Can the Metaverse exist without blockchain?

The Metaverse of the future sounds great, but is it all just hype? Serious technological, experiential and economic model headwinds need to be addressed for the Metaverse narrative to come true.

Blockchain suffers from scalability, interoperability and security challenges. Even the best chains with meaningful user bases can handle only about 50,000 transactions per second. The internet has millions of data interactions per second in emails, tweets, posts, Google searches, messages and more.

This comparison assumes that data interactions in a metaverse must be on-chain. As cryptographic techniques (like zero-knowledge Rollups) get better at addressing scalability challenges, the economic features will rightly take the limelight to create new Metaverse-based models for the future.

Apart from the scalability challenges, there are major interoperability issues across blockchains. This is particularly related to bridges used to transfer value from one blockchain to another.

Many cyber attacks on Web3 platforms have occurred through these bridges. The Ronin bridge attack and Solana wormhole bridge attack are examples. Interoperability is an ample opportunity within Web3 but it is equally a vulnerability that needs to be addressed.

These blockchain infrastructure layer challenges keep returning to haunt the ecosystem. One of the more recent issues is creating a sustainable economic model of the Metaverse. While GameFi has been leveraged as a growth hack to attract users, a scalable token model is yet to be identified.

To date, there have been many failed economic models that have informed and inspired new models and economic approaches. Yet, innovators in this space are at least a cycle away from identifying a sustainable model.

The last headwind is that of user experience. VR hardware and the Web3 onboarding user experience need to be more seamless to attract hardcore gamers, creators and users into the Metaverse.