Instead of looking at content, you exist within it.
The metaverse combines VR, AR, social networks, gaming, and cryptocurrencies to create immersive digital worlds where users interact through avatars and conduct real transactions. Major players like Facebook, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Epic Games are competing to dominate this emerging market, with Facebook planning to rebrand as a metaverse company.
- Facebook announced hiring 10,000 people in Europe to develop the metaverse
- CryptoPunk #7523 sold for $11.8 million in June 2021
- Bloomberg Intelligence estimated the metaverse could be an $800 billion market by 2024
- Ethereum blockchain hosts most NFT transactions and is positioned as metaverse infrastructure
Facebook and major tech companies are investing heavily in the metaverse, a virtual reality-based digital world that could become the future of the internet, with potential market value reaching $800 billion by 2024.
Mark Zuckerberg wants the world to stop thinking of Facebook as a social network. He wants it to be remembered as a metaverse company—a builder of parallel digital worlds where people live, work, and spend money without ever leaving their homes. To make that happen, he announced this week that Facebook would hire ten thousand people across Europe, all of them tasked with constructing what many technologists now believe could be the internet's next chapter.
The metaverse itself has no single creator and no agreed-upon definition. Think of it as a digital reality woven from social networks, virtual reality, online games, and cryptocurrencies—a place where you move freely between different virtual worlds using a single avatar, where your money works everywhere, and where the boundary between watching and being inside something dissolves entirely. Zuckerberg tried to explain the difference in an interview: instead of looking at content on a flat screen, you exist within it. You attend a concert, buy merchandise, run into people you know. All of it happens in a space you never physically enter.
Variations of this already exist in fragments. Games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox let players build, work, collaborate, and trade real money for virtual goods. Second Life has been doing this for years. But these are closed worlds—islands that don't connect to each other. The metaverse vision is different: imagine moving seamlessly from one digital realm to another, your identity and your wealth following you across all of them. Everyone would use the same currency, likely a cryptocurrency, to make it work.
Facebook is not alone in this race. Nvidia's president, Jensen Huang, declared himself convinced that the metaverse would become an economy far larger than the one we have now. Some analysts have suggested Nvidia could one day be worth more than Apple. Microsoft and Epic Games are also pouring resources into the space. The competition is fierce because the stakes feel enormous—Bloomberg Intelligence estimated in July that the metaverse could be an eight-hundred-billion-dollar market by 2024.
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs—non-fungible tokens, unique digital assets verified and stored on blockchain technology—are positioned to become the metaverse's financial skeleton. A digital image called CryptoPunk #7523 sold for 11.8 million dollars in June 2021. Dolce & Gabbana sold a clothing collection as NFTs that avatars could wear. In virtual worlds already built, people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency to buy digital real estate. The auction house Sotheby's recently acquired its own block of digital property and built a virtual replica of its London galleries there. Most of these transactions run on the Ethereum blockchain, which hosts ether, the second-most-used cryptocurrency after bitcoin. This positioning could make Ethereum and NFTs the backbone of the metaverse, which in turn could legitimize cryptocurrencies as everyday payment tools.
The path to a fully functional metaverse will likely take decades. The technology—especially augmented reality—needs to become far more common. Legal questions loom. And the metaverse will require an unprecedented level of cooperation between companies that can't even agree on phone chargers. Yet the pandemic accelerated things. When millions of people worldwide were forced to work from home, platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams introduced them to metaverse concepts without calling them that. Companies are already trying to recreate the spontaneous human interactions of an office in digital space. The metaverse is still in its infancy, but the momentum is real, and the companies betting on it are betting big.
Citações Notáveis
I am fully convinced that the metaverse will be a new economy much larger than our current economy— Jensen Huang, president of Nvidia
Instead of just seeing content, you are inside it— Mark Zuckerberg, explaining the metaverse concept
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does Facebook need to become a metaverse company? Isn't it already enormously successful as a social network?
Because Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as the next frontier—the way people will interact with the internet itself. He wants Facebook to own that transition, not be left behind by it.
But the metaverse doesn't exist yet. How can companies invest in something that's still just an idea?
They're building the pieces. Games, virtual reality hardware, blockchain infrastructure. They're betting that when these pieces connect, whoever built the most of them will control the space.
What makes NFTs and cryptocurrencies so important to this vision?
They solve the money problem. In a metaverse, you need a currency that works everywhere, instantly, without a bank in the middle. Crypto does that. NFTs let you own unique things in digital space—clothes, land, art—and prove you own them.
Is the metaverse actually inevitable, or is this just hype?
The pandemic showed us something real: people will spend time and money in digital spaces if those spaces feel alive. Whether it becomes what Zuckerberg imagines is another question. But the shift toward virtual interaction is already happening.
What could go wrong?
Everything. The technology isn't ready. Companies won't cooperate. Regulators might step in. And people might simply decide they don't want to live in virtual worlds, no matter how immersive they become.