Into the Metaverse…
As Pawthereum and the entire crypto space grows, we’re keeping tabs on what is coming next and where the space is moving. One thing on our radar is the development of the metaverse, and we’re already thinking about how Pawthereum can fit into future digital worlds.
What is the Metaverse?
The metaverse is a world that lives in a digital environment. Like our real world, it is always on but unlike our world, you can choose when to enter or leave the metaverse. Years ago, games such as Second Life created worlds that fit this description — so why the hype now?
The hype comes from a transformation of the internet that is currently taking place. If you’ve heard of web3, NFT’s, or cryptocurrencies, then you’ve probably been told that the internet is becoming more “decentralized.”
Games such as Second Life are centralized — meaning that one entity has full or most control over the world that they’ve created. There is nothing wrong with a centralized video game but an important distinction must be made between the two: the metaverse is not meant to be a game, but rather an extension of our current lives.
Why is decentralization so important?
In a video game, you might spend hours playing in order to be rewarded with an increase to your character’s rank or to unlock rare features that you can show off to your friends in the virtual world. You would be disappointed to learn that someone else may have obtained the same rank or features by cheating, or hacking the company that runs the game. Maybe someone who works at the company gave the features to their friends for free. It would be disappointing to learn this but it would not have any tangible “real world” consequences.
In a decentralized metaverse, there would be no centralized entity to be hacked and no authority to turn corrupt. Instead, the metaverse operates on protocols that are governed by everyone who participates in the world. You could guarantee that a character who is equipped with a specific feature truly earned that feature (that’s where NFT’s would come into the picture).
So you can think of the metaverse as a digital world that is powered by decentralized technology to ensure that what happens inside of the world is fair and secure. That opens up a lot of possibilities that are not possible in our “real world.”
Who would use the metaverse?
This is the same sort of question that was asked about people who were using the internet in the early ’90s. The metaverse is another form of sharing information and experiences.
Take a baseball card collector. Before the internet, the baseball card collector would need to spend a lot of time and energy to connect with their community. To find new cards to purchase or trade, they would need to go to conventions or find other collectors to engage within the real world. If the collector wanted to show off their collection, people would need to physically visit the shrine of cards in their home, or the collector would need to publish photos of their collection in a niche magazine.
In the time of the internet, this changed significantly. Communities could be found and engaged with on the internet. Homepages that showcased collections were free to display to the world instantly. When Web 2.0 hit the scene, eBay made it easy to buy and trade cards with other collectors. The internet changed it all.
Web3 and the metaverse is the next evolution. Instead of physical baseball cards, the collector will purchase NFT’s on a blockchain. Unlike the internet where anyone can publish a fake homepage, the collector can verifiably prove to everyone that they indeed own the digital asset with a history of transactions available for viewing on a public ledger.
The concept of verifiable ownership can unlock countless possibilities for community membership, real-world access to events, and much more that we haven’t conceived yet.
Enter the brands
Baseball card collectors aside, the possibilities that the metaverse creates has already attracted the attention of brands that want to ensure that they are ahead of the curve.
Facebook, ever heard of it? They are now Meta… a metaverse company. Nike has also entered the metaverse. This is not the AR/VR fad of 2015, the adoption of decentralized technologies is exploding at a rate that is greater than any of the projections made in the previous decade for AR/VR. Stripe, the leading payment integration system for internet companies, has built a crypto team to tackle integrating the metaverse into our banking institutions, and other payments brands such as Visa and Mastercard have followed suit. They understand that traditional banking and payment systems are being disrupted by web3 and decentralized technologies, and are preparing for mass adoption. The price of bitcoin might go up and down, but the rate of adoption for decentralized technologies is increasing faster than the rate of internet adoption in 1998.
Where does Pawthereum fit into the metaverse?
Animals and pets are a large part of our real lives, so it’s logical to believe that our furry and fishy friends will be a large part of our digital lives as well. There is an open opportunity to be the number one metaverse animal brand in the world. Your digital pet might need pet food, paid for in Pawthereum which will ultimately help real animals outside of the metaverse. If you made it this far into the article, you probably know the heartbreak of losing a pet… with advancements in AI/ML deepfake technology, we could immortalize your pet in the metaverse with all of their quirky, derpy mannerisms that made you fall in love with them in the real world. Pawthereum could be used to visit digital zoos or buy fancy digital animal art. Much like how the tasks you perform today on the internet were unfathomable in the early ’90s, soon the possibilities that we haven’t yet dreamed up will reveal themselves.
The biggest animal brands like PetCo, The WWF, etc., have a unique opportunity to leverage their existing brands to capture this market — so why don’t they? Well, you could ask similar questions throughout history. Why did SEARS insist on sending paper catalogs to your home to tell you about their in-store deals when you could buy a refrigerator online at BestBuy.com? Why did BlockBuster insist on you trekking down to their store, knowing you might be disappointed to find the newest movies weren’t available and when you could have streamed the newest releases on Netflix at home? The fact is that there is a new party going on in the metaverse and not everyone will be hip enough to get in before it’s too late.
Pawthereum understands the importance of decentralization and the opportunities that lie ahead. Through building our brand, we will capture the digital animal market of tomorrow’s metaverse to benefit the animals in our real world and provide value to our token holders.
— Myk and The Pawthereum Dev Team
