NFT 2.0 moves beyond the one-dimensional JPEG we are now so familiar with. These are digital entities which play on the imagination and open a new world of utility, particularly with gaming but extending to metaverses in general.
Your experience will increasingly be defined by your NFT avatar and as a result, users will find each metaverse offers a range of unique ways to interact. We may find NFTs are inseparable from the metaverse.
Creating new economies and digital spaces for people to explore and participate in will be the course many companies take going forward. Here’s a little bit on what that will look like.
A hot topic recently is Facebook's 'Meta' conceding it has plans to take a near 50% cut on each NFT (or “digital asset”) sale. This should be unsurprising: many don’t believe the Facebook-parent company will create a metaverse which enhances a lived experience instead of moving to usurp it.
Consider the gaming metaverse currently in development by Crypto Fight Club. Players are encouraged to mint an NFT and in the process gain access to the entire ecosystem of not just CFC, but partnered games as well. A low barrier to entry is consistent with the entire point of a metaverse, to give people a new way to play, interact and ultimately enjoy themselves while not breaking the bank. Why stick to one world or one game when you have the option to move elsewhere?
Profit-gouging on NFTs is one way to alienate a user base, but it remains to be seen whether Meta is simply too big to fail. Crypto enthusiasts will no doubt continue to champion decentralization and power-to-the-people NFT minting and trading processes.
Beyond the avatar as an entry point to a metaverse, there is also the exciting prospect of digital real estate: NFT land.
Land can be traded, developed and customized to the user’s taste and provides a personal space in the digital world where people can come together. This can be extended to consider the role of clans and guilds in video games, offering a novel way to experience gameplay and co-ordinate multitudes of people.
Metaverse and NFT interoperability is still relatively new and as such it’s hard to find fully built-out platforms. Partnerships are being developed however, which means the latter half of 2022 should see a range of options emerge for metaverse-hungry users.
Many companies are opening up the ability to embed third-party NFT avatars into their own metaverse. This allows you to take a selected NFT avatar into another realm outside what may be called home. Enabling these bridges can often result to further exposure and adoption into these worlds.
The ideal endgame scenario will see thriving NFT marketplaces working to complement a selection of metaverses covering social media, gaming and art platforms among any other plausible use cases.
You can buy a unique piece of art stored on the blockchain, your NFT, and display it in your house located on your NFT land. Your avatar can take you to a chat platform then later to a wide variety of games where you are rewarded with tokens for playing.
Here the big picture is a metaverse, or several metaverses, becoming self-sustaining, robust economies supported by the great interoperability of NFTs and users who receive substantial enjoyment from interacting with the platforms as part of the metaverse.
NFTs can go hand in hand with the establishment of a metaverse: users just need to see there is value offered first.
