Just How Deeply Will NFTs And Web 3.0 Effect The World?

The Metaverse and the general NFT ecosystem have gotten a lot of interest lately. Every few weeks, some company announces some new NFT project. And it’s not just the more obvious things like esthetic items for avatars. It’s not only fashion and shoes. We’ve seen food items on the table for replication. A budding real estate market of sorts with digital properties. All kinds of interesting things have become and will become digital and on the blockchain.

And some of them are replicated items—and that’s what I want to explore today. Sure, NFTs can do things not physically possible in the real world, but a surprising amount are one-to-one copies.

And that begs the imagination: will we slowly build a second skin to our world? Will products come with barcodes or something similar, so anything we buy at a physical store also exists digitally? Will the reverse also happen, and a (digital) pizza purchased at a (digital) party with (avatar) friends result in an order from Pizza Hut or Domino’s Pizza? Digital card games already have a model like this, where the cards you buy in person also can be used online.

Further, you don’t have to go far to find talk about Metaverse events. Imagine going digitally to a concert (that’s also happening IRL) with more avatars than any stadium could fit, buying merch from the band, and then having that merch show up at your real-life door.

We may see things with 3D printing and 3D scanning to narrow the reality gaps further. Augmented reality might show us this second skin in real-time. AI is a possible solution for quickly generating extra spaces and locations for a digital world. It’s honestly wild where the digital and the mechanical can intersect.

Science fiction novels often have a tough time accurately predicting how technology will shape the world, but the potential of the Metaverse isn’t science fiction—it’s happening. It demands imagination to even think about it fully, but it’s not a story. Google literally anything I mentioned and see how far this rabbit hole goes. The timeline on a lot of this is up in the air, but its newest permutations are sooner than we think.