Vitalik Buterin, Canadian co-founder of the world’s largest smart contract platform Ethereum, has taken aim at “existing corporate attempts to intentionally create the metaverse,” in a series of Sunday Tweets primarily aimed at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms.
Facebook’s pivot towards the technology under the Meta Platforms rebranding is destined to “misfire” said Buterin, due to a lack of understanding around metaverse technology.
The "metaverse" is going to happen but I don't think any of the existing corporate attempts to intentionally create the metaverse are going anywhere. https://t.co/tVUfq4CWmP
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 30, 2022
That misfire may already be playing out, given Meta’s recent market performance.
Not only did Meta just announce its first-ever year-on-year revenue slump, but internal hiring plans have also been slashed, while the recent scrapping of news content deals points to further cost-cutting measures for the social media conglomerate.
As progenitors to the metaverse industry, play-to-earn (P2E) big-hitters The Sandbox, Decentraland and Axie Infinity have also cratered in value this year, not helped by a number of harmful hacks and exploits and an intensely volatile wider crypto market.
Is the future meta?
Public interest in the metaverse may have cooled off recently — if the 66% year-to-date fall in Google searches is anything to go by — but the metaverse economy remains a hotspot for venture capital and, increasingly, international governments.
The Shanghai Municipal People’s Government in July announced a ten-billion-yuan (US$1.4bln) metaverse fund with a view to growing a US$52bln industry by 2025.
The Dubai government announced its own metaverse strategy in the same month, targeting 40,000 virtual jobs in five years under a plan to position the Middle East emirate as a global leader in the sector.
As for VC, Andreessen Horowitz’s Games Fund One vehicle has dedicated US$600mln to metaverse projects, while Fortnight developer Epic Games recently secured US$2bln from Sony Group Corporation and The LEGO Group to develop its own metaverse vision.
So while Metaverse-exposed enterprises may be enduring a crisis period in tandem with wider crypto trends, investments continue to flow into the little-understood sector.
Which investments — if any — pay off will only become evident in the long term.
Ethereum cops shade
Ethereum was subject to its own criticism from a high-profile crypto figurehead lately.
MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor repeated his stance that Ethereum is “unethical” and in violation of securities laws in a recent interview.
Bitcoin evangelist Saylor is an outspoken altcoin critic who as CEO has made MicroStrategy the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder with nearly 130,000 BTC on the balance sheet.
Buterin labelled him a “clown” in response.