Metaverse Will Bring About the “Construction of New Economies” – Animoca CEO

Yat Siu, the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Animoca Brands has shared his thoughts on what he believes the metaverse is metamorphosing into in the near future. 

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Speaking at the Future Blockchain Summit, the veteran industry leader noted that the metaverse is not a central entity and is bound to stir the advent of new economies that will benefit its adopters.

In the explanation for his position about the highly talked-about marketplace, Siu said industries cannot be quantities based on a single metric, and that the collective performance of key offshoots of the ecosystem often comes together to make a whole.

“Metaverse to us is a whole economy. We don’t want to measure the future of these companies using PNL, we want to measure it in terms of GDP. Just like we can’t define Ethereum’s value by how much gas it generates but rather its utility as a whole, in the same way, the metaverse is an all-accomplishing picture. So, thematically, it’s a metaverse; but practically, itu2019s digital ownership.”

Siu faults the usurping role big tech companies like Google and Facebook have played in the evolution of the gaming industry thus far. According to him, the bigger portion of the more than $200 billion industry is controlled by big tech with little going to the game developers and almost nothing to players.

Per the model of Web3.0, Siu believes this anomaly will be corrected, creating an economy whereby everyone will be fairly compensated for their participation in the ecosystem.

“More than half of the value that is generated in the gaming industry goes to Apple, Facebook and Google. How much of that goes back to the gaming industry? Zero. This is the issue today, and it makes the ecosystem unhealthy.”

Yat Siu, whose company owns The Sandbox metaverse and has invested in hundreds of gaming protocols believes GameFi is one of the contending avenues by which users will be onboarded into the Web3.0 industry.

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Rise of Web3: Metaverse tokens surge as Meta’s share price plunges

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, saw the largest single-day slide in market value for a U.S. company ever with a 26% fall in share prices on Thursday after the tech giant revealed disappointing earnings and a decline in daily active users.

Meta famously changed its name from Facebook in late 2021, to signal its plans to focus on the Metaverse, and its struggles have coincided with double-digit percentage gains for its decentralized competitors The Sandbox and Decentraland.

Meta reported $33.67 billion worth of total revenue for Q4 2021, compared to $28 billion the year prior. However, its net income decreased to $10.28 billion, down from $11.2 billion 12 months ago.

For the first time, Meta broke out a segment in its earnings report for its virtual and augmented reality research and development business, Reality Labs. It saw losses which topped over US$10 billion, up from US$6.6 billion in 2020. However it’s only in the early stages of laying the groundwork for Metaverse technology, including developing a haptic glove, allowing users to “touch” objects in the metaverse.

Speaking with Cointelegraph, Animoca Brands chairman and co-founder Yat Siu, suggested that the sharp drop of Meta’s share price may represent a broader trend in which users are beginning to question the centralized Web2 model:

“It’s a system that does not share any meaningful part of the ownership or value of the network, which will eventually lead to a decline as users look for better options.”

“As people are still likely to spend even more time online, the question is where and how? This is an early indicator that they are moving away from Web 2.0 and the logical conclusion on where to go for a growing number is Web 3,” he added.

Siu argued that Web2 companies like Meta and Apple are also “losing their best people” to Web3 companies and projects:

“Web 3 and the open Metaverse is more than just another product cycle, it’s a movement, and it’s hard to fight something like that as a single corporation.”

Crypto-backed metaverses

Decentraland, a Metaverse platform built on Ethereum, has seen the price of its token MANA increase by over 20% the past seven days, surging from a seven-day low of US$2.19 to recent support levels around the US$2.60 mark.

Likewise, SAND tokens for The Sandbox, one of Decentraland’s main Metaverse competitors, has seen a seven-day gain of 17.5%, entering the weekend at a low of US$3.31 before surging to a high of over US$4, now seeing support levels around US$3.60.

Related: Bitcoin bounces at $36.6K as Meta adds 20% losses to US tech stock rout

Apart from Meta, other factors are affecting prices for MANA and SAND this week. Decentraland released it’s 2022 Manifesto, announcing a prototype mobile app, improvements to its play experience, greater utility of NFTs, and protocol enhancements.

The Sandbox team announced a partnership with UniX Gaming, a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), and a release of more “land” in its metaverse slated for February 10th.

Animoca Brands owns The Sandbox, and there were unconfirmed rumors earlier this week that Meta would be acquiring the Metaverse platform. However Siu promptly shut those rumors down on Feb. 3.

Outside of Meta, other big tech companies including Apple and Microsoft are getting into the space. Entertainment giant Disney also seems to be gearing up for a move into the Metaverse with a recent job advertisement for a Business Development Manger seeks looking for someone to “help lead Disney’s efforts in the NFT space”.

It’s not immediately clear if Disney’s efforts could relate to it’s planned headset-free augmented reality Metaverse project uncovered by patent filings.