Liberty Metaverse — Data Ownership in the Open Metaverse
In August 2023, Yat Siu, Co-founder and COO of Animoca Brands (Liberty’s lead investor) hosted a Ted Talk titled “The dream of digital ownership, powered by the metaverse.” The talk is extremely informative, engaging, and it exemplified a number of key points relevant to Liberty’s own pivot into the metaverse. In this article, we touch on some of Mr. Siu’s key talking points and expand on them as we make the case for data ownership in the open metaverse.
What is the Open Metaverse?
The open metaverse, not to be confused with organizations like Meta who are simply making a walled garden extension of Facebook with their metaverse, is the truest, most genuine metaverse solution. This digital realm offers a blend of the newest, most novel technologies alongside a much-needed return to community-driven communication, creativity and fun.
The open metaverse, powered by web3 and decentralized blockchains, envisions an internet where people have control over their own data and exciting creative content is open and available to everyone using a open-source, community-driven system. In essence, it is a death knell to big tech’s exclusive ownership of value on the internet. No wonder all the tech giants are clamoring to get their share of the proverbial pie!
On a decentralized blockchain using non-fungible tokens (NFTs), everything is connected to a user’s Web3 wallet which can be read and verified by multiple interconnected blockchains. As long as all the apps and games you wish to interact with run on the same blockchain, or are connected by blockchain bridges, then everyone accepts the same truth as to who owns what. This means that assets purchased in one game are easily transferrable between games as everyone can verify that the asset is owned by the wallet using them.
Value accrual in the open metaverse
As Mr. Siu so astutely points out, current open metaverse platforms are places where participants, both individuals and groups, form complex social systems that very much resemble the workings of modern capitalistic societies. In 2022, despite the so-called Crypto Winter, these digital societies generated over 30 billion dollars of economic activity and had treasuries of over 12 billion dollars in value maintained by these communities. Keep in mind, that is 12 billion dollars within control of the communities of these open metaverses without the need for any central authority.
Tally it up and the metaverse has reserves just below that of the fiscal reserves of New Zealand and greater economic activity than the GDP of Cyprus, Iceland and 100 other countries. The banking system underlying the open metaverse is decentralized finance (DeFi). This banking system gives metaverse participants complete control and ownership of their financial and digital assets in the open metaverse.
In the Web2 world (the world controlled by the likes of Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft et al.), we, the people, have no ownership and no rights to speak of. Our digital existence can be completely removed or inhibited by these tech conglomerates at a moment’s notice without any due process. When we are utilizing these platforms, whenever we are online really, we accrue value to these networks and we have no ownership claim to this value.
“We are farmed for our time, attention and creativity and in so doing, generate large quantities of data. And data is the most valuable of resources,” Mr. Siu surmises.
It is time to take back control of this precious data resource.
Your data, your value
“Data is the new labor. And we’re not being fairly compensated for it. We create it, but it is exclusively owned by the publishers and platforms today.”
The open metaverse allows for the construction of new economies and new societies with a strong foundation of digital property rights and data ownership. Ownership of things gives us corresponding economic freedoms such as the freedom to transact and to do with as we please. It also allows us to partake in all the network effects related to the ownership of these things.
All the data that we generate today should be paying us an income with all the other benefits that property rights may bring. True digital property rights provide us with the opportunity to create a fairer, more inclusive form of capitalism — a form of capitalism that can still provide all the incentives to help entrepreneurship and innovation flourish, as capitalism has done for centuries before.
This new form of capitalism can already be seen in the digital realm. In 2022, NFTs generated over 24 billion dollars of sales. The majority of those revenues went to the creators and owners of these digital assets themselves and not the platform distributing them. on the contrary, Web2 platforms such as Spotify paid only a third of that to its creators in the same year.
The discrepancy in value accrual between the Web2 and Web3 worlds is staggering. Data rights and data ownership in the open metaverse promise to direct value to the content creators and owners who so painstakingly strive to entertain us day in and day out.
Because of thought leaders such as Mr. Siu, the balance of power is shifting. Liberty Metaverse is positioning to become a portal for content creators to capitalize on this value shift as we all begin to take back our most valuable resource — our data.
Thank you, Mr. Yat Siu and Animoca Brands for continuing to be such incredible partners to Liberty on our journey into the open metaverse!
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