Author: Abbey Research Institute

Recently, as Facebook, Microsoft and other global Internet giants successively announced the all in metaverse track, the term "metaverse" has become the focus of heated discussions in the industry.

Some people say that the oasis world entered with VR glasses in the movie "Ready Player One" is the metaverse, others say that the large-scale 3D rendered top online game "World of Warcraft" is the metaverse, and some people think that the multiplayer online creation game platform Roblox is the metaverse. The real metaverse, etc., in the eyes of a thousand people, it can be said that there are a thousand kinds of "metaverses".

So, what exactly is the metaverse? After a lot of research and analysis, the Abbe Research Institute tries to make a brief introduction with this article, and let everyone know what the essence of a real metaverse is.

Tracing back to its origin, Metaverse first came from the third book "Avalanche" created by science fiction writer Neil Stephenson in 1992. The physical and digital worlds span life. To put it simply, Metaverse is a continuous and converging virtual reality system that connects the network, hardware terminals and users.

To satisfy the vision of the original metaverse, the metaverse needs to meet three characteristics:

1) Permanent existence, this virtual space is parallel to the real world, and exists in parallel when necessary in the time dimension;

2) Decentralization, this virtual space is not transferred by the subjective will of a certain service subject, it is a space jointly operated and maintained by independent individuals all over the world;

3) Economic system, this virtual space must have an independent closed-loop economic system that can create incremental value outside of reality.

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Metaverse lacking the underlying architecture of the blockchain has no soul

Why can blockchain technology become the underlying architecture of the Metaverse? The Abbey Research Institute provides reference perspectives from the following five dimensions:

1. Confirmation of data rights. The non-tamperable, open and transparent, traceable and distributed bookkeeping features of the blockchain allow massive data to be effectively confirmed, thereby providing effective support for data assetization;

Second, the programmable society. The smart contract of the blockchain provides a program script that can be automatically executed. The program will automatically trigger the execution conditions according to the code, which not only ensures that all interactive behaviors in the blockchain decentralized environment are credible, but also provides currency It has laid the foundation for the programmability of financial systems, financial systems, and even complex social systems in the future. Only when currency, finance, and even society evolve toward programmability, can a complete metaverse society based on the blockchain architecture become a reality;

3. Everything is on the chain. The NFT of the blockchain provides an effective solution for mapping real assets to the chain. Users can NFT real assets through NFT casting standards such as ERC721, thereby realizing the connection and convergence of the real and virtual worlds. Moreover, NFT also allows blockchain technology to break the circle and continuously extend the scene to the real world art circle, architectural circle, entertainment circle, etc., which can accelerate the integration of the real world and the virtual world.

Fourth, the economic system. The Token pass model of the blockchain builds the possibility of realizing an independent closed-loop economic system for the virtual world. Token's distribution model and governance mechanism based on rewards and punishments can encourage early ecological developers to contribute code and products, and at the same time, it can contribute to the sustainable market operation of the ecology. Growth provides great community security. An excellent Token economic model can solve the problem of product financing in the early stage and also provide talent, technology and operational support for the later product development. This is undoubtedly a cross-generational progress in the highly introverted entrepreneurial environment in the real world.

5. Combinable economic forms. The open source and open programming foundation of the blockchain makes it a composable economic form. This makes the development of DeFi and NFT in the blockchain will be like the outbreak of the Cambrian period, quickly deriving various product forms based on the composability of its market, and providing a steady stream of innovation factors for the growth of the market.

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There are many possibilities in the metaverse social form based on blockchain

At this point, everyone must be curious, what is the current development status of the metaverse society based on blockchain? Next, the Abbey Research Institute will let everyone have a glimpse of the various metaverse gameplays that have been derived so far and the possibility of its future evolution from the aspects of the infrastructure, applications, and evolution forms that constitute the metaverse.

1. Infrastructure

1) Public chain:There is no doubt that the public chain is an essential infrastructure for building a trusted data environment for the blockchain. A complex metaverse society also needs the support of multiple public chains. When a public chain cannot meet the carrying capacity required for its operation Under the premise, side chain, Layer 2, rollup, cross-chain and other technologies will become the underlying infrastructure supporting the metaverse ecology in the competition and cooperation relationship.

At present, there are Flow, enjin, Near, Avalanche, Harmoney and other public chains in the blockchain ecosystem, all of which cater to the basic conditions required by the metaverse in their underlying architecture. For example: Flow supports the ERC721 protocol and uses its lower transaction rate and higher throughput advantages to launch NBA top shot, which is a blockchain-based NBA digital collection platform. After its launch, it has attracted a large number of NBA stars and their fans. With support, a single NFT work even fetched a sky-high price of $208,000. This makes the innovative form of NFT carrying assets quickly out of the circle, and promotes the penetration of blockchain technology into the traditional Internet field. Of course, the technological breakthroughs of Flow alone are not enough. For example, enjin’s improvement on the ERC1155 protocol, Near’s innovative gameplay on the Mintbase platform, etc., are all laying the foundation for the construction of the NFT metaverse society.

However, to carry a metaverse social form, it is obviously not enough to rely on a public chain alone. How to communicate between chains across chains, how to interact with off-chain data and on-chain protocols, how to improve the threshold and experience of on-chain interaction, data How to efficiently distribute storage and other issues are the answers to be handed over by Players clustered on the public chain infrastructure track.

2) Domain name:Recently, ENS has thrown a huge amount of airdrops, making it a smash hit in the circle, but many people have not thought clearly about the relationship between the domain name and the metaverse. You must know that in an anonymous address world consisting of 40 letters, it seems to be open and transparent, but it is as chaotic as looking for a needle in a haystack. This is obviously not feasible in the Metaverse society. The domain name system can map complicated and hard-to-remember long strings of addresses into short and easy-to-remember addresses, which can give digital characters in the Metaverse world social identities, brand status, etc., and at the same time greatly facilitate the interaction between people in the virtual world. Even a domain name can be a wormhole into multiple metaverse worlds. Speaking of which, there is no need to go into too much detail about the value and significance of domain names in the metaverse. The key point is that domain names that are easy to read and easy to remember are still scarce resources that everyone is vying for in the virtual world. At present, the domain name ecology has ENS solutions based on the Ethereum chain, and DAS services based on Nervous, etc., are all deployed here.

In addition, in terms of infrastructure, there are various protocol standards for convenient interaction, as well as infrastructure components such as distributed storage, L2, cross-chain, Oracle, etc.

2. Application form

Compared with the obscure infrastructure, most people who come into contact with the "Metaverse" must be at the application layer. Compared with VR+fitness, VR+education, VR+shopping and other experience-focused application scenarios derived from traditional Internet based on VR, the interesting gameplay related to blockchain track and chain games makes people see the realization of economic closed loop in the virtual world. possibility.

1) How to play 1: Avatar NFT.When it comes to avatars, many people can naturally associate them with Cryptopunk. These pixel avatars generated by computer simulations often command sky-high prices of millions of dollars, which is amazing. If the encryption bigwigs snap up punk auctions at high prices just to compete for their social identities on twitter, then the value of such avatar applications in the Metaverse world will be rich. To be precise, the avatar application in the virtual world should be called a digital avatar, which represents everything about a person in the virtual world. In fact, lavar labs, the team behind Cryptopunk, has launched Meebits, a 3D virtual avatar application, which is almost the same as the underlying logic of Punks explosion. Meebits will become digital avatars in the three-dimensional virtual world, representing the user's identity, image, brand, etc. etc., will become the traffic portal for users to enter the metaverse world, and its value is self-evident.

2) How to play 2: GameFi.The game can quickly substitute users into a closed-loop virtual scene, which is undoubtedly the best way to popularize the Metaverse. I believe that many people are not unfamiliar with a blockchain game called Axie infinity. As of now, the economic income created by this game in one day has exceeded the glory of the king. Compared with the glory of the king with hundreds of millions of users, Axie infinity is just a pet-raising PK game with a simple page. The key to its success is its subversive reconstruction of the ecological structure of the game. Games such as King of Glory are value-added consumption for game manufacturers to exchange experience for users. Axie infinity decentralizes game props, game characters, and game attributes. Compared with the traditional game model, the advantages of such games in terms of accepting new ones, retaining old ones, transforming, advertising, etc. are nothing less than a dimensionality reduction blow. Of course, the prerequisite for the GameFi ecosystem of the blockchain to have a closed-loop economic model is its excellent application of the NFT asset circulation mechanism and the Token pass model.

3) How to play 3: virtual city.Just imagine that on a piece of undeveloped land, everyone can buy, sell and trade land freely. After that, they can build shopping malls on their own land, hold art exhibitions, rent out building facades to advertise, etc., everything is like society Just like reorganizing and rebuilding, I can't help but feel cool when I think about it. In fact, such virtual cities are rising one by one in the blockchain world, the typical one being Decentraland. We can freely trade land, NFT and other collectibles on Decentraland, hold art exhibition parties, etc., which is equivalent to completing a 1:1 perfect reproduction of the traditional world economic model in the virtual world. Of course, the final carrier of the metaverse world must be a virtual city, and the avatar, gamefi, etc. mentioned above will be combined into this world as basic elements.

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The catalytic effect of industrialized services on the development of the Metaverse cannot be underestimated

In the last part, let’s talk about the “acceleration” of industrialized services to a purely digital native world. The industrialized services here refer to the service parts other than the original digital world technology, such as: NFT transaction matching platform, Metaverse architectural design service, gamefi DAO organization, etc. The fundamental reason why the intervention of industrial services is needed is that a metaverse ecology built by pure technology is not developing as fast as we imagined, and the constraints of technology in terms of expansion, performance, security, and privacy may exist for many years. In the process, the industrial service format will play the role of the breaker. For example, in 2020, the DeFi summer brought by the liquidity mining mechanism.

1) NFT trading platform:NFT assets are naturally illiquid, and the existence of a platform that can improve the liquidity of NFT assets is obvious. Everyone is familiar with a trading platform like Opensea, which has occupied the top three places in the ETH consumption list for a long time. Various popular NFT collectibles can be exhibited on Opensea. Users who like it can send offers to sellers, and the platform will collect during the matching process. A certain handling fee. Being an NFT trading platform can gather traffic to a certain extent, create hot topics, create focus IPs and improve the liquidity of NFT. But this is not enough. The NFT trading platform may carry out various DeFi attempts in the future to further strengthen the liquidity of NFT. For example: the NFT fragmentation protocol can convert the ERC721 protocol into an ERC20 token and then combine it into the DeFi market.

2) DAO organization:Although the encrypted world has imagined a fully distributed DAO organization for a long time, in the short term, it is the game guild organizations that help GameFi’s ecological operation that really bring the value of the DAO organization into its mechanism. Axie infinity encountered a fatal problem after operating well-known. The price of governance tokens was too high, which caused new users to enter the market and could not even get the most basic three small pets. If it is too high, it is destined to have a limited life cycle. In response to this situation, a game guild organization called YGG provides an item rental service. Users rent pets or items to fight to obtain income, and finally share the income with the guild in proportion. Such a DAO organization uses the form of offline business matching to solve the problem of insufficient operation mechanism of chain games on the pure chain, and has also become an indispensable part of game incubation, game generation, game drainage, and game operation.

3) Other peripherals:In addition to the above-mentioned industrial services, this market has also derived various services around Metaverse City, such as: digital artwork designers, digital venue architects, digital venue operators, advertising service agencies, etc., which seem to be The actual value of the surrounding industrial organizations that are constantly enriching the format of the metaverse will far exceed what we think.

Through the analysis of the current popular gameplay of the Metaverse ecology one by one, it is not difficult to see that compared with the advantages established by the traditional Internet industry based on VR hardware and 3D game rendering technology, the development of the Metaverse in the blockchain ecology is remarkable. Looking at the outside, both the technical content and the direct sensory experience are far from the Internet, but if you look at the core, you will find an amazing fact: the metaverse without the underlying blockchain technology has no soul, and the block chain The decentralized creator economic system created by the chain is accelerating the development of leading the metaverse world.