<aside> ❗ In a three part series I want to share with you some of my learnings from my sightseeing, investments and creations in the metaverse and web3. I hope that these insights can provide you some inspiration and hopefully help you avoid the mistakes I made.

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TL:DR Web3 is the idea of the next layer of the internet. Internet users will be able to own their content as such making content unique and scarce in contrast to abundant. Powered by Web3, VR, gamification and various other emerging technologies the metaverse offers a new way of experiencing human interaction - think how ecommerce graduated brick and motar, but in a radically immersive way. Leading the adoption of metaverse is the utilization of Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a digital asset class that provides novelty, ownership and utility to the industry.

“Meta-what? And what the hell is Web3? And why are there pictures of cartoon animals everywhere?” These were my thoughts that filled my head last year. While Web3 and metaverse are concepts are far from fully formulated, Web3 (or Web 3.0) is the idea for the internet of the future. The metaverse, on the other hand, is a vision of how the internet will seamlessly integrate into our daily lives. One is concerned about the technological foundation, while the other is the user experience of that foundation.

What is Web3?

To understand what the metaverse is and all that comes with it, you first need to understand the pillars of which it is built on. The concept of Web3 is one that has been built on generations of internet evolutions:

• Web1 was read. Your participation on the internet was reserved to be someone who could go there to read.
• Web2 was write. This is where we are today. While we can read we can also write for others to read. However, while we’d like to think we are in control we are not the owners of what we create as it is built on top of other peoples (sites) ownership. Also, the internet as we know it is one big copy machine. Everything you put up on it is bound to get copied all over the web(2).
• Web3 is ownership. This is where it gets interesting. Blockchain technology allegedly makes it possible to document the ownership of what we create as such introducing scarcity into a before abundant internet*.

This is the crux of Web3, ownership and scarcity (or uniqueness). Whereas Web2 had a feeling of ownership there was really no way of proving this unless you went through tedious IP processes claiming legal jurisdiction or told everyone that this piece of data is yours. However even by doing so there was no way for everyone to know what actually belongs to whom. This changes with blockchain technology. Boiled down a blockchain is a list of records that grows based on entries and are all cryptographically linked together. This list can take entries of anything (audio, pictures, code) it is open to everyone and immutable. The beauty of the blockchain is that any point anyone can conduct an audit so ownership can be verified**.** Web3 the idea is that everyone can see what everyone (who is participating) owns. It will no longer be possible to duplicate a song, picture or anything data-related. “But can’t I just right-click-save-as on your NFT?” Yes you can, and we will get to that in a moment.

<aside> ⚔️ Fun story to illustrate why ownership and scarcity matters. When I was about 13 years old I used to play a lot of video games especially Diablo II. I got so good at it that I managed to sell a few in-game items for actual money to people at the local internet-cafe. Then one day, someone figured out how to use a program to duplicate items and suddenly the game was flooded by seemingly unique items that were actually just duplicates. You just couldn’t see it because the code of the item was copied. The market was gone.

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What is the metaverse?