Reckoning with the Metaverse A Primer on the Metaverse and NFTs每日免费获取报告 1、每日微信群内分享7+最新重磅报告； 2、每日分享当日华尔街日报、金融时报； 3、每周分享经济学人 4、行研报告均为公开版，权利归原作者 所有，起点财经仅分发做内部学习。 扫一扫二维码 关注公号 回复：研究报告 加入“起点财经”微信群。。 Policymakers and executives must focus on the metaverse if they are not already doing so. Many “Metazens” are already spending significant time and money in virtual environments on things like gaming, virtual real estate, and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.1 As the metaverse becomes a bigger part of people’s lives and livelihoods, financial and other activities will need a solid basis in law and regulation. Such a basis does not yet exist. The metaverse has the potential to become a constellation of realistic and alternative worlds where, as in the physical world, individuals and institutions can purchase and sell all types of goods and services. It makes use of innovations in money: transactions are made with digital assets and some of the goods sold are packaged as non-fungible tokens. NFTs will play an important role in forming the building blocks of property in the metaverse, and both sectors are already growing rapidly.2 Some of the projections for the size of the metaverse market are eye-opening, ranging widely from $670 billion to $13 trillion.3 While the growth potential remains an open question, the market is too big for regulators to ignore. In this paper, we seek to provide an overview of the metaverse and how NFTs will play a role in shaping it, covering topics such as: •Basics of the metaverse •Ins and outs of metaverse use •Importance of the metaverse •Virtual property rights considerationsIntroduction 3Q: What is the metaverse? The metaverse employs new technology to bridge gaps between the physical and virtual worlds, allowing colleagues to work together, students to learn together, and friends to socialize together in a more realistic, natural way than the current internet offers (see Exhibit 1). Today’s metaverse contains humanoid avatars meeting in a multitude of different virtual reality environments. The most significant use case is gaming, with games like Fortnite enjoying three to eight million daily users.4 The metaverse of tomorrow may span many more use cases, driven by easy connections between digital worlds (portability) and the integration of digital and physical worlds through the use of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and the internet of things (IoT). The term “metaverse” was coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash.” It portrays a dystopian world in which users’ avatars are proxies for their social status and wealth, and a subset of users become addicted to the metaverse and effectively abandon the physical world for virtual reality.5 The work of fiction points to real risks within the metaverse, and to avoid a dystopian outcome, developers of the metaverse should seek to have the digital world enhance the real lives of those who use it even if it offers an immersive experience. In contrast, some espouse a more utopian vision for the metaverse, where virtual worlds are seamlessly integrated, with individuals retaining control and autonomy over their digital selves. These optimists imagine virtual worlds built on top of a new iteration of the internet designated “Web3.” While currently more of an idea than a firm reality, developers envision Web3 as the next generation of the internet with a focus on decentralization, open access, and interconnectivity between systems. The name Web3 is meant to distinguish it from Web 2.0, the current version of the internet, in which a few closed and centralized platforms dominate total value. Where the metaverse and Web3 may align to have the greatest impact is in the area of payments. The lack of an embedded payments infrastructure encouraged some business models to rely on excessive advertisement, data collection, and privacy Basics of the meta