As we ponder whether the metaverse is going to take on this year, a major innovator is pouring national funds into this kind of technology adoption.
Brian Newar reports at Cointelegraph today that the South Korean government is going to invest $187 million in a metaverse project that will create a “broad metaverse ecosystem” for the virtual platform.
“South Korea’s Ministry of ICT, Science, and Future Planning … wrote in an official statement on Sunday that funds will be spent on completing four main objectives in creating what appears to be an all-encompassing metaverse ecosystem titled the ‘Expanded Virtual World,’” Newar writes. “The government agency intends on using its metaverse as a platform for expanding the virtual industrial growth of cities, education and media.”
Regulatory challenges may apply:
“It is the regulatory issue that the government should pay more attention to,” says Hashed CEO Simon Kim as quoted in Newar’s coverage. “In Korea, publishing of NFT games is prohibited, and token issuance is also prohibited.”
In recent months, we’ve been considering whether the metaverse as a nascent technology is going to catch on, and whether it’s going to spur the wider adoption of NFTs as ownership assets for an individual user’s digital avatar.
“NFT avatars are images of a character, usually from the shoulders up, frequently used as digital profile pictures,” wrote Dan Kahan at The Defiant in the middle of last year, discussing this potential trend. “The vast majority of NFT avatars are individually unique and algorithmically generated from an array of traits (ie: clothing, accessories, hairstyles, etc.) with various rarities. Many NFT avatar projects have other functions built-in, or at least planned for the future. For example, some NFT avatars give their holders access to special virtual clubhouses, while others may have future implementations in games or multimedia projects.”
Because of the frequency of similar launches and the money being thrown around, these NFT avatar launches feel similar to the ICO boom in early 2018, where buyers aped in hoping to see massive upswings in price.
Right now, NFTs have major markets in in-game systems, (think skins etc.) as well as high-end digital artwork, but in the opinion of many experts, a broader move to the metaverse will create more use cases for these defi assets.
Keep an eye out!
