Citi Expects Metaverse To Be $13T Market By 2030

April 1, 2022 12:18 pm Comments

Bank analysts at Citi have recently made the expectation that the metaverse economy could amount to $13 trillion by the year 2030.

To reach that point, the bank says that there will likely be the need for significant infrastructure improvement as this would need to be able to support up to 5 billion users.

Although the prediction may seem extremely far out for some who are unfamiliar with the metaverse sector which is highly interconnected with the crypto world, the possibility is there for investors who see this the same as the initial stages of the internet.

To summarize, the metaverse is essentially a virtual world where users interact with each other much like the internet through virtual and augmented reality technologies.

CoinDesk reports:

The metaverse is an immersive digital world created by the combination of virtual reality, augmented reality and the internet.

The content streaming environment of the metaverse will likely need a “computational efficiency improvement over 1,000 times today’s levels,” the bank said, and investment will be required in areas such as storage, network infrastructure, consumer hardware and game development platforms.

The metaverse concept isn’t new, the bank’s analysts noted.

However, interest in the metaverse really began to snowball at the end of 2021 because of the rise in sales of non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) and big technology companies announcing their interest in the sector.

NFTs will essentially be the digital assets that many users will use which will represent their ownership of virtual assets or access to services in the virtual world.

As NFTs are run on the blockchain and are tied to crypto assets, increase adoption of NFTs in the metaverse would provide a bullish outlook for cryptos that are used virtually.

Citi continues to state that there is a possibility that the metaverse could become the next generation of the internet or Web3 which is quite the bold claim.

Multiple industry giants have already hopped on board to take advantage of the trend including JP Morgan, Citi, and Facebook which recently renamed itself to Meta in order to focus on the metaverse.

Concerns are coming up though as many investors do expect greater criticism from law makers and regulators as the metaverse continues to expand and take up a larger portion of the economy.

Yahoo reports:

“This ‘open metaverse’ would be community-owned, community-governed and a freely interoperable version that ensures privacy by design,” the report said. Its use cases include commerce, art, media, advertising, healthcare and social collaboration, it added.

What counts as money in this open metaverse is expected to differ from the real world, with different forms of crypto currency expected to dominate, alongside fiat currencies, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins, the report said.

If the metaverse is the new iteration of the internet, it is likely to attract greater scrutiny from regulators, policymakers and governments, and issues such as anti-money laundering rules, the use of decentralized finance (DeFi), crypto assets and property rights will all have to be addressed, the note added.

Top prominent blockchains will also most likely get involved into the metaverse sector if investors see that the metaverse actually continues to grow beyond expectations like Citi mentions.

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