Investment behemoth Greyscale published a report today on how Metaverse will shape gaming and the digital world into the future. It stated that most of the projected $400 billion revenue would be on in-game spending. The Metaverse report, headed up by David Grider, head of research at Greyscale, gave the following interpretation of just exactly what the Metaverse is: “Crypto cloud economies are the next emerging market investment frontier and the Metaverse is at the forefront of this Web 3.0 internet evolution. The Metaverse is a set of interconnected, experiential, 3D virtual worlds where people located anywhere can socialize in real-time to form a persistent, user-owned, internet economy spanning the digital and physical worlds.” The report highlights that leading Web 2.0 tech companies will need to start researching how they will be able to get into the Metaverse in order to stay current and competitive. It points out how Facebook has recently changed its name to Meta, and plans to build its own Metaverse. On that note, the report specifies how it sees the difference between “corporate” and “crypto open” metaverses. It explains how in the corporate closed metaverse worlds, game developers are not allowing players to monetise their efforts. Also, these players are prohibited from trading in-game items with others, and they cannot take out what they earn in the in-game economy and transfer it into the real world economy. On the other hand, the Web 3.0 open crypto metaverse networks are the opposite, in that players can legitimately own digital assets through the use of NFTs (Non-Fungible-Tokens). They can trade them with others, transfer them across to other open metaverse worlds, and extract their value whenever they want into the physical world. According to the report, this “play to earn” economy will put the corporate metaverse users at a disadvantage, unless they open up their metaverses and “remove their competitive moats”, despite the pressure from shareholders, as in the case with Facebook/Meta. The report gives the following extremely up-beat assessment of the opportunity for metaverses: “The Metaverse is estimated to be a trillion-dollar revenue opportunity across advertising, social commerce, digital events, hardware, and developer/creator monetization.” The report ends by stating that the future Metaverse may grow to compete with the market cap of Web 2.0 companies that are currently worth around $15 trillion. It adds that these companies may well follow Facebook and pivot towards the Metaverse. Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.