Conundrum That Is NFTs Metaverse -Pritha Jha – BW Businessworld

It wasn’t too long ago that my husband would tell me on a Friday evening, “We need to get back home. I need to meet Zur and buy weapons.” Zur was the weapons dealer in Play Station’s Destiny. He would appear only on the weekends to sell special weapons in-game. At the time, I’d scoff and think to myself, “Thank God that’s not real!” Now I’m thinking to myself, how MUCH of it could be real?

Imagine the entire game is now a universe of its own. Your virtual avatar can now drink in a club in the game, and you can buy weapons in the form of NFTs that would be exclusive to you. Unless we sort out the legal technicalities, its possible you could have a different spouse in the metaverse too! Where do you draw the line between fact and fiction? How do you know if what you’re buying is real? The ramifications are mind blowing. There is no limit to what you can do in the metaverse.

Having said the above, as usual, the law is still playing catch up. India still isn’t clear on its stance on crypto currency, and now it has to deal with NFTs and the Metaverse too. Almost all social media will have a marketplace for NFTs. Some sooner than later. Almost all social media will evolve into the Metaverse. Legally, we need to wrap our heads around it, and quick.

What happens if the site that hosts your NFTs disappears? You could have paid millions of dollars for nothing. What happens if someone takes a clip of a video off YouTube, let’s say Michael Jordan’s slam dunk, tells you it’s the real thing, and you only realise later that it’s fake? To make matters worse, NFTs are bought and sold in Crypto, a form of currency that requires no banking system, no intermediaries, nothing. It’s extremely difficult to trace. It’s not linked to a government issued ID so one individual can have many Crypto wallets. What if the price of the of the NFT you’re buying has been inflated through circular trading by one individual, much like it is possible to do with stocks? At least there’s a law that prohibits manipulative trading in stocks. So, before you plunge into the world of Crypto, NFTs and the Metaverse, really ask yourself, how much do you know? You will realise, we are barely even beginning to scratch the surface.

As if that wasn’t enough, there are massive social implications that we haven’t even begun to consider. If you thought social media was leading to depression, anxiety and mental health issues, well, let’s wait to see how much worse it gets when the only social lives people lead is in a metaverse. Remember the movie Inception? When Leonardo Di Caprio’s wife could no longer separate the real world from the one created by her mind? Yeah…we’re all going to get there.  

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