NFTs have become the newest, hottest, and most powerful trend of the gaming world since the long-gone era of Pong and Galaxy Game. Gamers worldwide, for the first time, can now make real money with play-to-earn (P2E) gaming, and in-game assets (characters, land, tools, and more) have been turned into tradable tokens with actual monetary value. Large amounts of money from both investors and gamers are rapidly rushing into the sector: Sandbox, a virtual world development game, saw its sales of NFT land plots surge by over 1,600% in 2021, with sales peaking at over $3 million per day. Ember Sword’s NFT digital land sale in August 2021 raised an unprecedented $203 million. Investment fund Metaverse Group bought an NFT land plot on virtual platform Decentraland in December 2021 for $2.43 million – an all-time price record. Top NFT metaverse game Axie Infinity generated a record $3 billion in NFT sales in 2021. The explosion in NFT trading volumes ($41 billion in 2021) and the number of NFT game metaverses (rapidly approaching 500) are signaling a tectonic shift. Also, with Facebook’s name change to Meta introducing the term “metaverse” to the wider public, this seems to signal the beginning of the Web 3.0 era. PwC sees the metaverse sector being worth $1.54 trillion by 2030, with Goldman Sachs upping the estimate to a potential $8 trillion. This game-changing trend, however, has come with a significant challenge. The traditio...
