Metaverse Economy May Surpass $13 Trillion By 2030 – Citi – Cryptovibes.com – Daily Cryptocurrency and FX News
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A new report from Citi shows that the Metaverse economy might be worth up to $13 trillion by 2030 while everything that counts as money in this generation of the internet might look different from today.
Since Facebook decided to rebrand to Meta in 2021, the concept of the metaverse seems to have taken a major stride with companies, including many in the financial space, scrambling to comprehend how the imminent move to a more virtual world will affect the economy and their business in general.
In their 186-page report known as Metaverse and Money, Decrypting the Future‘, Citi has focused on this subject, carefully reviewing everything from the in-game tokens to cryptocurrency, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and fiat currency.
A device-agnostic Metaverse that features use cases like art, commerce, media, healthcare, advertising, and social collaboration may see a cumulative addressable market of $8 trillion to $13 trillion by 2030, as estimated in the report.
That massive market will need a different method of looking at money. Citi explained:
“The definition of what counts as money in the Open Metaverse is also likely to be very different from what counts as money in the real world today.
“Interoperability and seamless exchange between underlying blockchain technology are critical to ensure a frictionless user experience. Different forms of cryptocurrency are expected to dominate, but given the multi-chain trend in the crypto ecosystem, cryptocurrency will likely coexist with fiat currencies, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and stablecoins.”
This Citi report also cites the example of Second Life, which is the virtual world that launched in 2003, and by 2021 it had hit a GDP of $650 million with a staggering 345 million transactions of virtual goods, services, and real estate. Second Life developed an in-world currency, known as the Linden dollar that was partially introduced to cut most of the transaction costs.
Nonetheless, Second Life is a centralized platform and for the Metaverse to operate as an alternate economy, it needs formats of money that are trustless, decentralized, and verifiable. The report authors stated:
“We expect the Metaverse of the future would encompass existing forms of money and also a set of digitally-native primitives, tied to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other tokens that were out-of-scope for a pre-blockchain virtual world.”
They insist that wallets like Google Pay and Apple Pay might expand the range of the supported payment types to wholly integrate the options in the decentralized world in a manner that:
“Abstracts away Web3 complexities the average consumer likely does not want to contend with”.
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