Grayscale Sees A $1 Trillion Opportunity In Metaverse Industry, Here’s What It Means to the Crypto World

Crypto investment giant Grayscale recently published a new report and remains ultra bullish about the growth of the Metaverse industry. In its recently published report The Metaverse, Web 3.0 Virtual Cloud Economies” Grayscale predicts a $1 trillion market opportunity in getting Metaverse to the mainstream in the next few years.

In the report Grayscale head of research David Grider and research analyst Matt Maximo have explored from the perspective of open Metaverse worlds backed by “interconnected crypto-economy” such as Decentraland.

The report further explains that Metaverse platform integrated with the crypto economy for e.g. DeFi services for staking and lending, decentralized governance, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized cloud storage have created a “new online experience” that is rapidly attracting new users.

The report further notes that there’s a rapid surge in the global all-time active wallets since the beginning of 2020. Just in 18 months up to June 2021, the total active meta verse wallets have spiked up by 10x and is currently sitting around at 50,000.

The report adds: Compared to other Web 3.0 and Web 2.0 segments, Metaverse virtual world users are still in their early innings, but if current growth rates remain on their current trajectory, this emerging segment has the potential to become mainstream in the coming years.”

It also highlights the interest of venture capital firms in this emerging sector. According to the report, the fundraising in the crypto metaverse tootled at $1 billion during Q3 2021 which was a substantial 12% of the total funds coming to the crypto sector.

The research also points out some key dynamics that could lead to the growth of the Metaverse sector. This includes the average leisure time and money spent on digital activities. The report notes that there’s going to be a cultural shift from premium games to Web 3.0 innovations like Play-to-Earn (P2E).

Back in 2020, the global revenue from virtual gaming stood at $200 billion. Of this, the “premium spending” was 20% or $40 billion. Estimates show that this spending can shoot 10x by 2025 to $400 billion primarily driven by in-game spending.

The report also notes: Web 3.0 Metaverse virtual worlds have benefited from rapid innovation and productivity gains. Crypto virtual worlds have created a multi-million dollar primary and secondary market for creators and asset owners by eliminating capital controls and opening their digital borders to free-market capitalism”.