The continued shift of game developer monetization is a key dynamic within this growth trend. Players are increasingly moving away from paying to play premium games towards free games, which developers monetize by selling players in-game items to enhance gameplay or social status within these virtual worlds.
A new paradigm allows users to own their digital assets as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), trade them with others in the game, and carry them to other digital experiences, creating an entirely new free-market internet-native economy that can be monetized in the physical world.
Metaverse virtual economies.
- Payment Networks: Web 3.0 metaverse economies can use their own digital currency, like MANA, or the currency of the layer one base crypto cloud economy platform they’re built on, such as Ethereum (ETH) or Solana (SOL).
- Decentralized Finance: Decentralized exchanges allow users to trade in- game items while lending platforms allow users to take out loans on their virtual land.
- NFT Sovereign Goods: Players can purchase NFTs from other creators and bring them into other virtual worlds to be put on display or sold.
- Decentralized Governance: Legal frameworks take back control of the digital economies from centralized corporations and allow a global network of Web 3.0 metaverse users to decide the rules of their collectively owned virtual space.
- Decentralized Cloud: File storage solutions such as Filecoin give Web 3.0 metaverse worlds a decentralized infrastructure solution to store data while services like Livepeer give virtual worlds decentralized video transcoding infrastructure.
- Self-Sovereign Identity: Internet-native social reputation coin (“creator coins”) data from other platforms may be transferred into the Metaverse and used for identity or credit scoring.
The market opportunity for bringing the Metaverse to life may be worth over $1 trillion in annual revenue and may compete with Web 2.0 companies worth ~$15 trillion in market value today
https://grayscale.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Grayscale_Metaverse_Report_Nov2021.pdf