Here's How NFTs Will Change Data Ownership in the Metaverse

As the Metaverse continues to grow, the next step is to make these virtual experiences hyper-real.Scaling immersive content experiences to billions of people will only be possible with automated AI tools that generate personalized content directly based on a user's biometric face and voice data and the physical environment they care about.

This ensures that everything from work meetings to parent-teacher interviews will take place in realistic virtual worlds that look exactly like our homes, schools and offices. And we as individuals will interact with each other while embodying photorealistic avatars of ourselves. The idea is that the Metaverse will still be filled with game worlds and stylized fictional avatars, but many of the things we do every day on the internet will be more easily replicated as hyperreal virtual experiences in the Metaverse.

With the emergence of a surreal metaverse where our avatars become perfect copies of us in real life, it is important that everyone can control how and where we appear in the virtual world. We also need to protect our hyper-real identities and have the deep personal biometric data that AI models use to build and animate our lifelike avatars.

Web1 and Web2 provide a read/write Internet experience. Today, we discuss Web3 adding a user-centric ownership layer - so the Internet becomes read/write/own.

The more realistic the Metaverse becomes, the more regular folks will have to think about who we "become" in an internet that looks and feels like reality.

If the digital world we occupy looks like it was captured on location with a camera and is filled with photorealistic versions of ourselves and loved ones, is it still just the Internet? Or are we creating a seamless extension of reality that forces us to "be" ourselves beyond the confines of the physical world? Is the surreal metaverse more Web3.1 than Web3.0? Could it give way to the advent of the "read/write/own/be" internet?

NFT hype cycles come and go, but there is no doubt that NFTs will play a key role in new content and the digital economy, especiallythose that are important to Gen Z. Record-setting sales and reserve prices aside, NFTs and blockchain technology are the technology stack that will enable ordinary people to create and own hyper-real synthetic avatars of themselves in virtual worlds. In the future, everyone will have an NFT in their wallet that is linked to their sensitive biometric data stored offline.

TheseNFTs will provide the basis for our persistent virtual identities, and we will use our wallets to log into third-party services and experiences like "3D Immersive Zoom" and "Hyperreal Fifa 2025" - just like we use "Sign in with Google" today Same. This process will allow users to verify their real identity, control access to their biometric data, and consent to how they are presented in hyper-real content. This is a far cry from the Web2 paradigm of data ownership.

This form of control over our hyperreal identities also allows us to participate directly in a new wave of virtual economies.

For example, we will be able to track our participation in virtual events and receive compensation for the data we create online as well as a portion of any advertising revenue or brand activations we generate through participation in the Metaverse experience. We will also be able to contribute our personal datasets to build more representative and realistic virtual worlds. When we are part of the content experience, it makes sense for us to share in its financial benefits. This isthe power of Web3.

NFT: A New Model of Data Ownership

Since the birth of the Internet, we have lost control of our data in two ways: gradually, and then suddenly. For a long time, the only people who raised concerns about data ownership were activists, who watched in horror as companies built tollbooths on the information superhighway and began to extract value from individuals’ personal data. With the rise of social media andthe Web2, it's impossible to ignore how big tech companies have amassed unimaginable treasure troves of personal information without our knowledge or genuine consent. Who actually reads the terms and conditions?

For many people, giving up control of their data is an easy choice. The Internet services and products we use every day are so convenient that our personal data is the price of admission.

Web3 presents a game-changing window of opportunity where we can claim our hyper-real virtual identities without transferring our personal data to centralized third-party platforms.

There are many questions to be answered about data security, such as whether we will be able to recover our identities if we lose our keys, but the concept of extending our individual sovereignty into virtual spaces independent of corporations is a powerful idea .

If the Metaverse is to be a seamless extension of physical reality, we will need to enable persistent, portable versions of our virtual selves. We don't have to change identities when we go to the store, the office, or meet up with friends in the real world, it should be the same in the metaverse.

While we may have multiple versions of surreal avatars that allow us to play with our identities, such as creating younger versions of ourselves, or presenting ourselves as different genders, these surreal creative permutations are ultimately based in our real world data and identity. Crucially, the high-resolution biometric data on which individual avatars are based does not find its way into the hands of every company or developer building virtual experiences in the metaworld.

When we securely store personal data inNFTs, we are able to transmit this information across the virtual space of the Metaverse. At the same time, NFT gives users full control over when and how third parties use this personal information. This allows us to demonstrate that we are who we say we are in all circumstances without requiring us to first disclose sensitive personal information.

Hyperreal NFTs linked to biometric datacould become a decentralized, user-controlled authentication platform built into the fabric of the Metaverse.

This transition to a newNFT-driven data ownership model is already well underway. Those working on using NFTs to protect personal data are planning a virtual world where our virtual selves possess all the traits we value in our flesh-and-blood identities. Our physical selves are irreplaceable, and ideally we have control over our bodies and our behavior. Now we finally have technology that allows ordinary people to protect and control who they are and what they do in virtual worlds.