Cathy Hackl - Navigating the Metaverse: A Guide to Limitless Possibilities in a Web 3.0 World

Yat Siu, Chairman of the Board, Animoca Brands

On October 28, 2021, Facebook announced that it was changing its name to Meta and becoming a metaverse company. The world reacted with a mixture of bewilderment and excitement, enthralled by the idea of a virtual existence in this glossy visualization of the metaverse.

But to a small cohort of people, including the authors of this book, the concept popularized by Facebook/Meta was already, in many ways, a reality.

There are people who have been breathing the air of the metaverse for years since the advent of true digital property rights. I am referring to the asset ownership enabled by crypto tokens and particularly NFTs, ownership that is provided to users in game worlds like Axie Infinity, Decentraland, Upland, and The Sandbox.

Even today, over four years since CryptoKitties first brought NFTs to the public's attention, most people still don't really grasp the implications of NFTs. Most people don't understand that this technology can break the pattern of operator dominance that has been in place for the greater part of the information age. Most people simply have no awareness of the seismic change that is occurring while you read these words.

It's a change based on openness, ownership, and user governance, and it's a change that is anathema to the closed, proprietary systems that have ruled our digital lives until now. The open metaverse is the inevitable future.

This book is one of the first published works to define the open metaverse: a series of worlds where users enjoy ownership and agency over their digital assets, a vast online ecosystem where property rights serve as the foundation for a potentially infinite number of creations, by users and for users.

The authors, all experts on this subject, will guide you through various opportunities in the metaverse the kind of opportunities that are as important as the rise of the World Wide Web in the late 1990s, or the emergence of the smartphone as the universal personal computing device. If you missed out on those revolutions, this book is your chance to participate in their present-day equivalent.

Even more importantly, in these pages are powerful and clear arguments against creating, working, and living in a closed metaverse: the proprietary, centralized environments that Facebook and many other closed platforms are advocating in order to retain market hegemony.

Finally, this book will explain how blockchain, NFTs, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and crypto in general are pieces of the puzzle that, when assembled, will reveal one of the most meaningful paradigm shifts in digital history: the creation of the true and open metaverse.