(https://www.pwc.com/us/en/tech-effect/emerging-tech/demystifying-the-metaverse.html)**):**

• Don't believe the hype: the metaverse is an evolution, not a revolution. And it's one that business leaders should not ignore.
• The metaverse may profoundly change how businesses and consumers interact with products, services and each other.
• Key metaverse concepts, including digital economy innovations such as cryptocurrencies, are business-relevant today.
• Risks are real too: new technologies require new strategies and new methods to build trust.
• Measured actions can allow business leaders to familiarize themselves with the six most important metaverse concepts and explore lower-risk use cases.

The building blocks of the metaverse:

Economy

Cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other blockchain-based digital currencies, assets and exchanges will likely underpin value exchange across the metaverse. Further innovation will be needed as governments, companies and new, digital-only organizations work to build trusted digital monetary systems, offer new data monetization propositions and conduct lending, payments, real estate investment and more in the metaverse. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) — with voluntarily agreed-upon rules enforced by a computer program that runs on a blockchain — will likely play important roles.

Interoperability

A true metaverse requires seamless interoperability among users and platforms, based on web 3.0 and still-to-be-determined standards. While this interoperability will offer new possibilities to reach and understand customers, it will also raise new challenges for gathering and protecting data, and for cybersecurity and privacy. It may also undermine business strategies built around keeping users and their data in a given platform. Competitive advantage may shift to those companies that offer (through hardware or software) trusted ways for users to enter the metaverse.

Governance

The metaverse will need rules of engagement for users, rules for how the metaverse itself can change over time and enforcement mechanisms, including for tax collection, data governance and regulatory compliance. Early movers may be able to help set these rules. Security will be paramount, as a new, decentralized digital world may offer malicious actors a new world of entry points for attack. Authenticity — and trust more broadly — should also be front and center, to reduce the disinformation that has often plagued the internet.

Identity

In the internet today, identity is often linked to platforms. It may be true, pseudonymous or anonymous. The metaverse, decentralized and interconnected, will need trusted digital identities — for people, assets and organizations — that port across platforms. Companies active in digital identity now may both help set the metaverse’s standards and be able to offer a necessary service. Digital identities may also be central to permitted data collection and data governance in a decentralized environment.

Experience

A shared, persistent and immersive 3D digital world will offer unique experiences, based on its own aesthetics — beliefs, ideals and tastes as expressed in individual choices. Some trends for user experience are already becoming clear, in games and VR / AR environments. Companies that create trusted metaverse experiences and protect privacy rights may win consumer loyalty, while those that stay on top of metaverse trends may be well placed to forecast consumer preferences and behavior.

Persistence

A true metaverse should reflect in real time the changes made in it by different participants, entering and leaving it in different ways, in different places, at different times. When you take your metaverse headset off, the metaverse and other participants will continue their activities uninterrupted, with (for example) smart contracts enforcing agreements and trading assets. This persistence will likely require a new approach to digital assets and activities, including services and applications that are portable, dynamically configurable and extensible.

Source: Demystifying the Metaverse

Alignment with Fund9 strategic goals

Fund9 Challenge Setting proposals have to meet one or more of these attributes:

• Prepare a group of people willing and able to make contributions to the ecosystem.
• Because it's so trendy, a metaverse-related challenge can help bring people from outside of Cardano ecosystem into Catalyst.
• Turn Cardano into an open source project.
• The centralized metaverse model advanced by large corporations is a threat to all things open source. This challenge setting proposal helps Cardano become a notable player in the Open Metaverse.
• Accelerate the growth and evolution of developer & app ecosystem.
• It is safe to assume that metaverse-related initiatives will be exciting for the growth of developer ecosystem and dApp builders, too.

Challenge Team

You are welcome to join the challenge team. Just connect with the main proposer Tomi Astikainen. He is a Kickstarter, Connector and Storyteller who helps in different facets of Project Catalyst. He is in various Challenge Teams, a Veteran Community Advisor and an active community member since Fund3.

<https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomiastikainen/>