How the Metaverse Can be Built on the Blockchain
Ever since news of giants in different industries, such as Walmart, McDonald’s and Facebook, now known as Meta, entering the metaverse have been announced, the curiosity of many has been piqued.
The metaverse is a combination of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) that make for a fully interactive virtual world wherein any type of content can be placed. On top of providing various businesses with a unique avenue where they can interact with their consumers, people will have a brand-new playground to entertain themselves with—one wherein they can create and nurture social and business relationships.
“Given a lot of the metaverse technology is really coming out of the gaming sector that is largely a consumer space, we see this largely being adopted a little bit from largely a consumer perspective. And we see that consumer perspective then blending into enterprise,” experiential reality (XR) platform Omniscape COO Ray Estep said in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
There are still several years before the metaverse can actually be used by everyone. This is largely due to technological challenges that have yet to be overcome. For instance, the devices through which the metaverse could be accessed are still in development. There is also a huge problem with slow Internet connection that can hardly support the metaverse.
“VR headsets do matter. They are profound, even though the ones we’ve got today are kind of only just coming out of the prototype stage that’s still a bit hot and sweaty to wear… At some point, they’ve become lightweight specs. Three years from now, 5G [can be] projected on there, and then, they will take off,” Sine Wave CEO Rohan Freeman predicted.
One large hurdle that needs to be conquered is what technology can support the metaverse and the high volume of transactions and massive amount of data it will require to operate and will generate once it is up and running.
Blockchain technology is a prime candidate for this. However, it needs to be able to scale in order to efficiently hold up the metaverse. Right now, popular blockchains are unscalable and offer small block sizes, low throughput measured in the number of transactions per second (tps) and expensive transaction fees.
“We’re going to need, for example, blockchains that can support a volume of transactions in an efficient manner… Blockchain is a technology, and I think that it’s going to have to evolve. It allows us to start having that—it allows you to buy something digital and track ownership, which is going to allow you to resell it and trade it and do a bunch of other use cases that were really hard to do before,” Artur Souza, Vice President for Engineering of Meta, pointed out.
For instance, ETH can only complete about 70 transactions per second (tps) at fees of over $20 per transaction. BTC, likewise, has a 4MB block size cap, a maximum of 7 tps and fees of less than $2 per transaction. Even at $1 per transaction, it would still be impractical to use with millions of daily transactions at stake.
BSV, on the other hand, has focused on developing its blockchain rather than focusing on popularity or a high price value for cryptocurrency trading. At present, record-breaking 4GB blocks are already being mined on the BSV blockchain at a throughput of up to 50,000 tps and fees of infinitesimal fractions of a penny.
“When we looked at all the different types of protocols for different types of blockchains, we made a business and technical decision. And honestly, BSV, it was super fast, it was super scalable, it was super inexpensive,” Omniscape Founder and CEO Robert Rice revealed.
And this is just the beginning. With the goal of having terabyte-sized blocks and millions of tps in the future, the metaverse could certainly be built on the BSV blockchain. Scalability is key to hastening the actual use of the metaverse.
