Why virtual reality is a killer app for the blockchain

The author of the material goes beyond the topics familiar to our payment blockchain service Wirex , dedicated to distributed technologies in the financial industry. This article will discuss the possibilities that lie at the intersection of virtual reality and the blockchain.

This weekend I spent in the company of a dozen top managers of the largest developers of virtual reality products, discussing the most responsible approaches to the creation of the Metaverse. This was the name of the virtual reality providing the full presence, described by Neal Stevenson in his 1992 novel Avalanche , which takes place in virtual reality. The idea is quite simple: if people begin to live in the virtual world, its rules and systems will become as important as any phenomena in the “real” world.

This situation can be illustrated by a simple example. Imagine what happens if we all start living in World of Warcraft or, for example, the virtual world that Facebook is currently working on. The social life of people, their assets and work will be tied to such a world. This means that the centralized company that manages them will be able to select everything with one click of a finger, if she only wants to do something similar.

This probability has become a source of serious plot controversy in the popular novel The First Player to Prepare published a few years ago. It describes the virtual world of OASIS, where people spend most of their time. A large corporation called Innovative Online Industries (IOI) owns the OASIS and ensures its operation. In the virtual world, there is a treasure hunt race, and ordinary people end up in a fight with IOI employees to find them. Despite the general fascination of the book, the fact that being the owner and manager of OASIS servers and databases is immediately striking, IOI could do whatever it wants: remove other people, access any information, change the rules of the world, or print endless for itself currency.
')
And therefore, it becomes quite obvious that one company cannot control the entire Metaverse, otherwise it will be able to take away everything you have, change your personality or even delete you.


Blockchains are a good solution for this and many other related problems. If your assets are in the blockchain, no operator in the world can take them away from you. If your identity is saved on the blockchain, you cannot be removed. And, perhaps, the most interesting: Bitcoin encourages computers around the world to participate in the work of its most powerful computer network, the total capacity of which exceeds the capabilities of 500 Google's or 10 thousand of the fastest supercomputers in the world. It is curious to see what happens if the servers controlling the virtual world are similarly decentralized, or if all such computing power is directed at controlling the world.

Perhaps such ideas sound too futuristic, but take a look at the world of World of Warcraft, whose 12 million players spend an average of 22 hours a week in it . And this is the statistics of the distant 2010! As soon as they start playing, they almost immediately retract: 90% of players spend more than 10 hours a week in the game. Good or bad, but this experience speaks for itself. And such economies are becoming very real: there was a time when, according to statistics, more than 100 thousand people earned their living by mining gold, the in-game currency of the world of World of Warcraft, and selling it for money in the real world.



When people think of the "Metaverse," they usually imagine total immersion in a certain world through sight and other senses. The definition of the “Metaverse”, proposed at the beginning of our informal weekend meeting, sounded like a “intersecting network of visuals that provide the effect of full presence and functioning synchronously heterogeneous multi-user virtual worlds”. Nevertheless, the visual part of the full presence is not the main aspect of such a network. The most important part - the one that makes the network intersected and interconnected - is a common, shared data layer. Without it, your virtual "I" simply will not be able to move around such a world. The reasons for the popularity of the visual component, of course, are clear: people are more inclined to perceive and experience quaint visual experience. I, however, hold the view that the shared data layer is what the Metauniverse does for what it is. And this layer will work on a blockchain basis.

After examining the issue in detail, it can be concluded that the blockchains are really well suited to the role of a single version of reality that exists on the basis of the consent of all its participants. Therefore, regardless of whether we are talking about the virtual world with full immersion, augmented reality or simply Bitcoin and Ethereum as shared registries of the “real” world, over time we will learn to trust the blockchains more and more as an objective basis for assessing this or that reality. . The boundaries between the virtual worlds and the “real” world will blur quickly. If someone creates an application for direct lending and residents of the United States will be able to lend money, for example, to residents of Brazil, the same application will be immediately available in any virtual world, since they all will work on the same blockchain.

It will be interesting to see how virtual worlds will evolve. I would not be surprised if everything begins with the construction of closed platforms, especially in the case of large players, such as Facebook, with huge private databases that actively use the accumulated network effect to protect their own interests. As with the closed AOL and CompuServe ecosystems at the dawn of the Internet, such models can work well for years, but eventually surrender under the onslaught of open worlds, just as AOL and Compuserve did not stand up under the pressure of the open Internet. And if so in the end be it, then an open way of thinking already now offers all the developers of such systems great opportunities.

I suppose that a successful business model for creating such worlds will be a model based on Blockchain and its own tokens . The second-largest crowdfunding in history, during which more than 140 million dollars were raised, was conducted by the virtual world of Star Citizen . In general, last year, funds worth over $ 250 million were raised with the help of the blockchain-crowdfandig. Developers can finance the creation of their own worlds in this way, motivate people to join their world through tokens and use them to control the world.

I left our meeting, realizing that virtual worlds will be one of the first killer apps for blockchains and maybe they will find the blockchains the most solid use. I dare to guess that the matter will not be limited to individual elements: the blockchains will turn into a full-fledged basis for virtual worlds, that is, they will simultaneously serve as a currency and asset regulator and a means of personal identification, and even management will be based on their mechanisms. And it will happen even before they begin to fulfill the same role in the "real" world. However, the real world will not bypass this process. It’s just a matter of time when the blockchains will reign in both.