In this article, let us dive into those sectors on which web3.0 and metaverse are creating a real time impact.

Looking past the hype and critique, Web3 and the metaverse are shaping a new application layer for the internet. How can leaders better understand this evolution and what it means for businesses, organizations, and society?

WEB3 and The Metaverse - Real time Impact

In an era where technology is advancing at a blistering pace, the terms ‘Metaverse’ and ‘WEB3’ have begun to permeate our collective consciousness. They are symbols of a shift towards a new digital reality, more immersive, decentralized, and user-controlled cyberspace.

These emerging technologies aren’t just another high-tech trend to follow; they represent a potential quantum leap into an exciting digital future.

The Metaverse - (Xave World)

By removing distance, connecting everyone and everything, and unleashing massive flows of information, the internet has been the greatest disruption since the printing press.

In a few decades, it has reshaped much of the human world, enabling great progress and historic change, and revealing the many challenges that come with such transformation.

There is now a growing need for standardization and interoperability across services and systems, more coherency around market fragmentation, more intuitive and seamless user interfaces, and governance that effectively regulates content and experiences while still supporting progress. 

Smart cooperation and governance by providers and regulators may be critical to overcoming Web2-era challenges and enabling the next internet platform: the metaverse and Web3.

Moving further into a world that blends the physical and digital may require greater integration, more modern standards and protocols, and capabilities that give people more control of their digital selves—their identity and representation, what they own, and who has access to the data they create.

Just as we use standardized protocols and devices to interact with digital experiences on the internet, the promises of Web3 could help enable consistency and interoperability across metaverse experiences—uniting disparate, disconnected metaverses into a single coherent platform.  

Similar to the web, there can be walled gardens and open commons and any number of creative innovations, accessed by browsers, mobile apps, AR glasses, VR headsets, and more.

The metaverse is emerging from our digital behaviors

Today, people often socialize through global networks, modifying their appearance with augmented reality filters that can see and respond to faces, wrapping themselves in avatars, buying virtual clothes, and attending concerts in massive game worlds. 

Businesses hold face-to-face meetings remotely and virtually, and can don VR and AR headsets to train, visualize, and collaborate.

Generation Z ranks playing video games as their favorite form of media and entertainment.4  Even before the nonfungible token ( #NFTS ) boom, some game worlds were running out of virtual real estate to meet the demand of players. 

Remarkably, one poll found that over half of people in nine markets prefer to spend their time online rather than in the real world. Several generations have become accustomed to digital interfaces, software and interactivity, and global connectivity. We immerse into the digital and increasingly draw it out across the physical world. Amidst the hype and critique, it is these behaviors and uses that are invoking Web3 and the metaverse.

Enabling seamless movement across the metaverse

One of the more common promises of the metaverse vision is the portability and interoperability of identity, data, and digital assets. For example, if a consumer buys an exclusive digital item for their avatar from one service, like a piece of virtual clothing, they can go to a second service that will recognize their ownership of the item and render it effectively.

For the enterprise, a similar use case might involve being able to invite users across a partner ecosystem into a shared immersive collaboration. This might mean reviewing the 3D assembly of a prototype vehicle or inspecting a digital twin of a factory for performance enhancements.

This capability may require new ways of organizing identity, ownership, and even storage. Digital identity is often fragmented across services, with multiple logins and passcodes.

Likewise, digital assets such as personal avatars and virtual clothing are designed to work in the service providing them, not for portability elsewhere. Currently, only the service knows you “own” the asset, and only the service can load and render that asset.

This concentration of user identity, data, and ownership within a given service is what is referred to as “centralization”.

Web3 can enable blockchain registries that bind a user’s identity to the things they own. NFTs offer this ability. 

Instead of being scattered across services, identity could become a persistent element of the blockchain internet: physically decentralized across the many computers mirroring and managing the blockchain but logically centralized as a registry.

This would enable any service to read the “state” of the user and the goods they own. Identity, data, avatars, and 3D objects could become portable across services.

Shifting the balance of power: Understanding centralization and decentralization

Web2 has been marked by hyperscale platforms and two-sided marketplaces that have aggregated very large numbers of users and built their businesses using identity and user data. Web3 protocols were developed specifically to challenge this control.

Increasingly, these winners may feel burdened by managing and securing identity and data, contending with customers and adversarial third parties that have learned to exploit their services, and reckoning with regulators concerned with market dominance and consumer protection.

If business leaders are to guide the historic shift to Web3 and the metaverse, they may need to shed some of their Web2 norms and embrace more decentralization.

Centralized vs. Decentralized

For the metaverse, decentralization applies to the premise that internet users should control their identity, their data, their digital goods, and more, and that these can move with them between services and experiences.

With Web3, a user’s avatar and digital goods, for example, can become more easily portable across different services. Or users can specify different properties for different services. For example, one’s personal avatar may be very different from one’s avatar for work—just as one’s dress style may be.

Users could use smart contracts that determine how third parties may or may not interact with their data. In this model, businesses can still own and control metaverse experiences, but they would negotiate for access to users.

There is much more to understand.

What changes will come with regulation, and how will use cases impact networks, semiconductors, software, and consumer devices?

How might media and entertainment evolve?

What is the role of artificial intelligence in amplifying these capabilities, and what is the future of risk and cybersecurity?

Ultimately, this big shift responds to the demands of people, business, and technology to establish the next foundation for progress. However, such tectonic changes should be approached thoughtfully, with more societal considerations beyond the goals of business and the inertia of technology.

#Binance #AI #Metaverse #WEB3

Immutable New Web3 Mobile-Based Game To Hit Shelves

In a new development, Immutable seems to be planning to bank on the massively popular Eyeball Games’ hit mobile game 8 Ball Pool, which has over a billion downloads and over 10 million daily active players.

Hoping to repeat its success, the collaboration between the two companies will seek to accelerate the development of Immutable’s blockchain-based title, which gives players full ownership of their digital assets including several other features that come from using blockchain technology.

As per Immutable, the full launch of Eyeball Pool on mobile devices is slated for Q1 2024. It seems Eyeball Pool is the first of a number of games rolling out from the company utilizing the recently announced Immutable zkEVM, which enables creators to tap into smart contracts to incorporate advanced trading and game mechanics.

Despite the no-so-positive stance, several companies all across the world are tapping the Web3 gaming space to level up user gaming experience with features such as true ownership, player-driven economy, transparency, and enhanced security among others.

#WEB3 #GAME #NEWS #REXBOX

Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) — are digital identity tokens that represent the certificates, features, and achievements that make up a person or entity represented by wallet/address. SBTs are issued and represent blockchain accounts or wallets and cannot be transferred but possibly revocable by the issuer.

SBTs can be considered as a specific type of non-fungible token (NFT) that imposes restrictions on transfer rights and owner management. This ensures that the rightful owner of the token is its original recipient and did not buy it from another. An analogous example can be drawn with certificates issued to specific individuals.

Embracing the application of SBTs opens up exciting possibilities, allowing these tokens to function as verifiable certifications or irrefutable evidence of trust bestowed by the token issuer. To delve deeper into the intricacies of SBTs and their potential impact, we invite you to explore this article. Uncover how SBTs can revolutionize digital identity and foster trust in blockchain ecosystems.

Concept

The main idea behind SBT is the use of non-transferable certificates to establish trust, origin, and reputation. While there is no limit to the number of SBTs that can be stored in a single wallet, it is possible for new SBTs to be issued by different organizations and hold different meanings.

Non-transferability of tokens is a requirement at the basic level, but it is important to consider this feature at the application level. For example, it is acceptable to transfer an approved loan with proper authorization. However, if the sender wants to show that they are a guarantor for the recipient, this transfer can also be made. Restrictive transfer functions mainly relate to bypassing the issuing platform, which means that tokens cannot be transferred from the user's perspective.

Nevertheless, their transfer is possible if implemented by the platform. However, in most cases, such transfers are unnecessary and may even have negative consequences. Let’s now explore a few theoretical applications:

SBT can function as a variant of self-subscribed decentralized identifiers (DIDs). The true power of this mechanism emerges when SBTs held by one individual can be issued or attested to by other individuals who have reciprocal relationships. I will tell delve more into decentralized identification (DIDs) in my subsequent articles.

The soul, which represents the digital signature of an artist, can exist at a level of abstraction beyond the wallet address. In this case, SBT can serve as a social connection, providing support and recognition for artists.

Interactions between souls can mimic surety in real-world relationships.

Soul-based lending refers to the utilization of SBT tokens within a wallet as a pivotal factor in determining credit ratings. The calculation of the credit rating may be influenced by an individual’s life achievements and interests. Additionally, SBTs from reputable authors can serve as evidence of loans taken, allowing for an assessment of an individual’s current debt load by verifying the presence of such SBTs.

In particular, SBTS could become the basis for Islamic lending; in those conditions when it is unacceptable to take % because of religion, SBTS would become the basis for the practice of lending to communities, similar to those that were first introduced by Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, when social network participants agree to support each other’s obligations.

P.S. Studying the history and the Grameen Bank way is highly recommended

SBT is a resume issued by an authoritative source confirming certain skills.

SBT as an alternative to trusted wallets (oracles) for social renewal — or a new approach to wallets with social restoration. Recall that SBT can represent membership in various communities. And the restoration of the wallet may be the decision of the circle of persons with whom he interacted.

SBTs in the DAO are also a proposed alternative for voting decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Instead of the current management model, which is based on the number of tokens a member owns, DAOs can issue SBTs that assign voting rights based on user interaction with the community. This model will prioritize voting for the most dedicated users with a strong reputation. In addition to creating a reputation-based voting system, SBTs can improve the integrity of DAO voting, namely protection against Sybil attacks. But not completely; in the context of Sybil, DAO participants can now sell not tokens but access to wallets with SBT. This will increase the complexity of the attack many times and will not make it impossible. An additional complication may be checking correlations between SBTs that support a certain vote and applying a lower vote weight to voters with a high correlation.

There is an almost unlimited number of applications for SBT. Still, the essential thing that SBT raises as a critical issue for the development of WEB3 is the implementation of mechanisms for restricting rights, including ownership or access rights. Creating a flexible tool for the possibility of rights and management will allow you to implement the fullness of interaction from the real world in #WEB3

Implementations of SBTs

#Binance Account Bound Token

A token on the Binance SmartChain network confirming the passage of KYC by Binance, the main application for AirDrop and DAO.

NEAR — I-am-human

In partnership with Fractal, NEAR is releasing a USB token to confirm your humanity by photo/video. Unlike Baby, KYC is not required, and a basic SBT approach is planned so that many different SBT tokens are formed on one account.

SBT implementations on #HAQQ

As part of the Sharjah Oracle project on the HAQQ, we are developing a new SBT implementation. This implementation will issue certificates approved by the community and the Sharia board, verifying the halal status of interactions with the corresponding smart contracts.

Our team is working on establishing a solution enabling voting on the network at the #Cosmos layer and issuing SBT tokens to smart contracts at the EVM layer. In upcoming articles, we will delve deeper into the implementation details of this mechanism and provide further insights.