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The metaverse can bring in over $1 trillion in annual revenue, stated crypto investment giant Grayscale in a report published on Thursday. The report, titled “The Metaverse, Web 3.0 Virtual Cloud Economies”, looks into the opportunities created by the junction of trends in lifestyle and gaming with blockchain’s potential to provide digital worlds with infrastructure.
People are spending more time and money online
Projects like Decentraland (MANA/USD) allow people to govern, interact, earn tokens, and even obtain real world benefits for time spent online according to Grayscale. Time isn’t the only thing people are spending more of online. They are spending more and more money to create social status within virtual worlds.
Gaming revenue to reach $400B in 2025
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Revenue from virtual gaming might reach $400 billion in four years, up from $180 billion last year, Grayscale said. Most of the revenue will be accounted for by in-game spending. In the third quarter of this year, $1.8 billion of the total crypto fundraising of $8.2 billion went to NFTs and Web 3, the report said.
Gaming app fundraising topped all other NFT verticals
Gaming app fundraising topped all other NFT verticals in Q3, reaching as much as $1 billion. For example, The Sandbox closed a $93 million Series B funding round led by SoftBank. The Sandbox token (SAND/USD) had a $6.7 billion market cap according to data from CoinMarketCap at time of writing. Grayscale added:
Compared to the $10 billion that companies like Facebook plan to invest, and the amounts that could follow from other companies and venture capitalists, the Metaverse is in its early innings.
Types of metaverse
Two main visions for the metaverse are competing now: private versus public. The former involves a centralized future where big corporations like Meta determine how people learn, interact, collaborate and play. This is achieved through VR and AR.
The latter vision of the metaverse involves a large number of decentralized digital worlds created and owned by participants, which people can move between. This metaverse runs on decentralized technological architecture, integrating DeFi and NFT innovations that hold real value.
DAOs govern and own the public metaverse. Distributed communities hold collective ownership and governance.