The hottest metaverse platforms for a new experience of the virtual world

Written in February 2022, when metaverse interest was at its height. Meta subsequently scaled back its metaverse investment substantially, and land and token prices on these platforms fell very sharply. The article is kept as written.

The metaverse is a virtual world built in the digital realm — a territory where users can live and experience something beyond the ordinary, and get in touch with people on the other side of the world at the touch of a finger.

Doing business online is already enormously popular today and adds a great deal of business opportunity, but the metaverse will add far more, by making a vast world feel smaller and making communication and international business easier. Blockchain is what allows the metaverse to work effectively, because it lets the metaverse operate smoothly on a decentralised model (DAO), which means the system can run without a server that would collapse the moment it was attacked. Blockchain technology also makes it possible to create NFTs tied to items in the metaverse, so those items have a single exclusive identity and can be bought and sold no differently from things in the real world.

Decentraland

Decentraland is a well-known metaverse platform founded by Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano, both Argentinian, who began the project in 2015 and opened the platform to users in 2020 — making Decentraland one of the oldest metaverse platforms there is. It is an open-source 3D virtual world platform with its own token, MANA, on the Ethereum network.

The game area is called LAND, of which there is a limited amount, which can be bought, sold and owned as an NFT. LAND owners can build houses or carry out any activity on the land, and can run a business on it just as with land in the real world.

Decentraland runs primarily on a DAO system — the Decentraland DAO. DAO stands for decentralised autonomous organisation, a decentralised system that operates together automatically. Each item on Decentraland runs on a smart contract, whether LAND, buildings, wearables, content servers or the marketplace, and MANA holders have the right to vote on the direction of the platform. Decentraland can genuinely be called a decentralised metaverse platform.

Decentraland has been taken up by a great many organisations — the bank J.P. Morgan, Samsung and many others — who have bought LAND on the platform for various business promotion activities.

Decentral Games (DG)

Not long ago Decentral Games, or DG, worked with Decentraland to open an online casino in Decentraland's virtual world, letting people mint the ICE Poker Set, an NFT used to take part in Decentral Games activities.

The Sandbox

The Sandbox is a project founded by the organisation Pixowl, set up by Arthur Madrid and Sebastien Borget. The Sandbox is a virtual world where players can create, own and earn from games they build themselves. It runs on Ethereum and has its own platform token, SAND. What stands out is that the characters in the game are 3D pixel boxes in a Minecraft-like environment, letting players go and experience the various plots of LAND. LAND in The Sandbox is limited to just 166,464 plots.

The Sandbox plays a significant role in the metaverse, with a great many businesses buying LAND on it — Gucci, Adidas, and well-known artists such as Snoop Dogg. There are also experiences from games inspired by the famous series The Walking Dead, and much else.

The system uses the SAND token, which lets you buy and sell LAND and various items in the metaverse, and it is a decentralised platform applying DAO — decentralised autonomous organisation — technology, making it genuinely decentralised.

Horizon Worlds — Meta

Horizon Worlds is the metaverse project of the social media giant Facebook, which later changed its name to Meta, driven by an ambition to be the next evolution of social connection and to make the virtual world part of users' lives.

Meta's technology uses 3D, and beyond that virtual reality (VR) — simulating a real environment to feel real — and augmented reality (AR), technology that merges the virtual world with the real one. It has to be said that Meta has invested in AR/VR technology to the hilt.

Meta has also developed a special device: smart glasses, a collaboration between Meta and the eyewear giant Ray-Ban. It is wearable technology that acts as a door into the world of the metaverse, letting users interact with the world around them. It can also record sound and images, controlled by touch, raising the user's adventure to a strikingly new level.

Axie Infinity

The online game that can fairly be said to have set off the play-to-earn blockchain gaming trend, running on Ethereum. Axie Infinity was founded by Vietnamese developers and funded by the billionaires Mark Cuban and Alexis Ohanian. The game takes its inspiration from Pokémon: breeding monsters, forming them into a team and fighting other players.

Axie Infinity uses two tokens: SLP, or Smooth Love Potion, used for breeding and upgrading the skills of the monsters in the game; and AXS, the governance token, which lets holders set the direction of the game's development, in the manner of a decentralised project.

What made Axie Infinity so popular is the income players earn from the game — particularly at the peak — which was substantial enough that it may have exceeded a regular salary for players in some countries. The characters and items in the game are NFTs, which can be bought, sold and exchanged on the marketplace.

Axie Infinity is now going a step further by opening the sale of land in the game, called Genesis, which counts as developing the system towards a metaverse — and it has been enormously popular, trading at values of several hundred Ethereum. Axie Infinity has developed its business into more than a blockchain game: it is building a metaverse outright.

The metaverse is something people have long dreamed would come about, but perhaps lacked the technology to make that dream real. Blockchain may be the technology that answers the need to develop the metaverse and change the world we know for good. Even so, development is at a very early stage, and there will have to be changes and further work in future — for how long, nobody yet knows.