Ethereum Co-Founder Feels Meta's Metaverse Attempts Will 'Misfire'

Ethereum Co-Founder Feels Meta's Metaverse Attempts Will 'Misfire'

The Co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, took to Twitter on Saturday and gave his perspective on the "existing corporate attempts to create the metaverse." Buterin noted that a metaverse will happen, but he doesn’t believe the current corporate metaverse attempts are going anywhere.

Buterin Shares His Thoughts on Existing Corporate Metaverse Attempts

Vitalik Buterin discussed the metaverse after sharing a tweet from the Co-founder of Dialectic and Blockchain Auditor, Dean Eigenmann, who said he doesn’t believe the metaverse "will happen in the ways VCs are currently funding." Buterin shared Eigenmann’s tweet on Saturday and agreed with the assessment.

Buterin said, "The'metaverse’ is going to happen, but I don’t think any of the existing corporate attempts to intentionally create the metaverse are going anywhere." Buterin’s tweet about the metaverse is closing in on 10,000 likes and close to 1,500 retweets in 24 hours.

Buterin’s metaverse statement got a lot of responses, and one individual wrote: "I think the barrier to entry is a bleeding edge bit of evolving research hardware that has created a rare case of a necessary condition favoring large incumbents. The idea wouldn’t even be under discussion without Quest 2."

Buterin responded to this specific tweet and shared his perspective. "My critique is deeper than ‘Metaverse Wikipedia will beat Metaverse Encyclopedia Britannica,’" Ethereum’s Co-founder replied. "It’s that we don’t know the definition of ‘the metaverse’ yet, so it’s far too early to know what people want. So anything Facebook creates now will misfire."

Facebook has directed a lot of energy toward metaverse concepts and even renamed the company Meta, long after it acquired the virtual reality company Occulus. Many other corporate entities are looking to build some sort of metaverse, and the term "metaverse" has been overused in thousands of press releases and articles.

So far, the so-called metaverse is arguably an incomplete mess of virtual worlds, non-fungible tokens, alternative and augmented realities, artificial intelligence, three-dimensional (3D) worlds, and video game concepts. Many individuals, skeptics, and surveys have questioned whether or not the metaverse will be a disaster.

However, executives from Disney, Microsoft, and Warner have described how they would address problems in the metaverse. An executive at Ubisoft said he thinks gamers who reject non-fungible tokens (NFTs) don’t understand the benefits.

The Twitter account for the Youtube channel Lily’s Show responded to Buterin’s statement and said: "Completely agree — the real power of the 'metaverse’ is in organic community building. The ecosystem and the foundation are already here (in many ways, thanks to you). Excited to see it flourish over the coming years."