The future of technology is on our virtual doorstep; everyone is talking about the metaverse. Proponents of the metaverse portray visions of a virtual world where we can interact more seamlessly across platforms. The predictions are that we’ll be collaborating, rather than competing, within this digital space. But is the collaborative mentality playing out in the competitive landscape?

Big players like Microsoft and Meta are racing to bring next-generation gaming to the forefront of capabilities within the metaverse. This is a huge prospect — the U.S. gaming industry alone reached a record high of $85.86 billion last year. Yet the cross-platform experience would be impossible to achieve without decentralized and immutable blockchain technology, which contradicts contemporary ownership models.

No single entity owns or validates blockchains. This means working together across borders is already endemic to the technology and culture. Blockchain protocols are also built in a modern, dynamic software environment that can be assembled with technologies in regular use today. Coded rules define how data is handled, and these rules can define ordinances across other blockchain protocols. 

Because it’s independent and unchanging, blockchain integration is the key to allowing users to traverse seamlessly across virtual worlds in pursuit of becoming metaverse native. It’s the future of digital commerce, ownership, and experience as we know it.

The Future of Metaverse Tech

Blockchain technology is pervading the world around us, steadily integrating into our work tools, automobiles, and mobile phone apps. It’s even built into the foundations of the metaverse. But, perhaps predictably, the current state of blockchain technology bears little difference from the early days of siloed virtual worlds like Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite.

What makes blockchain interoperability different is the push for a unifying metachain component. With a metachain, all blockchains and devices could be bridged together, enabling users to live their digital identities persistently in one virtual world and the next. Our digital lives would be unbound from individual developers’ platforms, whether we’re gaming, taking an office meeting, or investing in private markets.

Yet surprisingly, developers are hesitant to support cross-platform operability, even within their own games. The idea that they would support an open-ended economy seems far-fetched, but blockchain could remove current gatekeepers from monopolizing the market.

From Apple (which charges developers 30% for in-app purchases) to Nintendo, major tech giants want to keep players within their walled-garden ecosystems to maximize profits. Meta created a proprietary platform for Oculus that avoids both Unity and Unreal, but it plans to take 50% of developer profits.

Fortunately, blockchain’s interoperability model would spark more innovation in two industries dominated by a handful of isolated players: gaming and enterprise tech. This provides three key ingredients to preventing future monopolies in a true metaverse.

1. Digital Asset Ownership

Epic Games earns about $2 billion annually on in-game sales of digital items in Fortnite. Players love buying virtual goods, and most video game economies — from World of Warcraft to Roblox — continue to perform well because they have irresistible loot systems. However, that loot doesn’t transfer anywhere else outside the game.

From Candy Crush to Call of Duty, whatever you build in-game only exists in that one game. In contrast, NFTs enable persistently identical digital assets across platforms by leveraging blockchain technology. Assets garnered in the metaverse can ultimately be sold for real-world currency rather than remaining as digital loot that uninstalls with the app.

2. Universal Digital Identity Manager

Currently, cloud computing platforms and technologies only protect your identity within their controlled ecosystems. In gaming, this means you have limited control over your digital assets, let alone the ability to use one gamertag and identity between different games and platforms.

With blockchain, you can create one universal identity on a Layer 2 metachain like the Accumulate protocol. This delegated proof-of-stake blockchain adds an identity validation layer that works across any decentralized application built on supported blockchains — meaning you can have one uniform identity in the digital sphere.

3. Open-Source Core

Most blockchain platforms are open source, which means that their code is available for the public to see and use without paying gatekeeping licensing fees.

Take your basic smartphone messaging apps as an example: It’s challenging to send encrypted messages from an iPhone to an Android, much less between apps like Signal to WhatsApp, despite efforts to push big tech to change that functionality paradigm. Blockchain’s solution for sending encrypted messages across platforms wouldn’t have been possible without open-source access. Its decentralized nature meant that disentangled functionality was a stronger motivator than encircling a user base.

Blockchain technology could widen the purview to see every participant controlling their own digital identity in a shared digital metaverse. Only with a continued increase in interoperable blockchain technology does the digital future look so bright in the metaverse.

Image by Denys Nevozhai