Cryptocurrency and the Metaverse: FUD Over Fiction

If you live on an unfiltered diet of Twitter and the hype of Silicone Valley and other so-called "techbros,” you might be forgiven for thinking we are on the cusp of an internet revolution, a glorious future where virtual worlds will be ours to explore, and money will be algorithmic and hosted entirely on the blockchain.

But is this really the case? Is the market for Web 3.0 really as big as its proponents claim? And is this really the environment in which the future of the financial world lies?

It’s time to cut through the fluff and discover whether the metaverse and cryptocurrency are unsubstantiated hype, the future of our industry, or maybe something more sinister altogether.

Metaverse

When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced his intention to create a virtual world called the Metaverse – and even changed the name of his company to Meta to hammer home his point – it was met with a great deal of shrugs and eye rolls from audiences around the world.

Fast forward to today and progress on Horizon Worlds – the main functional hub world of the Metaverse – hasn’t been going well. Footage of the environment is sparse, poorly rendered, and more reminiscent of a video game from the early 2000s than the futuristic world we were told we’re all going to want to spend significant amounts of time in.

The main issue with a virtual world like the Metaverse when it comes to being a place where people can shop or conduct financial interactions is that it’s far less convenient than current methods – such as using your smartphone and completing tasks with a few swipes of your thumb. Compare that to the Metaverse which involves setting up your virtual reality equipment, logging in, finding the area in which the service you want is, and so on. For most busy people, there is simply no way the Metaverse is going to be their preferred method of interacting with services.

This is backed up by the numbers. According to Google data, there does not seem to be much of an appetite for the Metaverse among regular people, with some other research suggesting most Americans don’t even know what it is, and only 36% of those which have heard of it expressing an interest in participating in the concept.

The Metaverse seems to be what happens when a tech billionaire, famous for one insanely popular product (which they didn’t invent) believing their own hype and laboring under the delusion it makes them some kind of entrepreneurial genius instead of a one-hit-wonder.

Maybe this author will be proven wrong and the Metaverse will be a massive hit – but adopting a "wait and see” approach would seem the most prudent in this case.

Cryptocurrency

Another massive elephant in the room, and one which has more direct relevance to our industry than the Metaverse is cryptocurrency – the blockchain-based, environment-melting, decentralized money which enthusiastic proponents claim will be the future of finance.

As with the Metaverse however, it seems unlikely that cryptocurrency will ever replace money in the way its fans predict. For starters, its constantly fluctuating value makes it incredibly difficult to accept to pay for goods and services. A business could accept a crypto payment for something one day, only for the bottom to fall out of it the next and become worthless. Inversely, someone could use crypto to pay for an item only for the value to suddenly go up and they find they’ve spent a lot more on that item than they planned to.

Then there are the scams. The crypto market is based on such recent technology that it is almost entirely unregulated. The SEC is slowly catching up, but there has been no end of stories about pump and dump frauds, Ponzi schemes, rug pulls, and a never-ending litany of unscrupulous social media influencers hyping up tokens to boost their value and then making away like bandits while investors lose everything.

Cryptocurrency investors love decentralization until something like this happens and they realize there’s no customer service number.

This type of currency may have a future as an investment, but it seems unlikely it will ever be a serious contender for FIAT – and certainly not while the landscape is such an unregulated, fraud-riddled, Wild West.

Final Thoughts

While the companies behind these concepts would have us believe they are the future and their products will herald a new era of commercial and financial interaction, they really don’t answer the most fundamental question a new invention should ask – What problem does this solve?

Instead, they seem to be creating a host of new ones.

The Metaverse and cryptocurrency are sure to be hot topics at Future Digital Finance 2023, being held in March at the Hyatt Regency Austin, TX.

Download the agenda today for more information and insights.