Jan 28, 2022
Why Will Polkadot Spark the Cambrian Explosion of The Metaverse？
Background
The Metaverse has hit headlines after the boom of DeFi and NFTs in 2021, attracting a significant amount of capital flow into the sector. The Metaverse and Web3.0 incorporate the future of the internet where a completely decentralized network allows individuals to independently hold their digital assets and identities. This is highly concordant with the blockchain ethos. With the help of blockchain, the Metaverse is expected to replicate the underlying logic of the real world, bringing a brand-new virtual economy.
Why Will Polkadot Spark the Cambrian Explosion of Metaverse
As the economic infrastructure of Web 3.0, Polkadot’s architecture is naturally designed for the construction of the Metaverse. Blockchain technology provides solid technical support for asset ownership and decentralized governance. More importantly, Polkadot has provided a strong capacity to integrate multi-chain assets, which is in line with the diverse and inclusive concepts of the metaverse. In addition, building a metaverse on Polkadot has four native advantages:
● Superior Public Chain Performance
The Polkadot relay-parachain architecture, which naturally has excellent parallel performance and can deal with high-concurrency transactions of metaverse application scenarios in the future. The extremely cheap transaction fees are lowering the bars on the development and use of metaverse DAPPs.
● Multi-chain and Forward Compatibility
Polkadot supports both EVM and WASM smart contracts, achieving multi-chain compatibility by default. At the same time, it supports forkless upgrades, showing a more lightweight underlying iteration capability compared to other public chains.
● A Complete Technology Stack
The Polkadot ecosystem has a complete and mature technology stack, ranging from the underlying infrastructure, middle-layer protocols, to upper-layer applications. It can not only realize on-chain metaverse interactions based on Ethereum but also adapt to more diverse metaverse multimedia-rich application scenarios in the future.
● Strong Consensus from the Open-Source Community
According to a developer report recently released by Electrical Capital, Polkadot stood out as the fastest-growing developer community compared to other public chain communities. And it ranked second in terms of the total number of developers, just after Ethereum but far ahead of other mainstream public chains. This highly reflects that the open-source developer community has recognized the unique value of Polkadot.
What Polkadot has offered
Although the Polkadot ecosystem just sprouted, the technology stack related to the concept of the metaverse is progressively abundant. We have taken a close look at the blueprint of the Polkadot metaverse and seen that projects are working hard on product and technology developments under the concept of the Metaverse, redefining its infrastructures and standards. For example, Bit.Country provides the basic technical framework for building a customized metaverse, and Efinity has accumulated a lot of NFT resources for the Polkadot metaverse as a benefit of being created by the Enjin team. RMRK, another NFT service provider, has created unique NFT standards for Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems and launched NFT collections that have been widely adopted by the community. Unique Network can help developers achieve diversified NFT products, while Ternoa uses NFTs to achieve decentralized data storage and transfer. In addition, there are metaverse construction service providers like MetaDojo, providing high-quality 3D architectural rendering tools for metaverse projects like Bit.Country. There are numerous metaverse projects including NFT, GameFi, and DAOs thriving within the Polkadot ecosystem, and here we will deep dive into the most active and promising ones.
- Efinity
Efinity is the NFT and metaverse infrastructure built by Enjin on Polkadot. The Enjin team is a pioneer of the NFT ecosystem, initiating the ERC-1155 NFT standard and launching an NFT creation platform. With the influence of Enjin, the Efinity project received an investment of $18.9 million led by DFG and other institutions. The Enjin team also gives Efinity greater support in terms of funds and resources, launching a $100 million Efinity Metaverse Fund in November 2021 to support developers in building the Efinity Metaverse.
As a pioneer of the Polkadot ecosystem, Enjin is building an innovative NFT standard for Polkadot called the “Paratoken”, which will be compatible with parachains, parathreads and smart contracts, and be interoperable with the entire Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. In addition, Enjin plans to launch a series of new products in 2022, including an NFT wallet (Enjin Wallet 2.0), an NFT marketplace (NFT.io), and more.
Efinity won the 6th Polkadot parachain slot on December 31, 2021, and is currently preparing for its mainnet launch which is planned for March 2022. According to Enjin’s latest announcement, there are already over 70 developers and ecosystem partners who have committed to games and decentralized applications development on Efinity, pushing its product spectrum beyond simplicity.
Efinity built on top of Polkadot has high cross-chain interoperability, allowing NFTs cross-chain compatibility on Ethereum, Enjin, and Polkadot. Efinity will serve as an interchange station in the multi-chain metaverse with the advantages of high performance and low energy consumption. During the internal testing stage, Efinity can withstand hundreds of millions of mints and transfers per block. Additionally, Efinity will further foster its performance once it is officially operated as a Polkadot parachain, realizing the development of large-scale games and multiplayer online events in the metaverse.
2. Bit.Country
Bit.Country and its Metaverse.Network can provide closed-loop blockchain technical support and products for metaverse users, projects, and builders. Bit.Country can provide the basic components of a personal metaverse development based on a fan economy, including virtual land, virtual DAPPs to run 3D components on virtual land, land decorations and layout templates developed by the platform and other users, chat and trading tools for socializing with other players, tools for issuing social tokens, and data APIs. The Metaverse.Network can also provide technical services for the protocols using blockchain, enabling DAPP and game development environments compatible with Ethereum, NFT cross-chain technology, staking protocol, and community decentralization governance. All these will take place in a 3D virtual world built by Bit.Country.
Pioneer Network, the canary network of Bit.Country on Kusama has released 10,000 pieces of land for its metaverse construction. It plans to launch a client DAPP in 2022 Q1 and will use KOL partnerships such as CryptoGodJohn (about 330k Twitter followers), Mr. Beast (about 13m Twitter followers), KSI (about 7.3m Twitter followers), Tobias31 (about 250k Twitter followers) to achieve high volume social activities.
Since its inception, in March 2021, Bit.Country has continuously worked on the development of DAPP, Metaverse Stack, and the Metaverse on Kusama which is called Kaosland. It received nearly 4 million US dollars of investment from leading venture capital firms such as DFG and Animoca Brands.
Bit.Country was the first project to offer virtual land on Polkadot, intending to unite token holders, governors, landowners, and coders to create a virtual space for public events. Compared to Decentraland on Ethereum, it offers more comprehensive metaverse-as-a-service products ranging from underlying developer APIs to influencer community management tools, making it easier to onboard users and growing community members.
3. RMRK
While the current NFT standards of the Ethereum ecosystem are mainly ERC721 and ERC1155, RMRK has created a unique NFT standard for Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. It is a set of NFT legos that give NFTs infinite extensibility without the need for parachains or smart contracts.
The main features of RMRK include Nested NFTs, On-chain emotes, Multi-resource NFTs, and conditional rendering. In addition, NFTs on RMRK can be converted into fungible tokens, and these tokens can be used as governance tokens to perform the functions of NFTs, providing the possibility of NFT DAOs.
RMRK received $6 million in funding from DFG, D1 Ventures, YBB, and other VC firms in 2021. At present, the overall progress is well underway, and Moonbeam also announced that it will integrate the RMRK standards.
Singular is the first native NFT trading marketplace of RMRK based on Kusama, with a total of 550 certified NFT series and approximately 49600 NFTs in total. The top 46 NFT programs currently have total sales of about 25080 KSM (approximately $5.8 million), with Dino X Dino, Kusama Kings, and Chaos-DAO Ape among the top three.
The bird collection NFT, Kanaria, which is based on the RMRK standard, had a total sale of about 12,772 KSM (approximately $2.96m) in the last month, with 2,758 pieces sold. The highest NFT price is 675 KSM ($156k), and the floor price of this NFT collection is 13 KSM ($3,017).
But RMRK’s vision doesn’t stop at the release of NFT assets. RMRK’s latest roadmap shows that the metaverse is one of its focuses. In the near future, Kanaria birds may be given more features and functions, combined with DAO, GameFi, and other elements to create the RMRK metaverse. It is expected to be released in Q4 2022.
RMRK has implemented a series of innovative functions that take NFT’s descriptive and interactive capabilities to a new level, which are important for NFT social, NFT gaming, and will greatly facilitate the development of the Metaverse.
4. Unique Network
Unique Network is a public chain focused on NFT development. With Unique, metaverse builders can design personalized NFT products through its flexible economic model, whether it’s a gallery, NFT marketplace, game, or NFT wallet, with a customized gas fee model and the ability to pay network fees with ERC-20 tokens, ETH, or even NFTs while satisfying numerous interaction scenarios such as combining, decomposing and sharing between NFTs.Unique Network has also collaborated with RMRK on the NFT project Kanaria, and the partnership not only expands the use and vision of NFTs but also addresses the scalability and network congestion issues on Ethereum.
The project has received nearly $4.3 million in funding from investment firms such as DFG and Outlier Ventures, $16 million in a private sale, and $11 million in its latest public sale. Additionally, Unique Network has established cooperation with many NGOs, social and art organizations such as the United Nations, Subsocial, Artpool, Sovereign Nature Initiative.
5. Ternoa
Ternoa is a decentralized data transmission blockchain for NFTs and time capsules. It aims to provide users with secure storage and efficient data transmission solutions and innovative ways to build NFTs into the core experience of the Internet and the Metaverse. Currently, Ternoa has launched the Ternoa Launchpad and Secret NFT markets, with 151 NFTs listed. The Ternoa testnet has 140 nodes, 191 validators, a total of 1.54 million blocks, 2.01 million transactions, and nearly 220,000 NFTs have been minted. Ternoa will become the issuance and circulation center of Polkadot Metaverse assets.
Thanks to Polkadot’s mature infrastructure and governance modules, Ternoa can focus on its product innovations by leveraging its partner expertise in NFT asset issuance, circulation, and cross-chain interaction.
6、MetaDojo
MetaDojo aims to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3, bringing more Internet organizations into the crypto metaverse. The main product is to provide first-class, ready-to-use, high-quality 3D buildings to individual users and business users, buildings can be embedded into websites and deployed into the metaverse. The types of buildings can be art galleries, schools, retail stores, nightlife entertainment venues, arcades, social centers, homes, and other 3D visual creative scenes, empowering users to build visually rich, beautiful, and complex metaverse buildings. MetaDojo has received seed round financing led by DFG, and its product development positioning and project concepts have been recognized and supported by investors.
In the early stage, MetaDojo will mainly serve Bit.Country metaverse users. Because Bit.Country has won the support of many Polkadot ecological users in the Kusama parachain auction, it has gathered a large number of metaverse building development needs. With its beta launch in Q2 2022, there will be at least 30 buildings (Dojos) designed to be showcased and made available to the Bit.Country community. At the same time, it plans to launch a product exhibition hall in the Kaosland Metaverse, the community metaverse of Bit.Country, for landowners to visit and purchase metaverse buildings.
The advantage of MetaDojo is that it lowers the threshold for projects to participate in the metaverse. Brands can use MetaDojo to quickly expand influence and gain exposure in the Polkadot metaverse.
Future Prospects
Web3.0, represented by decentralized applications, will be the cornerstone of the Metaverse development, realizing the creation, circulation, and interaction of digital assets in the virtual world. It will eventually enhance the practicality of the Metaverse in real-world fields such as marketing, game experience, and remote interaction by cooperating with VR, AI, and many other innovative tech verticals. As a pioneer of emerging public chains, Polkadot will fill the gaps in the metaverse development such as multi-chain asset circulation, privacy protection, and data storage with its interoperability-driven technology and continuously expanding ecosystem. It will continue to generate products with a high-quality user experience.
The current Polkadot Metaverse ecosystem is dominated by infrastructure, framework and protocol-type underlying projects, and upper-level application projects are just beginning to emerge. As more and more Metaverse-related projects are launched with Polkadot and Kusama parachains, the cross-chain communication function between parachains will drive the popularity of the entire ecosystem. The vision of the Polkadot Metaverse Ecosystem will go further to realize the barrier-free circulation of assets, seamless connection of games, and socialization without location restrictions.
