With the rise of metaverse protocols such as Decentraland and The Sandbox, the cryptoeconomy has seen a tremendous surge in demand for digital land, space, & access to the metaverse.
Much of this demand has been driven by digital scarcity – whether artificial or simply from a barrier to entry for everyday individuals not having the ability to build out their own plots and worlds within the metaverse.
Take The Sandbox for example –
There has been a significant demand surge for the plots that exist within the protocol that fluctuates depending on the location of that land. Higher prices for land are being minted where more individuals, brands, & organizations are choosing to be concentrated.
The Limitations of Scarce, Digital Land
For many metaverse investors, the substantial rise in metaverse land prices creates a lucrative investment opportunity. After all, the metaverse land boom has rivalled that of the real-world economic housing boom. Both single-family housing AND digital land have morphed into investments rather than commodities.
With certain pieces of digital land going for hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, even average cryptocurrency retail investors are already forever priced out.
Much of the demand for digital land is being led by companies, organizations, and brands. This leaves out the typical individual who may be interested in acquiring property in something like The Sandbox.
Not a Coder? Not a Metaverse Builder
The other side of this problem arises through the obvious barrier to entry for creating worlds, building out properties, or sometimes even having the ability to access the metaverse entirely. As Tom Casano, founder of Deep Technologies, puts it: “You can’t have a metaverse without worlds. And you can’t have worlds without an easy way to build them.”
Tom draws comparisons between the emerging metaverse today and the rise of the internet back in the 1990s. In the early days of the internet, there was a massive barrier to entry for most normal people from ever participating in the world wide web as publishing a website required intense, in-depth knowledge of coding & computer programming.
This created a massive bottleneck in both available websites as well as overall adoption. The same problem exists today with the metaverse. Scarcity of worlds and digital land is preposterous when you consider the fact that, like the internet, the metaverse itself is infinite. This is especially true when considering the exponential growth of computing power.
To have a sprawling metaverse, everybody needs the ability to become a builder and it needs to be as easy as creating a website is today versus creating one in the late 90s.
Powering a World of Metaverse Builders
Tom Casano’s Deep Technologies has been developing a simple solution to the digital world scarcity problem. Their thesis is simple – building worlds in the metaverse should be simple, easy, and accessible for all.
Deep Technologies has produced a VR app that allows users to do exactly this – create worlds in an infinite metaverse that can even be played with communities and explored by others. Deep Technologies was initially founded in November 2021 and has since launched a usable VR application via Meta Quest (Oculus) in March 2022.
Since the initial launch of the Deep VR app, over 1,000 unique worlds have already been created by a spread out user base – no matter the ability level, age, or knowledgebase of the user.
Startups like Deep Technologies are helping the metaverse get to that next step in global adoption – just as website creation solutions did to fuel a boom of internet activity leading into the 2000s. As technologies like the Deep VR app improve accessibility to building worlds in the metaverse, further innovations could see the metaverse as an even more expansive digital space than the internet itself.
Learn more about how Deep Technologies is building for the future metaverse here