in product testing, or any other project that requires testing.Once a positive cycle is formed, this kind of token will surely become an inaccessible and important part of the creator economy.It allows the most ardent fans to invest in the future potential of these creators early on. Of course, these tokens still have many things to be resolved before laws and regulations, but I believe

The structure of social tokens will eventually co-exist with regulators and reach an agreement.

The po owner in the picture above was born in 1998, an influencer, an entrepreneur, and a philanthropist. He is a youtuber with 55 million fans. He posts 2-3 videos per month and receives 30 million video views per month. He created the youtube category of sand sculpture experimental videos, and also created a precedent for investing in the main MCN business of youtube (it has 16 million followers level influencers). Recently, his artist management company raised a fund of 20 million US dollars dedicated to investing in influencers.On a longer time horizon, it is clear thatThe world is becoming more digital. The pandemic is a huge catalyst for these underlying trends

, The feasibility of remote work has been proven, which has changed our previous understanding of the requirements of the working environment, and at the same time prompted us to treat digitalization with a more open perspective. With Starlink's ongoing rollout of advanced satellite internet networks, coupled with massive investments in web infrastructure, we can start to wonder what the future holds.Will people end up living in densely populated cities? Or will people live more spread out? I believe the latter, put another way, as the development of technological infrastructure ranging from drone transport to advanced solar technology increases the likelihood of mass population migration.

Globally, as these shifts take place, effective alternatives to once-dominant models of interaction will emerge.

I've never met anyone who has experienced virtual reality and is still skeptical of this new technology.In general, the era of virtual and augmented reality is upon us. It may well be that a device will soon help increase our perception of the natural world. With the continuous enhancement of technology,One day, each of our digital individuals may even be more important than our real-world bodies, People will continue to provide various digital products for their digital self

, D2C mode (Direct to Consumer direct sales mode) is likely to shift to D2A mode (Direct to Avatar directly for virtual entities).The infrastructure of this brave new world is constantly evolving and improving, and one day we will be able to choose between the virtual and the real

Anything that is scarce will be tokenized because of the coveted benefits and liquidity that digitization brings.An interesting project I invested in is called Crucible, which is the pioneer of the D2A business model mentioned above. This company is developing a product called Emergence SDK, which provides a springboard for game engine developers to connect to the new decentralized Web3.0 technology (NFTs+DAO+DeFi).Help game developers get in touch with a broader and more "money-worthy" player network and market.

These users will have access to tools that can be used to maintain identities within the Metaverse, as well as prove ownership of things like skins/digital collectibles and other in-game assets. This is the most solid foundation for realizing a player-centric Metaverse economy.Crucible also leads the blueprint for Open Metaverse, a cross-industry consortium dedicated to advocating for the Metaverse to be based on open standards. Although we are still in the early stages of development, the

Smartly embedding these technologies into the game engine in advance can speed up the process, so that both developers and players can participate in experiments earlier, so that technology popularization can be achieved earlier.If we want to talk about new business models, we must first talk about those big game companies that are doing a lot of work. They are too comfortable and have no motivation to embrace crypto.They belong to the previous era, treating players as tools, messing with your mentality, binding you to a specific game or a specific platform,Players are their assets, their cash machines.

This kind of mentality is really disgusting, and even if they want to change, they have their own shareholder responsibilities to fulfill after they go public. They can’t suddenly change their business model when they suddenly become cyber mentally ill. This is obviously feeding blood pressure drugs to shareholders. make them sick.