Key Points

  • Decentralization is the overarching, governing principle of a proper metaverse and many of the traits that follow depend on or result from this main concept.
  • Property Rights. The aspect of buying in-game items today is more similar to renting than actually buying and owning the item.
  • People’s identities must be able to persist throughout the metaverse without complete reliance on a small set of centralized identity providers
  • Composability is a systems design principle, and here specifically it’s the ability to mix and match software components like lego bricks
  • Open source as a principle is essential to the development of a metaverse.
  • Community ownership and governance where all stakeholders should have a say, proportionally to their involvement, in the governance of the system
  • Social immersion is more important than the actual technologies, such as AR/VR that are being touted by companies as essential tools for the Metaverse.

A metaverse does not have to exist in VR/AR. All that’s necessary for a metaverse to exist is social immersion in the broad sense. What’s more important than hardware is the type of activities metaverses enable. They will let people remotely hang out, work together, mingle with friends, and have fun, much like they do using Discord, Twitter Spaces, or Clubhouse today.

Read the Article 7 Essential Ingredients of a Metaverse