To work for everyone, Metaverse needs to be decentralized. In her monthly crypto-tech column, Israeli serial entrepreneur Ariel Shapira addresses emerging technologies in the fields of cryptocurrency, decentralized finance (DeFi) and blockchain and their role in shaping the economy of the 21st century.

What’s in a name The entire metaverse is what one might think, given the excitement surrounding the recent transition from Facebook to Meta. In fact, the new name is much more than that – including the whistleblower scandal as well as previous controversies that damaged the company’s image, as well as the advance of social media platforms that are more popular with young people.

However, if Facebook rebranding is easily viewed as a PR ploy by skeptics, Metaverse won’t be, simply because importing requires more than a public announcement. In addition to Facebook, which plans to invest 10 billion US dollars in metaverse-related projects this year alone, Microsoft is building its own metaverse and introducing 3D avatars for groups. In early April, Epic Games, the gaming giant behind teen darling Fortnite, raised $ 1 billion for its Metaverse efforts. Lots of great players are racing to get started in the Metaverse, and money usually makes things happen.

However, it is currently unclear what exactly money can do in this particular case, as it does not seem clear what the metaverse will actually look like. Most commentators think of it as a heavy VR / AR interface for interacting with other online and online services, the sleek futuristic technology we see on the series Ready player onewhere users navigate the online world with a 3D avatar. In building a virtual universe where anything is possible, Facebook and Microsoft have surely unleashed their creative powers with these 3D rendered business meetings, right?

But just for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that this would actually be something valuable: a human-machine interface that spans a whole series of technology stacks to change the way we interact with the universe. We put on our Augmented Reality (AR) glasses – Facebook gave one as opposed to the ones Google had to get rid of – and our house turned into a tropical island center where we can hang out with friends from all over the world and not access them Only the websites can do the whole experience and work in the same virtual space as the AI-powered tools that help us with our work. Our virtual avatar can also traverse the real world and project it onto other users’ glasses based on the location we set. In this way we enjoy live feeds from available cameras or even more or less good point projections are calculated from them.

Will all of this lead to a full-fledged technological revolution? Even when our imaginations run wild, it’s still hard to tell. Would you like to read this article from a virtual piece of paper that you can fold into an origami crane or stick on the wall of your virtual home, not your computer screen or mobile phone? If not, then the Metaverse may not be as terrifying as its architects hoped. But then who knows. Ten years from now, the metaverse could be as ubiquitous as cell phones are today.

What is certain is that there is a lot of work to be done to achieve this. Future Metaverse users will need VR and AR solutions, and new platforms and protocols must emerge to bring disjointed Metaverse segments together into a seamless experience. And I’m pretty sure Metaverse has to live and breathe decentralization if we don’t want Metaverse to be as overloaded and monitored as the internet is today.

Related: Decentralization vs. centralization: where is the future? Experts answer

Blocks hold the world

Blockchain is primarily a database. The databases themselves aren’t exactly exciting, but what is interesting is what you can build around them. Ethereum is the best example of this, and essentially works for a vast ecosystem that includes games, finance, digital art, and so much more. There is no central authority, community-based governance or supervision – in the sense that crypto wallets are anonymous, although transactions on the blockchain can be verified.

It is important to ensure that the same principles underlie the Metaverse, simply because without it, it opens up a whole new place for the questionable business practices we see today. Here’s just one example: You used to own a CD of copies of the movies, but you don’t own the shows on Netflix. Imagine not owning your avatar, your avatar in Beautiful new world, every second. Why not use NFT as a token proving your ownership of a particular virtual mask in a database that doesn’t belong to anyone?

Related: We haven’t even started realizing the potential of NFT. to tap into

NFTs can be used for other purposes within the metaverse as their main function is to validate and prove ownership of digital assets that can have (almost) world value. For example, OVR, a VR / AR-NFT project, is using NFT to give users control of augmented reality in certain geographic areas after mining cryptocurrency to motivate thousands of people to take pictures of different locations to create a create virtual map of the world. Sandbox, a startup creating its own metaverse, takes a similar approach, allowing users to build virtual worlds and monetize their creations. As a user, you hardly own anything on the Internet today. In the NFT-enabled Metaverse, you are a stakeholder.

This is another example of how Metaverse can enhance existing predatory practices. It’s no secret that many digital industries, from mobile games to e-commerce websites, sell visitor data to third-party vendors for marketing purposes. Now imagine shopping in a VR e-store, a 3D rendering of a normal store with add-to-cart buttons floating above the goods on the shelf. Remember, you will see all of this through a VR headset. In other words, the system knows where you saw in a given second. Imagine the marketing potential here. Add an AI, of course, and you have a system that adapts e-store layouts and ad placements to each visitor at the expense of security. If that data were stored locally – not in big tech data centers – and only their hash was sent to the blockchain, users would be free to choose whether to monetize it or keep it.

Related: Metaverse: Mark Zuckerberg’s Brave New World

Cryptocurrencies will also become as good as a major payment option for the Metaverse. Just like the metaverse is supposed to shrink the world by putting it on your VR / AR glasses, crypto is transnational by definition. It pioneered the principles of decentralization and anonymity, and these principles will be the key to an Internet of tomorrow, which hopefully is more privacy-focused than it is today. And today’s established market capitalization and user base make it a medium of exchange that can become ubiquitous across Metaverse platforms and protocols. The alternative is to use Fiat, which would instantly bring countries’ borders and fiscal policies to a world where they don’t belong together, or let each platform issue its own digital counterfeit, resulting in a separate virtual space.

If Metaverse emerges as the defining interface for our interactions with machines, centralization will essentially leave it in the hands of a single company – the only gatekeeper between users and everything). Gatekeepers will be able to set standards and guidelines not only for users but also for developers and establish themselves as the dominant player in this field. By now we should have learned that oligopolies, like oligopolies, only work for a single actor who holds the reins while stifling innovation and undermining innovation. Blockchain and decentralization are the opposite of such difficulties – and therefore they should be the core of the multiverse.