The Metaverse Race

Lately the world of the Metaverse has been on everyone's lips and it may be due to the recent news in which Facebook announced that it was renaming its brand, thus changing its name to "META" in order not to be seen only as a social networking company and to expand and be a pioneer in the world of the Metaverse, In addition, this interest in this technology has also been increased by the recent pandemic caused by the Covid-19 in which the population has been forced to do many tasks remotely, thus increasing the demand for more realistic virtual interactions.

If we analyze well the utilities that the Metaverse can bring us, we can see great benefits for humanity and our daily lives, however, despite being a possible great tool, it is also scary.

We could test products by the consumer without having to buy the product or move from home, it would serve to make simulations for architects or engineers, the games would be much more real and would give the feeling of playing a game in person, you could visit countries without having to move and you could see an ancient city completely rebuilt, etc, etc ....

Just in case, let's briefly explain what the term "Metaverse" consists of.

First of all, the word Meta means "Behind or beyond" and Verso comes from the word "Universe" meaning the creation of a fictitious universe.

The Metaverse consists of a previously programmed virtual world that can be accessed through devices connected to the Internet and that allow the simulation of being inside this virtual reality, even being able to interact with the elements that are inside this simulation. That is the definition of the Metaverse, but companies are focusing on taking it further and want the Metaverse to be the next phase of the Internet in which Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Extended Reality (XR) merge with the real world, so that we can interact with each other within the virtual world and from outside we can interact with elements of this world.

In the Metaverse world three key components can be visualized for a good practice (from my point of view*), having thus:?

At economic levels, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that the metaverse market will reach 800 billion dollars in 2024 increasing the interest of investors, however, you do not necessarily have to have a lot of money to invest in the world of the metaverse, let's see how an ordinary individual can invest in this new technology to come.

In a way you could invest in companies that are possibly the main ones in this world of the metaverse, but why risk investing individually in each of them and that may fail or have some kind of failure, if we can invest in the set of all of them and go getting average returns of all of them in the future.

Yes, I am indeed talking about the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF called "META", which contains companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Roblox, Tencent, Unity, Amazon and Meta (Facebook), among others.

Another very attractive way to invest in the world of the Metaverse is through Tokens, as we mentioned before the whole economic system will be based on cryptocurrencies and Blockchain, and an example of a virtual token is the Metaverse Index token (MVI) a project of Index Coop, which consists of the exposure of different tokens related to projects such as NFT, virtual worlds and online games and therefore acts as a kind of ETF of the metaverse.

https://www.indexcoop.com/mvi

Finally, I would like to comment on a news that was published this past Monday, October 8, and is that the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) has announced that it will be the first city to be introduced in the Metaverse, with the provisional name "Metaverse Seoul" and an injection of 2.8 billion euros as part of the Seoul Vision 2030 plan, with this project has the main objective of creating a virtual communication ecosystem that serves a tourist, educational, cultural, economic and civic service.

However, the most mind-blowing of all is that the city has already made a statement that in 2023 SMG will open the "Metaverse 120 Center" which consists of a virtual public service where on the one hand will be given consultations by public officials in avatar format and civil service, on the other hand the main tourist attractions of Seoul will be in the "Virtual Tourist Zone" and even historical resources already lost will be recreated.

SMG is the first local government in Korea to develop a comprehensive medium- and long-term metaverse policy plan, being one of the key strategies to make Seoul an "Emotional City of the Future," as suggested by Mayor Oh Se-Hoon in Seoul Vision 2030.

https://english.seoul.go.kr/seoul-first-local-govt-to-start-new-concept-public-service-with-metaverse-platform/

In conclusion, we can see that we are living in an era in which we are experiencing technological changes in a very fast way and we can see how all the emerging technologies are key pieces that complete the puzzle of the technological future. These days there is a technological race in which many companies want to be pioneers in the world of Metaverse, AI (Artificial Intelligence), Big Data and Blockchain. At the moment it is still in growth and adoption all these types of technologies, but soon it will be totally part of our lives.

Who do you think will win the race? Will they have to partner to win?