Building the Metaverse: ‘Crypto States’ and Corporates Compete, Down to the Hardware

Abstract

Metaverse investor and writer Matthew Ball estimates the metaverse could be worth up to $30 trillion in the next decade (Knight, 2021). How “the Metaverse” is built and governed will determine societal outcomes in the near future and for generations to come. The Metaverse describes virtual worlds that break distinctions between digital and physical space (Dionisio, Burns, & Gilbert, 2013). The concept is aptly depicted in Neil Stephenson’s 1992 Novel “Snow Crash” and the book turned film “Ready Player One” as virtual worlds where people and algorithms socialise, conduct commerce, and live (Cline, 2012; Stephenson, 1992). There are competing visions of the Metaverse. One is a privatised, centralised future where big corporates, such as Facebook’s “Meta”, determine how people “socialize, learn, collaborate and play” (Facebook, 2021b). The other is predicated on decentralised technological architecture, such as blockchain-based digital infrastructure, where distributed, objective-aligned communities known as “Decentralised Autonomous Organisations” (or DAOs) build their own worlds. One example of a distributed Metaverse being built is “KONG Land”. KONG describes itself as a “crypto state”, meaning a virtual polity which can collectively negotiate, fund, build, maintain, and reproduce without relying on external resources (Srinivasan, 2021). This piece argues that the battle for the future of the metaverse comes down to hardware, specifically, microchips. I explore the world building practices of KONG Land through the lens of the digital and physical, visible and invisible, and public and private. Using the ethnographic methods of digital ethnography and interviews, I identify the dynamics of threats and resilience in the concept of the metaverse and microchips as a public good. As the next generation of digital integration, research that uncovers the dynamics of network ownership and control in ‘the Metaverse’ is an important contribution to sociology and public policy.

Keywords: cryptocurrency, hardware, blockchain, metaverse, NFT, microchips, politics, infrastructure

JEL Classification: O10, O00, O30, O14, O17, M10, M13, Z10