The metaverse is booming. Even with the slumping prices, projects are still building around it. It has often been said that the most innovative blockchain products are built during bear markets. To benefit from the Sandboxes and Decentralands of the future, you have to begin doing your own research (DYOR) as early as now.
To this end, you’re in luck. In this article, we shall look at the top 4 most trending metaverse and NFT trends in 2022.
Quick Refresher – What is the Metaverse?
While many would like to believe they know what the metaverse is, they don’t. Even fewer have the right words to describe it. “Metaverse” is a term that came into existence in the early 90s, courtesy of Neal Stephenson. However, it is not until the maturation of the blockchain that it has become a popular term. In layman’s terms, the Metaverse is a digital or virtual world. There can be many metaverses, just like there are many planets in the cosmos.
These metaverses do not communicate with each other yet, however, that level of interoperability is in the works. In whatever metaverse you find yourself in, there will be virtual spaces to hang out with other people, tech solutions, and a range of different environments created by the users. Not to be mistaken, Metaverse is not AR or VR but aspects of these two technologies come together to give the metaverse functionality.
Four Top MetaverseTrends in 2022
As we get into the future of technological advancements, some trends become more and more clear. Here are five of the hottest ones:
Virtual Marketplaces
Virtual marketplaces are taking over. Decentraland, Sandbox, and Upland are just some of the largest virtual Lands on sale. For authentic ownership, assets on any Metaverse have to be in form of NFTs. NFTs are unique tokens that exist on the blockchain and cannot be duplicated since each of them have a unique identifier that is registered on the blockchain upon minting. The nature of the blockchain is such that it is immutable.
Virtual marketplaces will evolve even higher with the Metaverse. OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace on Ethereum already enables buying and selling of NFTs between peers. For now, these NFTs are simple items like pictures, music, and art. However, in the future, NFTs will represent cars, billion-dollar business contracts, rare artifacts, and much more.
Virtual Real Estate
The real estate industry is more than $2 trillion in terms of market cap and it keeps growing by the day. Centrifuge, a project that is unlocking liquidity for real-world assets to become decentralized has already called dibs in the real estate industry. Centrifuge acts as a bridge, moving real-world assets like real estate to DeFi by first converting them to non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
This is just one example of the numerous projects that are looking at having a piece of the virtual real estate pie. Centrifuge could be positioning itself to harness this $2 trillion industry. Currently, Centrifuge, which exists on the Polkadot blockchain, has $84 million in Total Value Locked (TVL).
Social Networking Spaces
In the next decade, the World Economic Forum estimates that a quarter of the world population will be spending at least one hour per day in the metaverse. A study was done by Gartner, a technology research specialist shows that most will people will be shopping, working, and even building homes in the metaverse by 2026.
On the extreme end, a study involving board executives shows that the majority of them think the Metaverse will be good for business. If Zuckerberg was in this study, then you know that your social life is about to impact in a large way. Facebook rebranded to Meta, showing that they plan on fully going the way of the metaverse. In addition to them, several other notable companies have taken a step to join the metaverse.
Amazon Sidewalk is creating smart neighborhoods based on smart devices turned on in a given area. Vail Ski Resort built their skiing metaverse with almost real-time snowfall using previous weather data – sounds like a nice place to have a virtual date, huh? Xinhua, the Chinese news agency launched its virtual newsroom with an AI news reporter. It runs 24 hours a day.
Gaming
Gaming is a huge industry, which has grown even larger in 2022. With the growth, comes the demand for new, more realistic, and sophisticated games just itching to eat your processor. To counter this tech companies are coming up with more complex CPUs, and GPUs to keep up with the demand.
Games like Fortnite are CPU intensive and as the blockchain matures, more games will evolve into their own metaverses, making games never-ending. The best example of what the future holds is Fortnite, which is an evolving game with no end. In Fortnite, you battle with other players or teams of players. The players can also create the world they dream of.
Be ready to see your favorite games go full metaverse in the next three to five years.
Conclusion
These trends are just some of the most popular. The majority of the global population falls into one of these categories: Gaming, social media, trading, home or landowner. Therefore these are the best industries for the metaverse to disrupt first if the technology hopes to become mainstream. Do you fall into any of those categories? There is no doubt the effects of the Metaverse are coming fast at you.
