Facebook’s Metaverse Will Fail – Vitalik Buterin
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin doesn't believe any of the existing attempts by corporations to create a metaverse will work.
A metaverse is commonly described as an interactive 3D online world focused on social connection, some of which is expected to be powered by augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).
Buterin said that while he believes the Meta Universe will be realized at some point, he doesn’t think any of the current attempts by corporations like Meta (ex-Facebook) will reap success.
The "metaverse" is going to happen but I don't think any of the existing corporate attempts to intentionally create the metaverse are going anywhere. https://t.co/tVUfq4CWmP
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 30, 2022
The Ethereum founder said the use cases are not yet clear, adding that he does not believe Meta’s attempt to create a metauniverse will be successful in its current form.
We don’t yet know the definition of “metaverse”, it’s too early to know what people actually want. So anything Facebook creates now will fail.
Other members of the crypto community have criticized centralized metaverse ideas such as those proposed by Meta and Microsoft, arguing that they could affect the decentralization of ownership of goods and services within these metaverses.
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But there are initiatives addressing the issues Buterin pointed out, as well as from the crypto community. Decentraland and Sandbox developers have teamed up with several Web3 projects to launch the Open Metaverse Alliance (OMA3), which focuses on building more transparent, inclusive, decentralized, and democratized metaverse.
The Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF) also seeks to build on these values and establish standards for a more open and interoperable metaverse.
This echoes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to stakeholders last October in which he stated that the metaverse is the next chapter for the Internet, adding:
“We are perceived as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier.”
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
