The Big Battle for the Metaverse space

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unpack

8 min readJul 19, 2022

Some time ago, when Facebook announced a switch to Meta, many of us didn’t really know what it was but today we are going deeper and deeper into it, assuming a new era of v-commerce standing behind the door. Not being able to catch up with these things will leave you behind as many of the companies who couldn’t switch to the era of Web2 and lost their market positions.

Therefore I am announcing a battle of 3 mostly evolving metaverses boosting in the Internet space. See who is the winner!🤩

But before that, let me introduce the Metaverse itself. What is that?

I would describe it as a 3D virtual world, running in a parallel to our physical world. Built up often in a game way to be more understandable to the users like we are, it also can be an ecosystem of anything decentralized, a perfect platform for virtual trade, AR, MR, XR and VR experiences.

So let’s go to see our finalists:

As of the day I am writing this article, Position 3 is proudly given by me to Internet Computer ecosystem.

As they claim themselves, The DFINITY Foundation is a not-for-profit organization developing technology for the Internet Computer blockchain. They aim for “blockchain singularity” in which every system and service is rebuilt and reimagined using smart contracts and runs entirely from infinite public blockchain without need for traditional IT.

Internet Computer insights

Internet Computer runs on The Dfinity blockchain, which provides a secure, performant and flexible consensus mechanism. Dfinity’s consensus mechanism has four layers: The first layer provides registered and Sybil-resistant client identities. On the second layer is a decentralized random beacon. On the third layer is a blockchain that is driven by the random bea- con through a probabilistic mechanism for leader ranking. Fourth layer is a decentralized notary that provides timestamping and publication guarantees, and is ultimately responsible for near- instant finality.

Dfinity supports open membership by providing a protocol to register new clients via a stake deposit with a lock-up period. This is the responsibility of the first layer.

The random beacon in the second layer is an unbiasable, verifiable random function (VRF) that is produced jointly by registered clients. Each random output of the VRF is unpredictable by anyone until just before it becomes avail- able to everyone. Using a threshold mechanism for randomness creation solves the fundamental “last actor” problem. Any decentralized protocol for creating public randomness without a threshold mechanism suffers from the problem that the last actor in that protocol knows the next random value and can decide to abort the protocol.

The third layer deploys the “probabilistic slot protocol” (PSP). This protocol ranks the clients for each height of the chain, in an order that is derived deterministically from the unbiased output of the random beacon for that height. A weight is then assigned to block proposals based on the proposer’s rank such that blocks from clients at the top of the list receive a higher weight. Forks are resolved by giving favor to the “heaviest” chain in terms of accumulated block weight — quite similar to how traditional proof-of-work consensus is based on the highest accumulated amount of work.

Finality of a given transaction means a system-wide consensus that a given transaction has been irreversibly executed. Dfinity deploys the novel technique of block notarization in its fourth layer to speed up finality. Only notarized blocks can be included in a chain. Dfinity achieves its high speed and short block times exactly because notarization is not full consensus.(It’s notarizing based on block height)

There is a big need in BC ecosystems, which could unify developers and therefore allow communities to have a commonly generated progress instead of building up the same pieces of code in a distributed manner, so big clap for the Internet Computer. But, so far it is more a metaverse for the developers than for public users. Let’s see if their direction will change in the coming months.📈

The second place of Metaverse battle is going to the Sandbox project

Sandbox’s Current market value: $1.73B which is making it a definitely worth looking at. Sandbox is a “play-to-earn” Gaming platform, owned and made by players.

2 small pros and cons: Graphics are pretty good and UI is user-friendly but it needs extra installations on your device. So it’s not a fully on-chain project.

You can mint your avatars, NFT, buy land, create game experiences with The Sandbox Game Maker, run your events and I believe much more is coming.

It runs on the Ethereum blockchain using SAND, the platform’s utility token and offers a deeply immersive Metaverse in which players will create virtual worlds and games collaboratively and without central authority. Sandbox is providing creators true ownership of their creations as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and rewarding their participation with the utility token — SAND.

It’s gaming ecosystem consists of three integrated products that together provide a comprehensive experience for user-generated content (UGC) content production:

VOXEDIT: This simple to use yet powerful free 3D voxel modeling package allows users to create and animate 3D objects such as people, animals, foliage, and tools, and export them into The Sandbox marketplace to become game ASSETS(ERC-1155)
MARKETPLACE: The Sandbox’s web-based marketplace allows users to upload, publish, and sell their creations (ASSETS) made in VoxEdit, as Tokens (Both ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens).
GAME MAKER: Anyone who owns ASSETS, either by making them in VoxEdit or purchasing them, can utilize them with the third and most important ecosystem product, the Game Maker and the Game itself. This product, when launched in Game Maker mode, enables users to place and use their ASSETS within a piece of LAND (an ERC-721 token) that they can own in the virtual world. Users can decorate their LAND with ASSETS, and more importantly, implement interesting and nuanced gameplay mechanics by assigning predefined behaviors to the ASSETS through visual scripting nodes, turning a LAND from a decoration experience into a potential full game experience.

To Sum it up, currently SANDBOX is a gaming metaverse, which is definitely scalable and has a big potential but so far to me it is just a platform to keep an eye on.

The finalist looks much more interesting because it combines not only the gaming experience but also v-commerce factors, which I believe is a reason for attracting more and more players. And that’s Decentraland: a virtual reality platform — user friendly, running fully online, play-as-a-guest.

What makes Decentraland now unique is the introduction of:

Advertising

Brands may advertise using billboards near, or in, high-traffic land parcels to promote their products, services, and events. Some neighborhoods may become virtual versions of Times Square in New York City. Additionally, brands may position products and create shared experiences to engage with their audience.

Social

Groups that currently gather in online forums, events, chat groups, or even other centralized multiplayer games could port their communities into Decentraland.

Decentraland is a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications. Land in Decentraland is permanently owned by the community, giving them full control over their creations. Users claim ownership of virtual land on a blockchain-based ledger of parcels. Landowners control what content is published to their portion of land, which is identified by a set of cartesian coordinates (x,y). Contents can range from static 3D scenes to interactive systems such as games.

Land is a non-fungible, transferrable, scarce digital asset stored in an Ethereum smart contract. It can be acquired by spending an ERC20 token called MANA. MANA can also be used to make in-world purchases of digital goods and services.

Architecture:

The Decentraland protocol is comprised of three layers:

1) Consensus layer:

Track land ownership and its content.

Decentraland uses an Ethereum smart contract to maintain a ledger of ownership for land parcels (with x, y coordinates) in the virtual world. LAND is bought by burning MANA, a fungible ERC20 token of fixed supply.

2) Land content layer:

Download assets using a decentralized distribution system.

Decentraland uses a decentralized storage system to distribute the content needed to render the world. For each parcel that needs to be rendered, a reference to a file with the description of the parcel’s content is retrieved from the smart contract. The current solution uses the battle-tested BitTorrent and Kademlia DHT networks by storing a magnet link for each parcel. However, the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS)11 provides a compelling alternative as its technology matures.

However, hosting these files and the bandwidth required to serve this content has significant costs. Currently, users of the Decentraland P2P network are seeding the content without compensation and out of goodwill. However, in the future, this infrastructure cost can be covered by the use of protocols like Filecoin12. Until this technology becomes available, automated micropayments can be used to pay for quality of service. The proceeds of Decentraland’s continuous sale of MANA can cover these costs over the long run.

3) Real-time layer:

Players communicate with each other by establishing peer-to-peer connections with the help of servers hosted by landowners or third parties. Without a centralized server, peer-to-peer connections are needed to provide social interactions between users, as well as applications that the landowner wants to run inside the parcel. To coordinate the bootstrap of peer-to-peer connections, landowners will have to provide rendezvous servers or understand that users will not be able to see each other in their parcel.

The maintenance of these servers can be incentivized the same way as content servers. When lightweight protocols like STUN13 can cover the functionality required from the server, the costs would be fairly low. But for more advanced features, such as a voice chat between multiple concurrent users or network traversal services, micropayments can be used to cover the operating costs.

2 more layers are on the road map:

Payment Channel Infrastructure for fast payments with low fees.

Identity System — this system must allow users to easily verify the consent of an author by linking public keys and signatures with human-readable names.

The Future of Metaverse

Looking at the last 10 years on-going digital revolution, it’s highly expected that in the coming decade all of us will move into Metaverse reality — AR or MR or VR but we still will be there: starting with education, ending up with virtual marriage experiences.

You may try Chanel dress with your digital avatar, practice surgeries, run work projects and study.

Many experts express concerns about the future development of VR but not many have doubts about AR and MR Metaverse evolving, so we will see which giant will become a winner!

Resources:

The Big Battle for the Metaverse space

Written by Inara Koppert-Anisimova