According to a story by Bitcoin.com News, the Spanish government wants to encourage the creation of metaverse initiatives by awarding funds to organizations and people that meet specific requirements. The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digitalization will oversee the program, which the government plans to fund with grants totaling more than $4 million.
Companies and people working on metaverse-related initiatives in the European Union will be given the funding. The government will need to see a project plan and an explanation of the objectives from potential recipients. To be eligible for the funding, applicants must have a female representation in their organizations of at least 25%.
According to the article, the first round of funds will be specifically allocated to the gaming and entertainment industry. The ministry is working on a procedure. Nevertheless, that will include funding for initiatives utilizing more avant-garde technology, such as virtual, augmented, and extended reality.
To profit from the metaverse’s expanding growth, the Spanish government predicts it will be worth more than $1 billion by 2026.
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Metaverse Industry Worth $ 1 Trillion Per Grayscale
Grayscale Investments (“Grayscale”), a division of Digital Currency Group, stated in a research report published in November of last year that “the market opportunity for bringing the Metaverse to life may be worth over $1 trillion in annual revenue and may compete with Web 2.0 companies worth ~$15 trillion in market value today.”
Head of Research authored the 19-page report by Grayscale, David Grider, Head of Research and Research Analyst Matt Maximo and is titled “The Metaverse: Web 3.0 Virtual Cloud Economies.”
Grider and Maximo began by defining the term “metaverse” for their audience:
“Crypto cloud economies are the next emerging market investment frontier and the Metaverse is at the forefront of this Web 3.0 internet evolution. The Metaverse is a set of interconnected, experiential, 3D virtual worlds where people located anywhere can socialize in real-time to form a persistent, user-owned, internet economy spanning the digital and physical worlds…”
“Projects like Decentraland are creating an open-world metaverse where users can log in to play games, earn MANA (the native token of Decentraland, with which users can purchase NFTs, including LAND or collectibles, and vote on economy governance), or create NFTs, giving them real world interoperability for the value of their time spent in-game.“
A “Web 2.0 Closed Corporate Metaverse” and a “Web 3.0 Open Crypto Metaverse” were then contrasted and explained in detail:
“Many gamers today spend their money and hours of their time building digital wealth within Web 2.0 closed corporate metaverse worlds. The problem is, that most game developers don’t let players monetize their investment and efforts. Developers prohibit players from trading items with other players and keep these worlds closed so players cannot transfer their in-game wealth to the real economy.”
“Web 3.0 open crypto metaverse networks solve this problem by eliminating the capital controls imposed on these virtual worlds by Web 2.0 platforms. This new paradigm allows users to own their digital assets as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), trade them with others in the game, and carry them to other digital experiences, creating an entirely new free-market internet-native economy that can be monetized in the physical world. This evolution of the ‘creator economy’ is known as ‘Play to Earn’.“
Then they noted that “the Metaverse opportunity goes far beyond gaming” and that “gaming is only one of the most readily reachable industries where value is already starting to transfer to Web 3.0 naturally.” “A trillion-dollar business opportunity across advertising, social commerce, digital events, hardware, and developer/creator monetization,” according to Grayscale, is what the metaverse represents.
The many sectors of the blockchain-based digital marketplace were then examined.
As a result of Facebook’s “shift towards the Metaverse” and its name change to Meta, the authors concluded that the enormous potential of the metaverse might “act as a stimulus for other Web 2.0 technology companies and investors to follow.”
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