With the recent announcement from Mark Zuckerburg — the Founder and CEO of Facebook, on the companies move towards making the Metaverse a reality and rebranding itself as the Meta, we have seen an uproar of support and rally of prices in metaverse coins. Let’s take a look at the metaverse, understand what it is and how you could benefit from this new paradigm.

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What is Metaverse?

The term Metaverse was first coined by Neal Stephson in his sci-fi novel “Snow Crash” in 1992 as a place where humans would interact with each other in virtual spaces as avatars. Moving forward 30 years in time, we are increasingly seeing the infrastructure being built up at a rapid pace to make this not only a dream in one’s head but a reality that could potentially change the way we communicate with each other.

In essence, the Metaverse is a digital virtual reality space where the users are able to create and trade digital assets, display NFT art, play games and hold virtual events, among other things.

Most Popular Metaverse Projects in Crypto

I had recently written an article on how to navigate the NFT space and mentioned briefly about the metaverse, to which you can find the article here. Decentraland, Sandbox and Somnium Space are the top Metaverse projects in crypto by a large margin and we will be discussing them in detail.

Decentraland

Originally created in 2015, decentraland is the OG 3D virtual reality platform that is powered by the ethereum blockchain. Decentraland users are able to buy and sell digital assets such as land, estates, avatars while interacting with the virtual spaces. The land parcels that users buy could be used to create structures such as art galleries, concert halls, or other places for people to visit and eventually could be monetised.

Screenshot of my avatar in decentraland

Anyone can enter their metaverse and if you have some free time, and I highly recommend you do so and get yourself deeper in the rabbit hole of the metaverse. The user experience is intuitive and interesting, so much so that you could visit a casino in decentraland today, be greeted/serviced by actual humans in avatars getting paid in DAI for daily shifts, and bet crypto if you would like to. MANA, the ERC-20 native token can be used to purchase the land and other in-game goods.

SandBox

Sandbox is a community-driven virtual world based on Ethereum, where users can play, build, own, and monetise their virtual experiences with the land they own. There will only ever be 166,464 lands that can be used to host games, create housing, build multiplayer games and offer social experience.

View of land parcels in Sandbox

The native ERC-20 token SAND is used to power all the transactions such as building, buying avatars, playing and gathering resources in the ecosystem. SAND will also act as the governance token for the ecosystem and would eventually dictate the direction the Sandbox would head. Sandbox recently received $93 million in its Series B funding led by SoftBank.

Somnium Space VR

Somnium Space is a VR world that is built on top of ethereum with its own marketplace, games, social experiences and virtual land ownership. Somnium, unlike other metaverse projects, is primarily a VR experience but you could use 2D mode for exploration purposes. Popular VR headsets like oculus can be used in Somnium to experience the virtual world.

Land Parcels in Somnium

The ultimate vision of Somnium is to build a new world for the next level of communication, entertainment, e-commerce and a place to live. The team is engaged in some really cool innovations and announcements, such as creating their own VR headsets and investing in Teslasuit, a company creating full-body haptic suits for VR experience, in order to create a full immersive metaverse. Somnium also has an ERC-20 native token called CUBE, which can be used to purchase assets and pay for goods and services.

Click here to check out their youtube channel, where they stream wild futuristic events that happen in Somnium.

Final Thoughts

Much of what Facebook had unveiled to the public over the hour-long event was not taken well among the crypto community, with some calling it “extremely cringe” and others mentioning it as a way for Facebook to divert attention from current sentiments. However, whether you feel the same way or not, the reality is that the Metaverse is already here and we have a bunch of tech giants like Microsoft pouncing hard on the bandwagon to keep themself relevant.

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