From e-sports to South Korea: A week in metaverse

South Korea is an especially interesting case as they're aiming to build a virtual counterpart of the country's ecosystem.

- ANSHUL AGARWAL & SHREY MISHRA

Let us discuss the role of NFTs in the Inascent metaverse, and explore a few different versions of the metaverse with a focus on Indian innovation in the field. We'll discuss a few fun examples of the way the metaverse is being used right now, from unique "foodverses” to the rise of e-sports in the XR world.

So, you may have been bombarded with a certain acronym in the past few months-NFTs, or NonFungible Tokens. Let's break them down. First, each NFT has its own unique identity, and second, this identity is verified by a decentralised ledger maintained via blockchain. We know, it sounds like gibberish. But a blockchain is simply a way to store information in sequential form, in several places at once, so that it becomes nearly impossible to falsify or counterfeit. Like a collectible; a any serious collector will be able to quickly tell you all the stats related to their prized collectible items: who owned it before, how many other similar items exist in the world, etc.

In the metaverse, NFTs provide a way for items to have a digital provenance, where you can track the ownership and pedigree of an item via a simple click. And this extends to images, videos, text, artwork, digital wearables - and virtual land. Metaverse spaces such as Decentraland and SandBox have parcels of land in the form of Land NFTs which you can buy and build on.