This is the seventh installment of "A First Look at the Metaverse," focusing on the role of payments in the Metaverse. Payments are defined here as "support for digital payment processes, platforms, and businesses, including on-ramps from fiat to pure digital currencies and financial services (a form of digital currency exchange), including cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and other blockchain technologies."
Throughout the introduction, the Metaverse is positioned both as the successor to the mobile internet and as a platform for human leisure, labor, and ubiquity. The success of this vision depends on whether the lithuania mobile database Metaverse has a thriving economy. And we know what a thriving economy is: competition and a constant cycle of destructiondisplacement, a large number of profitable businesses (especially small and medium-sized businesses), capital flows, and strong consumer spending.
In Part VI, I discussed some of the technologies that will help drive this outcome. However, I skipped over one of the most important instruments and standards for interchange: payment methods and services. These technologies enable and manage the flow of money throughout the economy, and determine the fundamental “cost of doing business” for every business, worker, and consumer in said economy. Moreover, they have become a problematic battleground in the struggle for hegemony in the budding metaverse.
To illustrate this, I’ll start with the basics of payments. Then move on to their role in controlling virtual worlds, how these single world policies are suboptimal for the Metaverse economy, and then why many in the Metaverse community are optimistic about blockchaincryptocurrency.