The Metaverse belongs to you
Corporations will do their best to restrict you to their universe and it's time we start fighting to stay free
Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash
The world is unfair and full of monopolies. An invisible example is the passport. By being born in a certain country, your life expectancy, access to capital, sanitation and medical services goes up drastically.
There is nothing we can do about these physical constraints. The geographical division of countries have been in equilibrium for decades.
When internet became a thing, these boundaries were dissolved to some extent. Flow of information and funds became easier and more accessible. You can access to research from top universities on Arxiv, sell you work on Etsy and Gumroad, find a job on Upwork and process global payments with Stripe.
Value generating information highways are lucrative for the tax authorities
Over the years, web2 companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google have developed a run book that's akin to passport 2.0. Instead of country boundaries that are hard to cross because of a passport, these companies try to lock-in users in their virtual eco-system boundaries.
In principle, FAANG is the new tax authority. FAANG is the new set of countries. And FAANG wants to keep you locked-in.
The tax authorities on the web are not countries, but huge companies that want to lock you in their eco-system.
Facebook wants you to "Login with your Facebook account" so your activity can be tracked across the web. Google builds and backs Chrome so it can keep a tab on everything you do online.
The passport 2.0 is an exhaustive document of your online identity. Your name, email, interests, relationships, fears, desires are all stored in your identity across these companies.
If FAANG is bad, why don't we move to open solutions?
It's hard to move away from the vicious web of spying companies because of the problems they solve. Facebook connects the world with Instagram and Whatsapp. Google indexes all the information on the internet and makes it available to you in milliseconds. Amazon delivers groceries in 15 minutes. These companies are hyper-optimised systems that make our life easy. It's tempting to sign a deal with the devil, at the cost of your identity.
Email too, although an open-protocol, works in the same way because of monopolies. How many times have you changed your primary email? The gmail one.
Metaverse is the next iteration of online interactions
Online communication is a low-bandwidth medium. The concept of the Metaverse is to increase this bandwidth. This is a tested model because it works with online games. In our opinion, it works because it increases bandwidth of communications by incorporating non-verbals.
Like all other iterations of information flow prior to this one, monopolies will evolve. But this is an opportune movement for the people to own their identities, mainly due to presence of trustless, permissionless networks like Ethereum and Solana.
But we fear a new kind of lock in.
Your avatar is your identity in the Metaverse
When you are in a metaverse and meet your colleagues, you establish a relation with them. Avatars are not compatible across metaverses. This means that companies will have the ability to lock you in their universe, hence leading to the next iteration of data hoarding monopoly.
The friction of changing your avatar is directly proportional to the time you have used it for. This is the classic sunk-cost fallacy that platforms like Facebook are optimised to cash on.
This sunk-cost-fallacy is something platforms like Facebook are optimized to cash on.
The owners of identity own the Metaverse
Meta Blocks is an open source protocol and avatar system that stays on chain. Meta Blocks avatars are composed of NFTs and our protocol helps combine NFTs together. The combined NFT Avatars can be carried across universes. With Meta Blocks, your Avatar belongs to you. Truly. On-chain.
Meta Blocks protocol can be used by games and other NFT projects to create NFT based upgradable characters, and move characters across universes.
We have been fouled many times by big tech companies. It's time that we take matter in our own wallet.
