How do you define The Metaverse?

A Boson Protocol Thought Piece

Boson Protocol facilitates the decentralized exchange of any physical, digital or on-chain Thing in a common interoperable format. As the boundaries between the physical and digital world blur, it becomes ever more important to enable peer-to-peer, trustless and decentralized commerce in the Metaverse. But what is a “Metaverse?”

As a team, we at Boson spend a lot of time considering what the Metaverse currently looks like and imagining what it will look like in the future.

We have been known to have team meetings and get-togethers in Decentraland and Cryptovoxels — and our recent record-breaking six-figure purchase of prime real estate in Decentraland’s Vegas City is an important milestone on our journey to be the DEX for anything.

However, when talking to other people, it becomes clear that our understanding of what the Metaverse actually is varies from person to person.

The arrival of the internet — probably the only techno-cultural evolution of a comparable magnitude — was much easier to define. You acquired a modem, connected and whether you were using email, a bulletin board, a blog, or one of the early websites, you were indisputably online and using the internet.

In contrast, the boundaries of Metaverses are blurred. There’s a general assumption that it means some kind of shared experience of a digital space. But there’s a lot of confusion around which locations, ideas and spaces fit the definition, and which don’t.

Let’s start with the origin of the word: a portmanteau of ‘meta’ (beyond), and ‘verse’ (from ‘universe’) — implying a world beyond the physical realm in which we find ourselves. While the word was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 classic scifi novel Snow Crash, the concept was not new.

While we wait for technology to catch up, we find ourselves currently within touching distance of what a Metaverse, or a connected network of Metaverses, may one day look like.

Perhaps it is easy to define the term in the sense of what it is NOT. As Matthew Ball says in his Metaverse Primer: “The Metaverse isn’t a game, a piece of hardware, or an online experience. This is like saying ‘World of Warcraft’, the iPhone, or Google is the Internet.”

This thought is echoed by Boson Protocol’s Metaverse consultant Elad Yakobowicz, who draws a clear distinction between platforms and Metaverses.

NFT galleries such as RareRooms and Cyber are 3D and give a metaverse vibe, but are they really Metaverses? They each include the interactive aspect of a metaverse but they do not really have a social element.

While protocols such as Boson are undeniably useful in these gallery-type settings, one should be careful not to conflate them with ‘The Metaverse’.

Yakobowicz also points to another useful clue that something is a Metaverse — or at least, potentially part of one: does the narrative extend outside the location itself? “[In these cases] the narrative can extend across platforms,” he explains. “It can start in an XBox game, then in an app and then as an app on OpenSea, and that narrative together creates a Metaverse.”

This ties in nicely with the definition given recently by The Economist: “A Metaverse is a collective, interactive endeavour that is always on and is beyond the control of any one person.”

Shared experience: you see what I see

The real world is inhabited by friends, colleagues and strangers with whom we have different interactions. If a Metaverse is a reflection of the real world, by its very nature, it needs to have a social and shared experience.

If you’re hanging out with friends in a Metaverse, you need to know that you are all seeing, hearing and experiencing the same things. At its most basic digital level, you need an interactive discussion between all participants, and to know that they can hear and see the same things at the same time.

Fortnite is often acknowledged as the closest thing we have to a Metaverse right now. Despite the fact that it does not have an open, decentralized economy (more on that later), it certainly fits the ‘Shared and Social’ criteria.

Some events in Fortnite have hit the headlines for the sheer number of participants that were involved. Twelve million players, for example, participated in Travis Scott’s April 2020 concert. It is important to recognise, however, that these 12 million individuals were not co-located, seeing and hearing exactly the same thing. They were divided instead into smaller groups on separate servers on which the event was simultaneously broadcast.

While this technique — known as sharding — is currently based on technological limitations to the number of players that can be hosted on a single server, some Metaverse analysts believe when such scalability issues are improved, there may be some logic to limiting the number of individuals who are present on a single server at any one time.

Research carried out by Robin Dunbar (‘Dunbar’s Number’) suggests a limit of about 150 people with whom any individual can sustain stable social relationships. If this number is dramatically exceeded in a Metaverse that is supposed to mirror our own physical world, then we might find this impossible to navigate from a psychological point of view.

Does a Metaverse need to be decentralized?

This is an evolving question. If we look at the Metaverses of the present, Fortnite (centralized) most closely fits the definition, both in terms of its interconnectivity (with the real world and with other interactable elements, such as Marvel characters).

Elad Yakobowicz explains why Fortnite fits the Metaverse definition: “There are lots of things that make Fortnite a Metaverse now… [particularly] when people stopped going there strictly to play a game and started doing other things. This is a type of connectivity and they started building a whole story around it. It has non-tangible ideas that include narrative, background, experiences: you have things that your avatar can interact with, you have interactable elements — and then you have the social aspects.”

However, the more closely Metaverses start to resemble the real world, the more likely it is that the virtual worlds of the future will need to be decentralized, because a centralized Metaverse does not represent a genuine economy, where assets can be independently owned or transferred on secondary markets.

In other words, the movie Ready Player One should be seen as a cautionary tale, rather than an aspirational one — and we should add ‘decentralization’ as a future marker of Metaverses, rather than a characteristic that is necessary to meet the current definition.

Interactivity with the real world

We need to connect our experiences in virtual worlds with the physical realm in as many ways as possible. As virtual reality and mixed reality progress, technology such as improved headsets and even haptic suits will make our journeys through the Metaverse more immersive and compelling, but we also need to interact with the assets and goods we buy, sell and possess, and bring them backwards and forwards from the real world to the digital one.

As we wrote recently: “In a world where we move fluidly between the virtual and the real, we need frameworks of ownership, commerce, and value transfer that allow assets to flow seamlessly from one universe to another. In other words, we need something that is like TCP/IP, but for exchanging any goods and services, whether these are purely digital, purely physical or a mixture of the two.”

This is Boson Protocol’s unique value proposition, which we will be demonstrating with the ground-breaking land purchase we mentioned above. Boson aims to create a freeport in Decentraland, where commerce and innovation thrive. Brands, artists, creators and sellers will be able to sell or reward players with their real world products tokenized as Boson commitment NFTs, which players can then redeem in-store as real products in the physical world.

In this way, we will lay the groundwork for the Metaverses of the future: as social and popular as Fortnite, yet with principles of sovereign identity and ownership that much more closely resemble real life as we know it.

About Boson Protocol

At Boson Protocol, we are creating a decentralized commerce ecosystem that everyone can use and anyone can trust.

Boson Protocol is a decentralized infrastructure for enabling autonomous commercial exchanges of anyThing, specifically off-chain items. Boson is a peer-to-peer system which replicates the benefits of a market intermediary, without the disbenefits of centralized systems.

Keen to learn more?

Enjoy the dCommerce Stack outlining the services we’ll need to build a dCommerce ecosystem.

Want to get involved?

• Apply for a Boson Ecosystem Grant today
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Where are we going?

See our ROADMAP and embark with us.

Got more questions?

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