Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin is more responsible than anyone for turning blockchain and cryptocurrency from an obscure way to make peer-to-peer payments into a technology embraced by companies ranging from Amazon and Walmart to Bank of America and the Banque de France.
So when he says attempts by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and a horde of venture capitalists to build the metaverse is doomed, it’s probably worth paying attention.
See also: Blockchain Series: What Is Ethereum? The Blockchain That Moved Crypto Beyond Currency
Buterin took to Twitter on Saturday (July 30) to say: “The ‘metaverse’ is going to happen but I don’t think any of the existing corporate attempts to intentionally create the metaverse are going anywhere.”
The "metaverse" is going to happen but I don't think any of the existing corporate attempts to intentionally create the metaverse are going anywhere. https://t.co/tVUfq4CWmP
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 30, 2022
That led to a comment arguing that the biggest barrier was technological — the immersive, 3D virtual reality aspect that separates a metaverse from the Internet — and that without Meta’s Quest 2 VR headsets, “the idea wouldn’t even be under discussion.”
Read also: What’s a Metaverse, and Why is One Having a Fashion Show?
To which Buterin replied, “my critique is deeper than ‘Metaverse Wikipedia will beat Metaverse Encyclopedia Britannica.’ It’s that we don’t really know the definition of ‘the metaverse’ yet, it’s far too early to know what people actually want. So anything Facebook creates now will misfire.”
Money Trail
But despite making one of the most cogent arguments about the metaverse goldrush that Zuckerberg kicked off by renaming his company Meta and declaring his intention to turn the social media giant into a metaverse, that misses a basic point: No one had an inkling of how modern social media could change the world before Facebook monetized it with advertising personalized and targeted with data mining.
Sort of like no one knew what blockchain technology could become until Ethereum created smart contracts that made it possible to let Walmart put every supplier bringing lettuce from farm to aisle onto a single digital ledger that could show it real-time, fully searchable and immutable picture of its supply chain.
Read more: DeFi Series: What Is a Smart Contract?
Buterin’s use of quotes around the word “metaverse” is dead on — as is his belief that no one knows what it will be yet.
That applies equally to the blockchain-based “Web3” that venture capital firms (VCs) have been throwing money at as analysts and marketers cheer them on without anyone being able to clearly explain what it is beyond a version of the internet that will not be censorable and will not be controlled by big tech. Which, you’ll note, is explaining what it isn’t without being quite clear about what it is.
See also; Web3: Is There Any ‘There’ There? And if so, Where Is It?
Not-quite venture capitalist Dean Eigenmann, a co-founder and partner at “Swiss capital enterprise” Dialectic — to whom Buterin was responding in the first place — had tweeted that as “an ex intense gamer,” he’d been struggling to make sense of all comments about communities moving to virtual worlds.
The conclusion he came to was that he doesn’t believe it will “happen in the ways VCs are currently funding,” in part because he believes “most of these VCs have never played a video game and it shows.”
Read more: Tech Giants Moving to Vastly Expand and Monetize the Metaverse
Indeed, the “metaverse” is still largely described as a sort of massively multiplayer online game, like World of Warcraft, which Eigenmann called out. And video games have massive up-front development costs to build the virtual worlds gamers interact in.
Buterin makes a good point about the challenge Meta’s taking on. Zuckerberg’s betting the company’s — now much diminished — half-trillion-dollar market capitalization that everyone will want to put on a big headset and “walk” around inside a big video game to hang out with friends, do their shopping and go to concerts rather than seeing sunshine occasionally.
See also: Meta Says Metaverse Will Be Worth $3T
But someone has to build out the infrastructure, and it’s not going to be the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a bunch of college professors who started the Internet on its three-decade journey from 1969 to the tech boom of 1999. Whatever the metaverse is or isn’t, it might take the seven-to-10 years Zuckerberg believes it will.
And it might or might not be built on a blockchain foundation.
All DARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and the world wide web consortium (W3C) and other organizations did was build infrastructure and the rules of the road. Corporations, some small at the time, built the Web.
And by the way, that’s how the Metaverse dreamed up by cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash” was created: by a game developer.
And he is currently working with a corporation to build one himself.
Read more: Metaverse Weekly: 30 Years and $13T Later, Neal Stephenson Returns to His Metaverse
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