NFTs and the Metaverse — explained
Over the past few months, you’ve probably all heard something about NFTs, or Non Fungible Tokens, especially with the controversy that rose up around the sales of specific art pieces, where some ‘mad’ people spent thousands of dollars to purchase children’s drawings, extreme pieces of clothing they could never wear, or a house they could never live in physically.
Though perhaps it’s not fair to tar all NFTs with the same brush, as they are not all made the same way. So today, let’s leave the controversy out of this blog as we explain the connection between NFTs and the emerging Metaverse.
Into the Metaverse we go
The word ‘Metaverse’ recently exploded from out of the blue when Facebook (excuse us, Meta) announced they were going to invest a hefty sum into the development of a Metaverse. While the details of their Metaverse are still unclear, we have our assumptions. Although this technology might have originated in the gaming world, it is so promising that we will surely see it break out and be applied across a spectrum of industries.
The metaverse, like every other new technology, represents a possible revolution in the world as we know it. The only question is, who will be the first to develop and obtain the fruits of their labor. “Some companies have already started building their metaverse — the closest one to that goal being Decentraland platform and Sandbox video game, but taking the number of users into the consideration, Roblox and Fortnite might be even closer to the real meaning of the metaverse. There you can participate in different activities with your avatar, activities that aren’t connected to the main course of the game,” explains our CEO, Darian Škarica. Will those avatars be the NFTs inside the metaverse? That could easily be true.
Avatar as an NFT
Now before you dive into the magical metaverse, that is not a video game, you need an avatar. You can either create one, if that is the option in your chosen metaverse, or you can import one. Now, what if we say that all the predispositions are for the avatar to be an NFT you can move between worlds? Although the original purpose of NFTs was for them to be a form of digital art; in practice, NFT technology has all the requirements to be any kind of digital asset. They are crucial for linking the physical and the digital world. In fact, that is already happening, as there are people acquiring avatars that can move across different virtual worlds.
However, a cross-metaverse NFT doesn’t just need to be the avatar itself, it can also be different assets that an avatar can wear or use, like a helmet, a superfast car, a flying device, or anything you could possibly imagine. As an example, let’s take the Jadu Jetpacks as a “first of their kind AR NFT that gives your avatar the ability to fly in the Metaverse”, according to NFT Culture.
“We’re not solely building for the future, but are focusing on how we can bring the virtual and physical worlds together now. We’re enabling different 3D NFT collections as playable avatars,” Jadu explained for NFT Culture. Jadu Jetpacks can be used to fly around a variety of metaverses, just as you could drive an NFT in the form of a car, and all the way to the NFT clothing items you could wear.
The assets of tomorrow
Metaverse, NFTs, avatars, and digital assets that give you the characteristics of a superhero may be far away as part of the ongoing development, but we honestly can’t wait for this type of modern technology to become available to the wider masses.
For this, we believe, Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta team could really be significant. They have the people, the resources, and the fundings to perhaps pull something together like what they presented in their video. Or perhaps something even better? Will we be able to enjoy a Sunday afternoon barbecue with friends and family from another continent? We sure hope so. We can only hope that soon we will be able to enjoy the Metaverse in its entirety. Including flying jetpacks, of course.
