Here’s our roadmap for replacing Shadowbang in the Metaverse

Despite all the hype about the metaverse, it’s easy to forget that it’s still in its early stages. Although the term has only recently gained wide public acceptance, its impact on how we interact with technology is already expected to be very significant. McKinsey & Company estimates that annual global spending within the metaverse could reach $5 trillion by 2030, across a wide range of areas including gaming, social, fitness, commerce and distance learning.

The question of how to define and build a technology with such broad capabilities is fluid. While many games such as Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft are hailed as early examples of successful metaverse platforms, a more holistic approach would allow unlimited player interaction between these games. Interoperability between metaverse platforms is one of the key components to consider.

A new way to socialize

Although the metaverse has only recently appeared in popular dictionaries, it is not a new concept. The term was originally used in Neil Stephenson’s novels to describe a fictional break from reality. snow crashThe popularity of digital entertainment has increased significantly during the pandemic. From games like Among Us to services like Netflix Party and Zoom, the opportunity to socialize virtually has been very appealing to many during times of acute isolation.

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These changes are fundamentally reshaping our ideas about how we socialize and work together, creating enduring habits formed by connecting and collaborating virtually. – A key factor in accelerating engagement with the Metaverse. Virtual experiences such as Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert have taken positive steps in the development of in-game social immersion experiences. However, a multi-platform hyper-social virtual experience is not yet on the market.

Moderation and censorship

Freedom, community, and collaboration are all hallmarks of the Metaverse. Achieving this requires an infrastructure capable of supporting the transfer of sensitive metadata across a variety of blockchain protocols, metaverse platforms, and a gaming ecosystem of mixed social media, cryptocurrency wallets, and decentralized applications. Therefore, before the interoperable metaverse introduces new business models and cross-platform capabilities, multi-chain identity and moderation issues must be addressed.

Decentralization provides opportunities to experiment with community-driven tactics, encourages specific behaviors, and allows groups to determine their own preferences. PubDAO, a publishing collective launched in conjunction with Decrypt, is a good example of how these structures work. The key is to make a clear distinction between moderation and censorship. Pubbars are like-minded individuals, in this case writers, who are vetted, onboarded and integrated into the culture of the community.

Scaling this model to billions of people creates problems because individual screening is impractical. Traditional social media is plagued by this problem and has introduced shadow bans and other censorship tools to combat it. Common solutions proposed by Web3 proponents include algorithmic detection and incentivized moderation to combat abuse, but this fails to explain the nature of the multi-chain metaverse.

Too much abuse will slip through the net, even if done transparently and fairly. Using the same tactics as the infamous Tornado Cash mixer, the laundering tool of choice for 52% of Non-Fungible Token (NFT) scams has gone before it gets sanctioned and abused in the name of free speech. You can hide the origin of unwanted messages. Even if the perpetrator goes unidentified on her one chain, she can jump on to the next. This is not the type of metaverse that everyone wants to live in.

NFTs make users traceable across chains

A possible solution is to move the moderation tools upstream. Twitter has successfully tried such a process. By displaying a warning prompt before publishing a tweet, 9% of users were prompted to cancel the post. Overall, the study concluded that his offensive tweets decreased by 6% as a result of this mechanism.

Implementing a metadata standard and injecting a distributed identifier (DID) into it could provide a path to ethical moderation. This guarantees accountability rather than enforcing privacy. Such multi-chain technical standards allow tokens created on any chain to be traced back to their origins within the metaverse. NFTs may be injected with verifiable credentials, allowing platforms to provide privacy to users and define the conditions under which these rights are forfeited.

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More importantly, with the increasing interest in cybersecurity, metadata standards will help us better protect individual users. According to his 2020 report from Akamai, data breaches in gaming are notoriously common, with more than half of frequent gamers targeted for hacks. The wealth of victims and the prevalence of in-game microtransactions make them lucrative targets for cybercriminals. Additionally, users tend to use the same password across multiple accounts, making credential stuffing a serious problem that can permeate the entire industry.

While certainly not a panacea, interoperable standards go a long way toward consolidating individual security needs. Web3 is set up to accommodate identity systems that eliminate the need to store sensitive data on central servers and make it more difficult for hackers to access. If personal assets are compromised, a metadata standard that incorporates DID enables traceability across multi-chain metaverses.

It’s important to get data standards right, as they govern the evolution of the web. Interoperability is easier to set up from the start than an afterthought. By learning lessons learned from the evolution of the Internet, we can collectively build innovative metadata standards to foster positive, shared, techno-social experiences on Web3.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended, and should not be construed as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views or opinions of Cointelegraph.