Grayscale sees a trillion dollar opportunity in Metaverse projects
The worlds largest digital asset manager Grayscale has published a report on the rapidly growing excitement for metaverses and their enormous market opportunities. Grayscale expects metaverses to become mainstream in the next few years, offering a trillion-dollar market opportunity.
Grayscale research director David Grider and research analyst Matt Maximo share their views in a report published in November entitled “The Metaverse, Web 3.0 Virtual Cloud Economies.” The duo presents interesting insights into this burgeoning sector and the open Metaverse worlds that are supported by a networked crypto economy like Decentraland.
The report also notes that “globally active Meta-Verse wallets” have grown ten-fold in a year and a half since early 2020. In June 2021, the total number of active Metaversen wallets reached 50,000. The report goes on to say :
“Compared to other Web 3.0 and Web 2.0 segments, Metaverse virtual worlds are still in their infancy, but if current growth rates continue, this emerging segment has the potential to become mainstream in the years to come.”
The report adds that Metaverse projects using crypto tokens, NFTs, decentralized governance and decentralized financial services (DeFi) like staking and lending are creating a new online experience and thereby attracting new users.
The Grayscale report also notes that there is a lot of interest from venture capital firms who see great potential in this sector. Metaverse fundraising totaled $ 1 billion in the third quarter, according to Grayscale. This corresponds to a share of 12% of the fundraising of the entire crypto sector in this quarter.
This means that Metaverse, together with the NFT category and Web 3.0, are among the “top sub-sectors”.
Dynamics through which the Metaverse sector is growing
Grayscale researchers also pointed out some of the key dynamics leading to the growth of the Metaverse sector. These include the growing average free time and increasing amounts of money being spent on digital hobbies.
The report also notes that Metaverses will mark a cultural shift from premium games to free-to-play games and other Web 3.0 innovations like play-to-earn (P2E).
In 2020, global gaming revenues for virtual worlds were a staggering $ 180 billion. Of this, the “premium spending” accounted for $ 40 billion. It is estimated that spending on games could increase over the next four years and the sector could earn more than $ 400 billion by 2025. The report also states that “with the transition from closed Web 2.0 metaverse to open Web 3.0 crypto-metaverse network, change is accelerating”; and further: The virtual worlds of the Web 3.0 metaverse have benefited from rapid innovations and increases in productivity. Virtual crypto worlds have created a multi-million dollar primary and secondary market for asset creators and owners,
