The metaverse continues to be a growing trend, with the market expected to grow to $783 billion in size in 2024. Nevertheless, what the metaverse exactly means is still a topic up for debate. Many will instantly think about immersive experiences, people wearing VR glasses and 3D avatars. Some might also refer back to the book Snowcrash, which depicts a dystopian future where the metaverse is an escape for people.
There is no agreed-upon definition of the metaverse. Nevertheless, there are a few features people generally agree upon, such as that it’s persistent, live (it does not stop, just like real life), ideally accessible, contains a full-fledged economy, and experiences that cross digital and physical worlds. Especially the last point is worth keeping in mind. The metaverse isn’t just spending time in a VR space.
You can read more on my attempt at outlining the metaverse here.
So, how can we create metaverses that combine the real and physical worlds? The team at realitychain believes that the metaverse shouldn’t replace social interactions. It should be complementary to our lives and provide another layer of expression for us.
Nevertheless, at the moment, metaverses aren’t very accessible. As a user, you’ll often require special equipment or at least a strong graphic card to enjoy it, and as a project looking to build in the metaverse, you’ll need significant funding.
Instead of building your entire metaverse from scratch, one can also go rent or buy space in existing worlds like the sandbox, but yet again, that’s expensive.
Realitychain wants to make the metaverse more accessible and interoperable than it currently is. They created a multi-chain, interoperable metaverse-as-a-service platform to provide users with a non-immersive experience.
Non-immersive?
Yes, because the realitychain metaverse doesn’t require you to buy any fancy VR glasses. You can easily access it from the devices you already own, such as your smartphone or a normal laptop. It’s a 2D metaverse where anyone can casually enjoy the metaverse experience.
Once logged into the realitychain space, you can customize your avatar to your liking, build land, chat with other people via text or voice, interact with items (a bit like sims), share your location, teleport to other users, and of course stream what you’re doing to the world.
Key characteristics of the realitychain world include:
- persistence: there are no loading screens, and users can seamlessly move from one to another space.
- casual: provides a relaxed in-world experience that goes hand in hand with irl.
- accessible: built with a mobile-first approach, lightweight, and quick to load. Can be accessed directly from the browser.
- multiverse: with modifier tokens one can instantly change the in-world experience and shift between worlds
In the future, the team is also planning to add dynamic NFTs.
Dynamic NFTs are NFTs with metadata changing based on pre-specified events. For example, they could change color, or the image they display depending on the weather.
Create your own metaverse
A key value proposition of realitychain is that anyone can create a metaverse in it. This is important as an increasing number of projects are looking to add utility to their projects through metaverse experiences.
On realitychain, all one needs to do is stake the platform-native REAL token to start creating a metaverse. Depending on how much you stake, you can create bigger areas.
REAL token
The $REAL token is also used to govern the realitychain protocol, earn revenue from transaction fees, and pay for getting utility NFts whitelisted.
The total supply of $REAL is 100 million tokens, with the initially circulating supply set to 25 million. 25% of the tokens went towards direct fundraising efforts, and 17.5% of the supply are allocated to the global DAO governing the realitychain ecosystem.
Partners
So far, realitychain has secured major partners in the NEAR ecosystem, such as paras, Myriad social, and even the NEAR protocol itself, which uses the realitychain solution to showcase projects.
In April this year realitychain held concerts and exhibitions in its metaverse space together with Mocca and Paras. During the event, 350 visitors showed up, and 12 NFT artists showed their works.
In the future, the team plans to launch a 3D metaverse, integrate with further blockchains to enhance interoperability, and add a gamification module and in-world object creation tools.
If you feel like exploring one of those metaverses spaces, you can check out paras.city or myriad town.
