Metaverse Standards Are Becoming Another Walled Garden

History is already starting to repeat and I feel like we never learn a thing. Another metaverse standards consortium has popped up on top of the existing Metaverse Standards Forum.

This one is called OMA3 (OMA 3 — Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3) and is led by some of the more prolific brands across #web3 like Animoca, Decentraland, Sandbox and others.

The MSF has around 650 members so far and its mission states that “the potential of the metaverse will be best realized if it is built on a foundation of open standards” and provides a venue for cooperation between standards organizations and companies to foster the development of interoperability standards for an open and inclusive metaverse, and accelerate their development and deployment through pragmatic, action-based projects.

Sounds decent enough.

Now here comes OMA3 where its mission is to realise a goal of an open metaverse by operating as a DAO (decentralised autonomous organization) and “is guided by the principles of inclusiveness, transparency, and decentralization.

The standards we create are guided by the goals of true ownership and real-time interoperability.”

Ok, so pretty much the same goal then.

Back in 2015, I was tracking some 10 major factions fighting to become the standard for IoT, the reality being that 6 vendors controlled the outcome of the industry. There was a lot of money sloshing around if you believed the pundits — $19 trillion to be precise.

The metaverse so far represents $3tn which is no wonder why we’re going to see another bunch of fragmented standards councils all wanting to own their piece of land.

Now I can see Tim Sweeney’s point about being in for a decade of pain and suffering around standards and interoperability with so many groups now starting to form.

“We will build infrastructure to ensure the metaverse operates as a unified system where digital assets (such as NFTs), identities, and data are permissionless and interoperable for all and controlled by users, not platforms. Users will immutably own these assets and transfer them to any OMA3™ virtual worlds freely, without needing the platform’s permission.”

This sounds like a lot like a closed system to me, as long as you’re part of the group of companies building on their infrastructure.

For an industry that preaches about collaboration and community, there are an awful lot of walls being put up around the garden already.

Buckle up, it’s going to get bumpy from here.