What is “the Metaverse”?

I recently produced digital art using AI. I didn’t plan to do this, however, I wanted a catalyst for learning Solidity Smart Contract development, and copy and pasting digital art just isn’t my thing.

Months of artistic experimentation and software development later and the result is Gangen Alumni. 10,000 unique characters without context or a story.

Who are these 10,000 1-of-1 characters without a world for them to exist in?

“Metaverse” is a phrase used across many collections to establish this sense of “world”, however, it is important to understand what a Metaverse is in order to determine whether the world of Gangen is one.

“The Metaverse” is commonly understood to be this virtual landscape where humans can connect without language or geographic constraints, where digital avatars and characters will become our identity.

This notion seems far-fetched but is viable at a point in time when there is an economic incentive to exist within a virtual landscape that out-incentivises anything offered in the physical world.

This is why some individuals with highly regarded opinions reference “The Metaverse” as this point in time.

The problem with this notion is that the current landscape of NFTs is fragmented. Each collection that establishes a sense of “world”, is its own Metaverse, resulting in a landscape of “Metaverses”.

Until there is a symbiosis of digital worlds, and there is AI that bridges art styles dynamically, we won’t have a single “Metaverse”.

These thoughts are an extract from a deep dive into the art and concepts that went into the Gangen Alumni NFT collection published here.