TL;DR Breakdown:
- Grayscale projects the metaverse industry to be worth $1 trillion by 2025.
- Crypto integration and FB rebrand have created wider market opportunities in the industry.
- Gaming will be a major source of metaverse revenues in the future.
Crypto investment firm Grayscale released an annual research report on the metaverse and web 3.0 economies. The research report provides a detailed overview of the market opportunities, key trends, and web 3.0 metrics. Grayscale mentioned that the metaverse market will be bullish for the next few years, and the growing market opportunities can make the industry worth over $1 trillion by 2025.
According to the report, users of meta platforms like Decentraland and Sandbox has increased over 10 times compared to last year. The growing integration of crypto and NFT in these platforms, and Facebook’s recent announcement of rebranding itself as Meta has created an influx of metaverse projects in-development.
Gaming and crypto integration are fueling metaverse adoption
The Grayscale report mentions that the biggest market opportunity comes from the possibility of transforming the existing web 2.0 applications into metaverse applications. For instance, in addition to new blockchain-based games being developed, many past games are also transforming into VR-compatible versions.
Popular games like GTA are releasing the VR versions of their previous games. Fortnite has also integrated major meta elements within its game environment, such as hosting virtual concerts and parties. Grayscale predicts that almost half of all web 3.0 revenues in the future will come from the gaming/eSports industry.
Metaverse games have already started to soar in the last quarter of 2021. Decentraland’s market cap has increased from $1.5 billion to almost $10 billion in a month, and its native coin MANA has gone up over 500% since last month. Recently, a digital land in Decentraland’s platform was sold for a record price of $2.4 million.
Another virtual gaming platform the Sandbox has also experienced similar success. The platforms active user number skyrocketed recently, and its native token SAND increased over 700% since last month. The blockchain-based gaming platform also raised $93 million in investment funding to expand its virtual world to millions of users.
These advancements in the metaverse industry indicate that Grayscale’s projection is very realistic, and it will create massive market opportunities in the next few years as virtual platforms continue to expand crypto and NFT integration.
