The Metaverse is a complex space where many users create and visit many things daily. Huge loads of money are also injected daily, mostly into brands, real estate, blockchain projects and many other assets, attracting new investors and market options.
These markets, brands, and businesses conform to places in the Metaverse called ecosystems, which are labelled with different layers.
What Business Layers Conform the Metaverse Market Map?
7 layers conform to the Metaverse market map, each with a special and unique representation that helps people with their Metaverse daily tasks.
Experience
The first layer, the Experience layer, is where people experience the virtual worlds, engage with others, and more. Every social experience, video game, live music event, and real estate is located.
Discovery
The second layer is known as Discovery. These are the places where people learn that an experience exists within the Metaverse.
Creator Economy
The “Creator Economy” layer is very important; creators get help making money and monetizing their creations. Design tools, systems, software for animations, graphic tools, and another tech can be found here.
Spatial Computing
Referring to most tools and software that allow the creation of 3D assets, the Spatial Computing layer is one of the pillars of the Metaverse. These are the objects that users can interact with, including 3D engines, gesture recognition, spatial mapping, and artificial intelligence.
Decentralization
The Decentralization layer is “where everything moves”, being a permissionless ecosystem where everything is distributed with a democratized structure. Everything is delegated without an authority figure or a central group in control.
Human Interface
Human interface refers to the hardware systems that allow and helps users to get into the Metaverse. It includes mobile phones, virtual reality headsets, and future technologies like haptics and smart glasses.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure refers to the semiconductors, materials science, cloud computing, and telecommunications networks that allow any of the higher layers to be built.
Most Important Companies of the Metaverse
Some companies can be considered referents of each of the seven layers of the Metaverse market map. These companies may seem similar, but they are different in several ways.
Moreover, some are so huge that they can have a presence in more than just one of the Metaverse layers. These are extremely important due to their Metaverse market map influence. Therefore, to fully picture the whole layers, you should know about some of these companies and what they realize in each section.
Unity
Unity is a development 3D platform, a fully integrated 3D engine, and a design studio, especially for game developers. Such a massive brand influences each layer of the Metaverse, supporting its large ecosystem and plug-ins.
Regarding the layers of the Metaverse, this is what Unity takes part in: video games, socials, events, shopping, and esports all encompassed in the experience layer. In addition, ad networks and ratings are in the discovery layer design tools, workflow, and eCommerce do the same for the Creator Economy layer. Finally, VR/AR/XR plays its role in the Spacial Computing layer.
Microservices, blockchains, and edge computing take part in the Decentralization layer; meanwhile, mobile, smart glasses, and gestures are in Human Interface. Finally, 5G, Wifi, 6G and cloud services finish the onion inside the Infrastructure category.
Epic Games
This entertainment company is one of the most important in the Metaverse, raising more than one billion dollars in private capital during the last few years.
The list of categories in which Epic Games is present is also impressive, providing them with an immense role, especially in video games. For example, its most known product, Fortnite, attracts millions of players every week, along with certain unique events such as the Travis Scott recital, which had 45 million viewers.
Its store, called Epic Games Launcher, is a game store that competes with many of the other gaming platforms, such as Origin and Steam, being a social ecosystem. However, with more than $300 million invested in third-party games, Epics takes a small revenue share on anything purchased.
Roblox
Often misunderstood as only being a video game, Roblox is more than that. These platforms contain many games, allowing millions of creators to do what they please. Since Roblox doesn’t make games on its own, it uses the business model to hold events like concerts while getting a split revenue.
Roblox is also commonly known as the “Youtube for games” since users can browse across millions of creators other people realize and play them. In addition, Youtube’s Discovery, social structure, and even rating can also be applied to this platform.
How Does the Metaverse Market Economy Work?
The Metaverse economy is deeply based on Blockchain technology, giving place to a new economic system. This new way of profiting led to the birth of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which hold certain advantages in this system.
These digital assets can be spent anywhere worldwide and in the Metaverse too. As a result, many investors have taken a lot of interest in the marketplaces where these are being sold, exchanged, buying, and selling NFTs, giving life to the trade.
Late years have skyrocketed people’s interest in such topics, listing more than 20 successful metaverse companies. This success benefited many blockchains, turning them extremely profitable due to being permissionless, transparent and tamper-proof.
Types of Blockchains
Among these successful blockchains, four big groups can characterize them. These are the types of blockchains that can be found, with their unique pros and cons:
- Public Blockchains: one of the most famous types, public blockchains are permissionless and got no restrictions. This makes them completely decentralized. Every node has equal rights to create and validate blocks.
- Hybrid Blockchains: as the name says, hybrid blockchains are half private and public. They are also permissionless but in a private permission-based system. This means only a part of the data goes public; most of it stays confidential.
- Consortium Blockchains: also known as permission blockchains, these are managed by multiple organizations, acting as a node. This type is very famous between banks, governments, and organizations.
- Private Blockchains: these permissions blockchains are known for being governed by a single blockchain instead of a group like Consortium ones.
Other Important Features of the Metaverse Market
NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technology are part of a bigger marketplace located in the “Market map” between all the layers.
The cryptocurrency exchange is probably the most important of those features since it’s essential to the foundation of these new virtual Metaverse worlds. In addition, these features helped to accelerate many of the other projects, such as NFTs.
Collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunk were some of the most successful ones, selling their NFTs even for millions of dollars in some cases. OpenSea is the biggest NFT marketplace to sell, buy and trade NFTs.
Real estate is also another important player in these virtual worlds. Commonly found spread around the many platforms, many users buy virtual land to create houses and different assets. Teams like Exolve are professionals in this area, able to create anything a customer would like to materialize in 3D.
Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t left behind, either. On the contrary, it’s one of its more promising features, enabling millions of users to interact freely with avatars created by intelligent coding. This is critical for a growing metaverse since it can help to perform many of the tasks between these worlds.
Conclusion
The Metaverse market map is a way to place everything under certain labels or tags, where everything is ordered by its use and characteristics. Of course, some of those are shared since many companies are huge, meaning they occupy more than one of those labels.
It’s important to know that the Metaverse isn’t only a place for virtual reality videogames or socialization but also for investing and learning. Users can profit from it by creating different 3D assets, which are highly valued by the community, depending on their quality and styles.
