Data Economy: The Foundation of The Metaverse
Shared Open State
The Metaverse is rapidly access to reality and anyone on the Internet is accessible to this shared virtual world. The metaverse consists of multiple virtual worlds and digital domains, such as Sandbox, Decentraland, etc. The true metaspace links all these separate worlds with the help of a “shared open state”.
In real life, people are unable to export all the posts from Facebook to Twitter. But in the metaverse, users can easily move their items from virtual world A to virtual world B. Users do not need to export the avatar from Decentraland to Sandbox because only an interface that can render the avatar and the virtual world to enable the avatar on either platform to automatically exist in other platforms.
The “shared open state” makes this seamless metaverse experience possible. Providing the only source of fact for all the data and assets present outside of any single platform gives real value and potential to the metaverse concept. Creating and utilizing this “shared open state” needs to be built on the data economy.
The Definition of the data economy
Data economy is a digital ecosystem of data-based products and services, including data storage, computing resources, data market, and independent agents. In web2, they are usually represented by FAANG and NASDAQ; in cryptocurrencies, they are represented by DATA, the decentralized data economy token ETF portfolio (as shown in the figure above).
The data economy is the backbone of major U. S. companies, and is also an important part of the crypto market. Chainlink, IPFS, and The Graph are the three largest data-based services in the crypto economy, topping the market capitalization, as these services are used by almost all smart contract platforms and dapps. The total market value of the crypto data economy may be larger than that of both DeFi.
The Importance of The Data Economy to The Metaverse
Almost every component of the metaverse is built on the data economy to achieve a shared open state. These decentralized data protocols allow separate virtual worlds like Sandbox to connect to an interconnected shared virtual reality.
Without these data protocols, web3 tokenized virtual worlds would be much less valuable than centralized web2 platforms with existing network effects. The data-centric framework for a specific public chain is something that can truly create the metaverse and bring value to its experience that will provide persistence, utility, and availability for all dapps, games, and even the realistic structures with which users interact.
Permanent data on the metaverse reality
The concept of “shared open state” is one of the core principles of creating the metaverse. This concept is important because it represents not bound by Ethereum, Solana or any particular public chain. Even if the smart contract platform it was tagged lost popularity or failed completely, the user’s assets will always remain in the persistent storage layer. As described in the Sandbox white paper, “ IPFS is used to store the actual digital assets, ensuring that the assets cannot be changed without the owner’s permission.”
Tokens represent ownership, and ownership is only a content hash unrelated to the platform on Filecoin or Arweave. What the user really has is the underlying data for the NFT contract link. This means that the metaverse and all its content will exist forever, creating a universal, non-corrosive reality.
When the user stores the content to be used in the metaverse, it can ensure that the content is always available and that the content suddenly disappears. This can extend to all aspects of the MetaUniverse, where reality can be eroded if one cannot store content safely and permanently in a completely fault-tolerant way.
This persistence is important not only for the data itself, but also for the way users access the data. Cryptographers have been making long-term efforts to ensure that the Hash conflict is kept to a minimum. If user data is secure across platforms, what about user identity? People tend to get annoyed when they can’t get the same username on Github and Twitter, as it makes it difficult for sharing and spreading social material. Can you still have the same name and identifier when the user’s avatar jumps from Sandbox to Decentraland? With blockchain-based DNS and domain names, Handshake has provided a potential solution: with encrypted ownership of unique domain names at the basic Internet level, users can safely log in to any platform and maintain their digital identity blockchain, or even web2 applications on a virtual world, gaming platform.
Data Prediction Machine In The Chain Tour
The verifiable randomness (VRF) of the Chainlink prophet is critical to making GameFi and being able to monetize them fairly. VRF can be used for anything one can imagine with — randomly generated virtual environments, probabilistic games like gambling, as well as proven rare automatically generated items sold by game developers. These are all important components of the metaverse ecosystem that can help to make it a vibrant and exciting virtual world. Game developers can easily create more fun experiences, and users can be more eager to get involved without having to worry about being cheated by the game studio or other players.
Smart contract application sends random request Chainlink to generate randomness and send proof to VRF contract VRF contract verification randomness smart contract application accepts verified randomness
The Chainlink prophet has an unlimited number of additional features to bring to metaverse and on-chain games with custom adapters. The collaboration between Chainlink and Filecoin has enabled some of these new use cases. Chainlink can now reduce the burden to game developers to run the infrastructure by allowing smart contracts to send data directly to Filecoin for storage, without developers or creative personnel. For example, game developers can use it to automatically publish weekly leaderboards, and they can also use Chainlink Keepers to automatically perform repetitive tasks (i. e., daily tasks) to upgrade their characters faster.
Access to The Metaverse Data
One of the key issues in building a huge virtual world is how users should track all the amazing events that are happening. For example, the more vibrant the Sandbox ecosystem, the more difficult events are to track. The Graph provides the answer to the encrypted data economy, an indexing service of linked data that can easily track every token transfer, the creation of a new NFT, virtual events occurring, etc. Most events in Sandbox can be tracked via The Graph. As an open-source project, one can accurately view the data available on the subgraph of Sandbox and can even modify it using their own Graph node for tracking customer data. The Graph has been tested for years in numerous DeFi, metaverse and GameFi dapps.
Handshake can also be used to provide semantic URL to users’ IPFS hashes to obtain profile pictures and virtual world locations, make URLs simple and easy to identify, and bind them to encryption keys to prevent phishing, fraud, and DNS hacking, making the virtual environment a more people-friendly and secure time-killing scenario.
Brief Summary
The metaverse is not just based on the data economy, which is actually the metaverse. A data-centric framework without a particular public chain is something that can truly create the meta-universe and bring value to its experience. The more metaverse projects and GameFi use these data services, the more they can provide users with better innovative products. These project parties will also improve their market competitiveness by outsourcing their technology infrastructure maintenance and overhead, thus releasing more resources to conduct more research and development. It is foreseeable that the cooperation between the metaverse and data economy projects will create a whole new world.
