Timothy Shih

Today, those one-year-olds are ten to twelve. A four-year-old in 2011 is now well on her way to adulthood. These once unintelligible media consumers now spend money directly on content. Some are already creating content themselves. And while these kids now understand why we found their frames of reference so amusing, we still struggle to understand... See more

Hong Kong-based entrepreneur Yat Siu was born in Austria and studied at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. Both of his parents were musicians and urged Siu to pursue the same career, although he was more interested in technology and computers.

Riccitiello, a long-time videogame industry executive who is now CEO of Unity Software, once blew it with a prediction that a new Sony PlayStation game console would come out a year earlier than it did. He did better in 2015 when, at the zenith of the hype surrounding virtual reality, he began publicly casting doubt on overoptimistic projections of... See more

We can also consider the expansion of the creator economy. New marketplaces will emerge to commission and sell independently created virtual goods (Etsy, but for skins!), and to hire architects and artists for your digital spaces. Much of this is effectively in place today via Super Rare and OpenSea. 

Beyond various platform fees, the Metaverse economy is adversely affected by the policy decisions of various virtual platforms and publishers. These policies make it harder for users to spend money, maroons user spending, penalizes users for spending diversity and or using multiple platforms, and limits the utility of all purchases and constrains t... See more

But crucially, the Metaverse will also lead to the establishment of many new entertainment franchises and consumer-facing brands. This is because new access technologies do more than shift how consumers access content. They change the content itself.

Profit-maximizing strategies can be benign (e.g. builders prioritizing transactions that offer fees for being included) or more problematic (e.g. if the builder observes a profitable trade, they can front-run it by including their own copy of the transaction first).

Consider today’s most popular Metaverse-like experiences, such as Fortnite or Roblox. While these platforms succeed through incredible creative achievements, it’s important to recognize that their underlying ideas are far from new — they’re just newly possible. 

The differences in the two blockchains mirror an ideological rift in the crypto world: Crypto purists (like Buterin) accuse Solana of being too centralized, too enmeshed with venture capitalists, too willing to compromise in pursuit of efficiency.