The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.
The next frontier of the internet and blockchain protocols is the Metaverse. The Metaverse is a brave new world of interconnectivity, promising to be the stage of digital development that makes it possible for large numbers of people to simultaneously experience and interact with enduring digital worlds, platforms, applications, and experiences.
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Using digital identities that are not limited to the proprietary networks of a single website, service, or blockchain protocol, a person will be able to live, play, socialize, and do business with ease and all while maintaining the same, holistic, Metaverse identity.
What is the Metaverse?
The word “Metaverse” comes from two Greek terms, “meta,” meaning “beyond,” and “verse,” here meaning “everything.” Putting them together gives you a word meaning “beyond everything.” This breakdown can help us get a basic idea of what the Metaverse is often treated as; it is a space beyond any one aspect of the internet. From it, one can interact with the component parts while also being able to move outside of them.
In short, the Metaverse allows for different platforms and DApps to be connected in ways that allow users to easily move between them without trouble or abandoning the identity that they have in any one location. While the Metaverse promises to more fully connect the various parts of the digital world and its economy, the infrastructure needed to fully manifest that promise doesn’t currently exist.
Currently, the way that identity is created and managed on the internet is incompatible with what the Metaverse will be. So to make the Metaverse work, we’ll need to create Metaverse identity systems.
The Importance of Metaverse Identity
The need for some kind of identity as an individual uses the internet is obvious. Even the most mundane of activities require some ability to guarantee that you are the person you say you are. Right now, identity on the internet is highly centralized. The systems we use to process identifiers and public keys typically fall back on trusted third parties. Devised before the internet could agree on a model of decentralization, this model has done what it was designed to do reasonably well over the last few decades.
This model is not without flaws, however. First, the centralization provides clear attack points for malicious operators trying to get their hands on private keys. Second, the complexity of many public-key systems means that most interactions on the internet are unencrypted for the simple reason that it is too difficult for many people to encrypt their data. Finally, domain registrars, certificate authorities, and other third parties technically own things from website domains to usernames; website “owners” merely rent the space.
Beyond these concerns, there are practical problems with a centralized identity in the Metaverse that makes decentralized models more attractive. The current centralized identities we have on the internet often fail to travel with us as we move away from the provider of that identity, for example, Facebook, and towards applications and platforms that do not have and are not likely to have a Facebook login feature.
You do not entirely own the identity you use, and the data used to create it in the first place is often poorly secured from hackers and frequently bought and sold by the operators that constructed it in the first place. In a Metaverse where anything is possible, security and ownership will be essential.
Whatever identity system is used in the Metaverse, these issues, travel, privacy, and ownership will have to be resolved. Any model that fails to solve all three will hinder the individual as they move throughout the Metaverse. Luckily, this is entirely possible. Ideas for decentralized public-key systems have existed for years. As Vitalik Buterin explains in his forward to the book The Business Blockchain by William Mougayar, this information can be processed in combined in ways that make it quite useful without ever compromising the privacy of the individual the information belongs to:
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“All transactions under ‘crypto 2.0' come with auditable trails of cryptographic proofs. Decentralized peer-to-peer networks can be used to reduce reliance on any single server; public-key cryptography could create a notion of portable user-controlled identities. More advanced kinds of math, including ring signatures, homomorphic encryption, and zero-knowledge proofs, guarantee privacy, allowing users to put all of their data in the open in such a way that certain properties of it can be verified, and even computed on, without actually revealing any private details.”
Providing that traveling, secure, and self-owned Metaverse identity (MID) is where MetaVisa comes in.
MetaVisa and the MetaVisa Credit Score
MetaVisa, a layer three middleware protocol, is preparing to provide the best in Metaverse identity as the number of applications in what we understand the Metaverse continues to expand.
Using indelible blockchain data, MetaVisa conducts comprehensive processing and evaluation of information such as credit history, on-chain behavior, address activity level, asset holdings, and address correlation to construct a MetaVisa Credit Score (MCS) for active members of the Metaverse which can serve as a decentralized Metaverse identity owned by the individual.
The credit system will award the users with ranked badges based on their MCSs.
Users with higher MCSs will be rewarded with high-ranking badges. These badges, which are unique NFTs, can serve as a kind of MID verification system, assuring other users and platforms that the bearer of a badge is who they claim to be, own what they claim to own, and is being truthful about their past on-chain behavior.
Developers can use MetaVisa’s credit system to improve the Metaverse experience for everyone involved. Beyond just providing a MID, which will make effective interaction with other people and applications in the Metaverse possible, MetaVisa’s credit system can be applied by platforms and applications to provide better services, improve their governance, and manage their communities.
Developers and community members can formulate a corresponding membership system based on the MetaVisa credit system to motivate and retain users with high scores in desired areas. The MetaVisa credit system can also allow developers to quickly identify upstanding members of the community they wish to attract and reward, improving the user base’s quality and making marketing efforts more efficient.
DAOs can use the information in a badge to enhance and improve their governance models. For example, a model utilizing the MCS could look at the number of tokens or shares held and at factors like engagement, history with similar applications, and credit score to determine how votes should be weighed.
For DeFi, MetaVisa makes improved lending possible by developing a credit score for the user based on their past behavior and current assets. As a result, DeFi protocols will be able to offer new and improved services, knowing that the person they are dealing with is a reliable, active, and creditworthy denizen of the Metaverse.
Games in the Metaverse can be combined with the MetaVisa credit system to provide special rewards distribution, settle asset ownership issues, and provide rewards to loyal users. Additionally, the MetaVisa credit system can be used as a credential to log in to third-party applications in Metaverse, including other games and platforms that players may wish to bring their assets to.
The next frontier for the internet and blockchain protocols is the interconnectivity that the Metaverse will offer. MetaVisa offers users the tools needed to establish their Metaverse Identity and take it with them between apps, platforms, and entire virtual worlds for everyone’s benefit.
To learn more about MetaVisa and the inspiration behind this post in its original format, please visit the company’s website.
Image Sourced from Pixabay
The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.