News Center

Goldman Sachs: blockchain is the core of the development of metauniverse and Web3

Financial giant Goldman Sachs said that encryption technology will become the core of the virtual world, because it will allow people to safely own digital items in different virtual worlds.

Wall Street bank analysts led by rod hall from Goldman Sachs said in a report released on Tuesday that blockchain is one of the most destructive technology trends since tcp/ip and HTML "introduced the Internet in the 1990s".

Metauniverse is a loose term, which refers to the virtual world in which people can play, work, entertainment, socialize and trade in the form of avatars.

In October, Facebook announced that it would change its name to meta and focus on building a virtual world, saying that this is the future of the Internet.

Decentralized game metauniverses such as axie infinity and the sandbox, which focus on encryption, have been attracting users recently. They allow players to create and trade items in the form of irreplaceable tokens or NFT (a secure crypto Collection), and have an in-game economy using cryptocurrencies.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs said that encryption technology must become the core of the development of metauniverse, because it allows users to safely own assets or items and transfer them to different platforms without the permission of the central party.

For example, the sandbox runs on the Ethereum encrypted network, which enables users to buy and sell game land and NFT on exchanges outside the metauniverse (such as opensea).

"We believe that the metauniverse is likely to be a fusion of different 3D spaces, and users will regularly move between these spaces," Goldman Sachs said.

"If any virtual goods or services cannot be moved from one space to another with users, we think their value may be more limited."

The analyst added: "as far as metauniverse is concerned, blockchain is the only technology we see that can uniquely identify any virtual object independent of the central authority." this ability to identify objects and then track ownership is crucial to the ultimate function of metauniverse. "

Blockchain is the digital ledger of transactions, which is supervised by all members of the network rather than the central party. Blockchain technology provides power for bitcoin, in which users called "miners" must solve password problems to verify transactions, so as to maintain network security.

Although facebook/meta has launched an early version of metauniverse, it is unclear whether the company believes that decentralized blockchain technology will play a big role.

Many encryption enthusiasts worry that the company's financial strength and power on social media means that it may dominate the virtual world and strictly control creation and trading.

At the same time, critics are highly skeptical of the whole idea of metauniverse, and point out that the previous virtual world (such as second life) has existed for many years, and virtual reality headphones have never really become popular.

Goldman Sachs' report is generally optimistic about blockchain, although the bank said that it is too early to formulate a clear investment strategy around it.

For web 3, Goldman Sachs believes that blockchain allows "partial elimination of centralized control". The note added that in the future, users will be able to log in without a third party (such as meta, Google or apple).

Goldman Sachs analysts said that blockchain "has a broader and far-reaching impact on the decentralized identification and ownership of digital and physical entities."

They said that this technology can increase privacy on the Internet and get rid of the need for centralized control over a series of industries such as supply chain management.