JP Morgan becomes the first major bank to make its entry to the metaverse, ready to seize the meta-economy. The biggest bank in the US has opened a virtual lounge, titled Onyx, in Decentraland’s Metajuku Mall.
Along with that comes a paper that looks at the massive potential of the industry and how businesses can explore the metaverse while navigating the hypes.
“We are not here to suggest the metaverse, as we know it today, will take over all human interactions, but rather, to explore the many exciting opportunities it presents for consumers and brands alike,” says the report. It forecasts that the metaverse will likely infiltrate every sector in some way in the coming years, with the market opportunity estimated at over $1 trillion in annual revenues.
The bank hopes to use its “long-standing core competencies in cross-border payments, foreign exchange, financial asset creation, trading and safekeeping, in addition to at-scale consumer foothold,” to better organize financial transactions and payments in the decentralized web.
Metanomics and gaming will go hand in hand
Diving deeper into Metanomics, the report states that the metaverse is evolving from two decades of gaming and will be built upon the gaming infrastructure. It cites the latest trends to back the prediction; the sales of a virtual land adjacent to Snoop Dogg’s Sandbox plot for $450,000 and Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, to name a few.
It also acknowledged the emergence of DeFi and DAO over the last few years and how they will be central to the meta-economy.
New opportunities, jobs, and skills
Supply and demand dynamics in the meta-economy has urged the creation of new skills. As the metaverse booms, people will have to develop and build the products that are consumed in the virtual world. The marketing and advertising industry will greatly benefit from the growth, in-game ad spending set to reach $18.41 billion by 2027.
The report goes on to talk about the challenges in front of the industry: “Despite much excitement about the possibilities of the metaverse, in order to enable its full potential for engagement, community building, self-expression and commerce, key areas need to be further developed and matured”. The aforementioned key areas being, technology, commercial infrastructure, privacy and identity, workforce of the future, and regulatory infrastructure.
