Name: From crypto art to commerce, a thriving economy is developing in the metaverse
Uploaded: 2022-05-26
Duration: 19 min 50 s
Description: The metaverse could provide ownership opportunities where traditional economies have failed.

The metaverse could provide ownership opportunities where traditional economies have failed.

From crypto art to commerce, a thriving economy is developing in the metaverse

Photo illustration by Fortune and Getty Images

Fortune_Crypto

Inside the metaverse economy, from crypto art to commerce

we talked about the virtual economy, this migration of younger people in particular towards digital economies. Because traditional economies failed where everybody is focusing their attention. This emerging infrastructure of digital asset ownership focused primarily around there is definitely an economy shaping around these different platforms. People are making lots of money, this is all about giving us the freedom to have control over our own finances over our own art sale. Every human being has a desire to create and be purposeful in their world and they should have the capability to pursue that freely and you know, in a meritocracy, that core value is why we build a piece of architecture in the metaverse and we fill it with artwork. The economy is growing different kinds of people, different kinds of businesses, dance classes, there are people who build games, gallery owners, many, many, many expensive galleries with expensive in a virtual gallery you can english people from all around the world. I see a future metaverse economy where there won't be a distinction between the metaverse and the matter of earth, There will be a blurring of the two Goldman and Morgan Stanley have put the market size of the metaverse up as high as $8 trillion. You can think about how much of our daily lives are being consumed already online. That value transfers to the metaverse, I think it could be very large so people are definitely making money in the metaverse economy today and in quite a few different ways. So first of all you have the web to metaverse platforms like second life. Second life is a social virtual world, so people go in there to engage with other people and build things. Zb essentially makes virtual goods for second life selling pets and babies. We create caregiving experiences and other kinds of experiences with virtual goods, their immersive, you can take these virtual assets with you all over second life, you can see them, you can share them with your partner. It's basically been a really nice small business. We've supported a family, we have two homes. The second life is centralized, it is not a decentralized system, Lindon labs owns the business, I am a content creator for this company. Overall they take about 10%. So if you make $10,000 secondly take $1000 meta which is really the biggest web. Two player that's entering the metaverse economy. The talk is that they are going to be taking around 50% of transaction fees from things that are created within their metaverse. That's a big cut and it's a very big difference between what you are seeing today within the web. Three metaverse economies where a lot more of that value goes to the creators. Yeah. N. F. T. S represent a lot of different things within the metaverse beyond digital art. You're seeing in FTS, that represents the digital land within the metaverse is the collectible items that exists. This avatar is an N. F. T. Now avatar creators, you know, it's a big business and some of them already last year was the first year when we allow people to upload and tokenized avatars through civilian space directly on ethereum. And avatar creators earned Net more than $500,000 by selling avatars to other users. If you think about the digital economy, just like you think about the traditional economy, you need marketplaces, you need financial centers, you need the ability to have those people within those economies transact and what you're seeing with the metaverse is you're seeing marketplaces that have emerged like open C. For example is a large market place that really caters to a lot of digital N. F. T. Items. Open C. Is anything and everything. When it comes to er C. 7 to 1 tokens. I would argue artwork is like maybe 15% of open C. I. As a user can own a digital item in my wallet and if I want to sell that to someone else, I could list that on a marketplace. Like open, see another party could come to virtual world, they could go and they could say I want to buy this N. F. T. They could see it listed for example, it can go to one of these marketplaces and they could buy it for me there. I think that just like you have real estate developers who will buy land, develop businesses around that property, make an attractive place for people to come and live and create value. If you look at the metaverse, I think that the same model is going to kind of exist there as well, you know, simply owning land is not going to be, what creates value for it, it's going to be all these extra activities that exist around it. That creates value at every realm where a metaverse investor innovator and developer, we're kind of like a one stop shop for all things metaverse and looking to shape what the future of the metaverse looks like. And we started as an investment vehicle that gives investors exposure to the metaverse, but our thesis here is that the metaverse is only as exciting as the content inside of it. We realized if we wanted the metaverse ecosystem to start taking shape to start maturing and becoming a viable asset class, we actually had to not just buy and hold, but we had to buy and build and that's what we've been doing. One of the first things we built was a shopping mall called metadata group into central and through something the vast majority of people can relate to a shopping mall, we demonstrated the entire e commerce possibilities for the metaverse. We put up a mall, we leased out the spaces to tenants, they were tenants selling digital clothing, so again, something that's fairly easy to understand if you have an avatar, you'd rather not be naked, so you go buy clothing for it in a shopping mall that we own and we were the landlord for. And we've since realized that when we do things like that, we can create outsized returns for our investors but we also create content that's bringing users to the platform France, recognized that the metaverse is like another interface or frontier, much like the web and then mobile. Now we have the metaverse, it's not a question of should they have a metaverse strategy, it's seen as a absolute hygiene factor. Must have boson protocol is the universal settlement layer for commerce built on Web three technology, so that means that it sits between buyer and seller in much the same way as amazon or alibaba and enables commerce transactions. We've built an application called boson portal which is a metaphor marketplace and this marketplace enables brands like Tommy Hilfiger Hogan and a whole host of Web three brands to sell physical and digital products or as as we call them digital products as N. F. T. S. In the metaverse. So we were one of the key strategic partners in metaverse fashion week within the central and we created a whole street of stores and enabled brands to sell these busy digital items as N. F. T. S. And so if you imagine, you know selling a high end pair of sneakers or handbag, you can sell it as both a digital N. F. T. And a physical N. F. T. And both can be traded um and transferred just like any other N. F. T. My view, the first articulation of the functional effective meta breast is not going to be virtual, it's going to be digit physical virtual landscape that are layered over the physical infrastructure around us. When you walk outside and you're wearing your contact lenses or your glassware, whatever it happens to be, you're able to see a filtered world of engaging immersive virtual environment. So that could be anything from new landscape, could be effective promotions for new movies or CVS. You walk outside and there's a dragon flying over. Blacks was the very first Blockchain built specifically for N. F. T. S. We were the first in the world to do uh the linking of a physical consumer products to an N. F. T. We did that in 2018 we sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokenized sneakers, tokenized jackets, collectible physical cards for doing it. Now with Hasbro with figurines were doing it with mattel with their hot wheels, cards. I think more and more consumer product companies are recognizing the fact that a lot of people who buy their products are not the intended end user. They are simply buying them to trade them. You certainly see that in things like comic books and sneakers uh Supreme has made a whole business out of that with its fashion wear. A lot of the people who buy Supreme merchandise during the Supreme drops ultimately just immediately realist them. And so that will be a bigger part of how e commerce evolves on the Blockchain in the sandbox. I know Adidas bought a large parcel, sorry Warner music group we saw. I think they actually will create great experiences, you know, high quality gaming and music experiences. Some of these brands coming in really actually legitimizes the space right now and brings in more of a mainstream audience. There's a lot of celebrities that are getting to the metaverse as well. Snoop Dogg blondish paris Hilton, whether it's creating a communal space for their fans together in or selling avatars and wearables to allow their fans to cost plays them or representing their brand while they're walking around in these spaces. One example recently was Snoop Dogg, he created an avatar line for the sandbox metaverse. And so we're gonna see thousands of Snoop Dogg walking around every day and that metaverse and it's a really cool way for him to be a part of the space and fans to also be connected with him a lot of architect building for other users if the users are coming, they have an idea but they don't know how to build or they don't have time. People are charging thousands of dollars for bills on their parcels. It pretty much always starts as a DM of someone messaging me on twitter or through my website and says, hey I have this project in mind, Can you help me build it or I have this parcel of land? And I'd like to show off this collection, the people that come through that those outlets are typically digital art collectors and FT collectors. I'll charge anywhere between a couple east for a project to several. Either for a project. It really depends on the scale of project that someone would like to do and the scale of the plot of land that they have and in what world they'd like to build it. Space is now is a collective of architects, designers and game developers were focused on the decentralized metaverse. We've been collaborating and working on platforms such as the sandbox, the central and Romney um and Krista what skills We also do some projects and special dot Io and framed. Er We've done art galleries, we've done social hubs. One of our recent designs that he uploaded was an art gallery for both beauty collection for international Women's Day, honoring the role models collection, which was a beautiful project that I hold close to my heart as well, because I'm all for empowering women in the space. I do get people who reach out and ask and say, here's my mansion. I'd like to pop it in the universe. But I try to steer away from that and steer clients away from that and think about what can we create here that can't exist in the real world and why I tried to make the process part of the product to where it's about exploring what are the limits and the thresholds of each virtual world, What are the constraints and designed to them. And ultimately, I think that's better for the arts that they want on display or the meeting or the event or the kind of scene that they want to create. The process of doing a specific commission Design is actually quite longer and that is not going to help fill the metaverse. So what we want to do with our community is to create an NFC collection. Your home for the metaverse, you can have your office for the metaverse and all of these will be designed by our community and put up its NFC. I'm a resident architect at the Museum of Crypto Art and with them we develop all sorts of kind of visual experiences for different art collections. What is uh, it's hard to box like anything in this space, but uh easiest mental model would be that it is a virtual reality museum in which we showcase the the earliest artworks of the NFC revolution. The museum was born in Psalm um space in April of 2020. We also exist in the central land. We exist in our am with different exhibitions and artists solo shows. Yeah, we have a social and governance token majority reserved for the artists that want to work with the museum. Therefore we aren't burdened by like both physical bank structures and legal fees to decide what the power structures are between people instead. You can choose your your power and the organization by buying what you would like out of it. We have an app dot museum of Crypto art dot com which is a decentralized web three application. Using our token, people can receive rewards for being a part of the museum, whether that's as an art collective, whether that's as an individual, Holborn messaged me on twitter and he let me know that they had created this uh space for me, insomnia space with my art collection that they had bought from Super rare. It's this just absolutely gorgeous nature space. It just feels really magical. I love seeing my art in the metaverse and what I think is really incredible is that these virtual spaces allow people to create like environments that couldn't exist in the real world. And it's like you're getting to experience like the mind of the artists themselves, you know, courts of The mission from me is just to kind of re awaken people's imagination to what is art and who decides Um to preserve kind of the rebellious early spirit of this movement and the artists to protect and honor creators that stood for a novel New Paradigm. One that gave them 10% royalties on secondary sales. It empowered them to create more sovereign lee. And it allowed, you know, given ethereum nature as an open access network, really the ability for anybody in the world with internet access to begin to kind of upload and preserve their creativity. My name is automatic sara. I am a 14 year old artist from south India. Most of my artworks represent spectrums of art and tech. Some of my very common art mediums that I used to represent. This would be three D. Animation generative art when I started it was just a you know like a fun thing or hobby that I did when I was 9 10. But then um even truly I you know with the time I just the love food are just increased more and more so one sunday I just felt you know, let's just try out what the N. F. T. S. Just to see what it is. Just give it a shot right and minted some of my pieces that day as N. F. T. S. And that's slowly collected by an artist and that you know, can introduce to me this space and voila it cannot brought me up to a place where I can have paved a path for myself. I've made around 100 pieces status. Now Overall I have made around a $1 million 100% on art. I have like a bunch of little jobs that I kind of do all based around crypto and stuff on the Internet. The market value of crypto. Art could be somewhere between 10 to 20 billion in total market value. People who own some of these very early art collections, art pieces from this, this era, I think you're going to look back in, you know, 5100 years and people will look at this like owning art from after the french revolution for example, or in the early days of the founding of America, I think you're gonna see that cultural significance emerge and I think that's gonna be one piece that ties value back to crypto art many years down the road. There are so many places, instances where the effects of this artwork and this value transfer our felt much more deeply and and that is going to be in developing nations and developing economies and artwork and creative expression that exists generally outside of the Western canon. There are like incredible artists in Argentina and Argentina historically has a government that has failed them. They have double digit inflation, It's very difficult to find jobs And some of the most creative, talented, brilliant people have had to like fight and struggle to develop a skill set that benefits them on a global playing field. In my view, it is the failure of the post-2008 traditional economy to facilitate upward social mobility for younger people. That is driving people towards these new economy because it's the only place to hope exists at the moment we have in the Western world, in developed capitalist democratic societies created an environment where employees are losers, not only are you not going to be wealthy, you're not going to be middle class to the extent that you will have some level of financial stability and security into your retirement. The likelihood the owner home is reducing all the time, the amount of debt that you will need to take on in order to service that asset as well is increasing all the time. The potential yield that you can access from assets is also reduced. People looking at N. F. T. S right now and thinking that this is nonsense. These these collectibles, this art, whatever it is, substandard and we have no interest in it. Besides the point, N. F. T. S. Are important because they provide an opportunity for digital ownership. And increasingly digital marketplaces. I saw people pursuing their passion doing it while earning a living a living they never expected to make at the age of like 14-65. Like those are the different ages I've encountered in crypto art. It is like one of the greatest hopes for my generation and the generation below me to reverse the course of a lot of a political and economic system that has failed them. Mm hmm mm hmm.