Coinbase defines its role in the Metaverse, saying keeping it free and open is its goal

Last week, U.S cryp­to exchange Coin­base released a blog post shar­ing its thoughts and defin­ing its role in the Metaverse.

Since Facebook’s rebrand­ing to Meta in late Octo­ber, the Meta­verse term has been thrust into the main­stream spotlight.

But cryp­to projects such as Enjin, Decen­tra­land, and The Sand­box, to name a few, have been work­ing on the Meta­verse con­cept for many years now. How­ev­er, their efforts have failed to gar­ner the same recog­ni­tion as Meta to date.

All the same, unable to shake the data pri­va­cy scan­dals of the past, many have already writ­ten off Meta. Phillip Dut­ton, the co-founder of tech firm Sol­i­da­tus, said the col­lec­tion of vast quan­ti­ties of data by Meta pos­es concerns.

“reg­u­la­tors and the pub­lic are demand­ing trans­paren­cy so they can trust their data is being used and pro­tect­ed appropriately.”

Many influ­en­tial peo­ple still see the Meta­verse as a nat­ur­al evo­lu­tion of the inter­net. Coin­base thinks that the Meta­verse can be a trust­ed space with its contribution.

What is the Metaverse?

The con­ver­gence of blockchain, NFTs, and extend­ed real­i­ty tech­nol­o­gy will bring about the com­ing of the Metaverse.

Pro­gram­mer Eric Elliott described it as a dig­i­tal world where the only lim­i­ta­tions would be our own imagination.

“The meta­verse, in a nut­shell, is the dig­i­tal world, where any­thing we can imag­ine can exist. Even­tu­al­ly, we’ll be con­nect­ed to the meta­verse all the time, extend­ing our sens­es of sight, sound, and touch…”

Admit­ted­ly, reach­ing the lev­el Elliott describes is still some way off being real­ized. Nonethe­less, when/if that time comes, he pre­dicts it would become a huge econ­o­my – esti­mat­ing a total val­ue 10x greater than the cur­rent glob­al economy.

As allud­ed to above, there will be com­pet­ing Meta­vers­es, each deal­ing with dif­fer­ent group­ings of immer­sive expe­ri­ence. Coin­base puts these into the three broad clas­si­fi­ca­tions of vir­tu­al world or own­er­ship focused, gam­ing, and foun­da­tion­al or pro­to­col lev­el such as transacting.

What is Coinbase’s role in all of this?

Much like Car­dano is work­ing on dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty via its Ata­la PRISM solu­tion, Coin­base sees iden­ti­ty as a core com­po­nent of its con­tri­bu­tion – in effect, han­dling the on-ramp­ing into the Metaverse.

Coin­base men­tions col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Ethereum Name Ser­vice to back their plans and make this a reality.

“That’s the idea behind our work with ENS, which makes it pos­si­ble to cre­ate a unique user­name NFT that resolves to a wal­let. Even­tu­al­ly, this will allow users to car­ry a unique ID across dif­fer­ent worlds in the Metaverse.”

The firm was quick to point out that they are not moti­vat­ed to do this for finan­cial rea­sons. Instead, they say it’s about build­ing a crit­i­cal ele­ment of the Meta­verse and fos­ter­ing cryp­to adop­tion in the right way.

“Our goal is to make it easy for any­one to estab­lish their iden­ti­ty and gain access to those worlds in a way that’s sim­ple, trust­ed, and decentralized.”

They sign off by say­ing achiev­ing this will max­i­mize the Metaverse’s poten­tial and keep it free and open for everyone.