Thread by @LeonidasNFT

1/ Another metaverse thread. Why we have to beat Facebook and the 1000x case for the emerging NFT asset class 👇

2/ The digital age is upon us and all roads lead to a VR metaverse with billions of people living, working, and gaming inside. The only question is how far off is it?

3/ Billions of humans will need to have access to a headset that matches real life when they put it on. This means that we will need a mass-produced headset with a resolution and frame rate that match the human eye.

4/ Alright, let’s bust out the calculator and do a little math to determine what the specs of this headset will need to be.

5/ The human eye sees the equivalent of 576 million pixels and there are two of them, so the resolution will need to be 1.1 billion pixels. The human eye also sees 1000 fps so the frame rate will need to be 1000hz.

6/ Now let’s compare that to the HP Reverb 2 which is the current state-of-the-art commercially available VR headset. The Reverb 2 has 2160x2160 pixels per eye so that’s a total resolution of 9.3 million pixels and the frame rate comes in at 90hz.

7/ So to achieve a VR metaverse at scale we need to go from:

9.3 million pixels -> 1.1 billion pixels
90 fps -> 1000fps

8/ At first glance these numbers might lead you to believe that we are very far off from achieving a full-blown metaverse, but not so fast. There are a couple of more dynamics at play.

9/ It’s not the screen technology that limits our ability to create the perfect VR headset. Beefing up displays is surprisingly easy. It turns out that the real bottleneck is the GPU processing power needed to render all of those pixels.

10/ The GPU compute required is proportional to:

resolution * frame rate

The current commercially available GPUs can render 839.8 million pixels per second (9.3 million * 90)

But we need to be able to render 1.1 trillion pixels per second (1.1 billion * 1000)

11/ This means that we need a 1372x increase in GPU processing power. Yikes!

12/ Fortunately GPUs have been improving at a very fast, predictable rate. Similar to their CPU brethren who follow Moores law and double in power every 2 years, GPUs follow Huang’s law and double every 18 months.

13/ Given this rate of improvement, by 2037, only 16 years from now, the GPU processing power needed to power a VR headset that is on par with real-life will be readily accessible.

14/ The implications of this are profound. Massive companies like Epic Games and Facebook have done these same calculations and are now betting their future on the metaverse.

15/ The real kicker is that this 16 year horizon is a somewhat conservative estimate. There have been very promising breakthroughs in VR eye-tracking technology that could cut that time in half.

16/ The theory goes that it’s very wasteful to render every pixel in a VR headset. The human eye only sees at a sharp resolution in a very tiny part of its field of view. This is why everything gets blurrier in your eye the further away it is from what you are focusing on.

17/ So given this phenomenon, if a VR headset could track where your eye is focusing on the screen, then it could only render the part of the screen that you are looking at in high resolution. Everything else could be blurry and you would never know.

18/ This eye-tracking technology may not end up panning out but that’s how the bull case for a sub 10 year full-blown VR metaverse timeframe goes.

19/ All of this is to say that the metaverse is inevitable. Whenever the bottleneck for an enormous opportunity is improving at a very predictable rate it’s probably a good idea to pay attention. Elon saw this with lithium-ion and Netflix saw it with residential bandwidth.

20/ In these types of situations you don’t have to be able to look into a crystal ball to predict the future, you just need to be able to read the writing on the wall and place your bets accordingly.

21/ Many people believe that we are heading into a dot-com bubble-like speculative moment of insanity as the narrative around the metaverse and blockchain penetrates into the mainstream.

22/ Two possible visions for the future seem to be emerging out of that narrative. Will Web 2.0 giants like Facebook build centralized, walled gardens or will we learn from our mistakes and leverage a new set of protocols to build an open and decentralized metaverse?

23/ I don’t know about you but I’m not super thrilled about the idea of Zuck effectively declaring himself a god over the metaverse that I’ll spend half my waking hours in.

24/ I can’t wait to receive notifications like this:

“Meta has suspended your Bored Ape avatar due to depicting gun violence and its use of the banned item: Bored Cigarette”

25/ Since I wrote the below thread several weeks ago, Facebook has publicly stated that they are hiring 10,000 metaverse engineers, will spend $10 billion on building the metaverse this year alone and have ruined the word “meta” for all of humanity.

https://twitter.com/LeonidasNFT/status/1445823435951656962?s=20

26/ The open metaverse is certainly not guaranteed given the infinite resources that established players are willing to commit to ensuring it doesn’t come to fruition. For humanity’s sake, I don’t want to imagine what a future with a metaverse controlled by Facebook looks like.

27/ So let’s not find out! You might not realize it but by simply participating in this conversation and doing things like downloading MetaMask, setting your twitter pfp to an ape, or using Uniswap you are casting your vote for the protocols and future that you believe in.

28/ We are only a couple hundred thousand strong right now but if we keep building and participating, soon there will be hundreds of millions of us. At that point, even an organization as powerful as Facebook won’t be able to compete with our network effects and we will have won.

29/ Now let’s turn our attention to the implications of a large-scale metaverse with billions of people inside. For the remainder of this thread, I'll assume that the open metaverse won bc if it doesn’t our jpegs going up in value will be the least of our concerns.

30/ In an open metaverse, our identity, avatar, and digital assets will move with us through all experiences and worlds. This is called interoperability. Once you internalize the significance of this and realize these are both the same NFT it will click why people are long NFTs.

31/ Now to the question that everyone’s thinking. How do I make money with this knowledge?

32/ If you're looking to invest in the metaverse, sure you could go buy up the tokens for a bunch of gaming/metaverse projects (or even buy $MVRS) but the power move is to buy blue-chip digital assets that will be relevant regardless of which platforms win.

33/ Over the coming months and years, you will see a lot of people (Zuck included) pedaling metaverse investments, but why take a risk on a platform when you can lock in an iconic NFT that is virtually guaranteed to be relevant in all of them?

34/ Why are blue-chip NFTs like Punks a shoo-in? The metaverse is about human interaction at its core and NFTs are both cultural and social expressions of our identity.

35/ An @EtherRock in your pocket, a founder CryptoKitty walking beside you, or a Fidenza hanging on your wall all provide incredible utility as a flex.

36/ People don’t indicate social status by writing their bank account’s balance on their forehead, they wear thousand dollar sneakers, drink ten thousand dollar bottles of champagne, wear hundred thousand dollar watches, and drive million dollar supercars.

37/ For more on the profound implications of “flex” and NFTs give this great post by @CryptoHayes a read: cryptohayes.medium.com/rock-paper-sci…

38/ pfp NFTs will be much more than just avatars. They are about access. A Punk or Bored Ape will be able to walk into some of the most exclusive spaces in the metaverse. They are keys that grant you access to invaluable information and networking opportunities.

39/ When you layer on the fact that NFTs are engineered to store value, the 10,000 wealthiest individuals in the metaverse will be willing to pay extraordinary amounts for a Punk knowing that they can very likely sell it to someone else for more later.

40/ Not all NFTs are created equal. If you’re day trading jpegs that’s a very different thing than making a metaverse play where you’re planning to hold an iconic asset for over a decade.

41/ For the latter case it’s very important that you acquire NFTs that are “historically significant”. And all that really means is that the project innovated or pushed the boundaries in some way.

42/ Is the narrative and community behind the NFT strong enough to carve its name into the history books? Because if not it will be forgotten and some trendy new NFT minted between now and 2037 will probably have replaced it.

43/ Early/historically significant NFTs also make for a great store of value because there can be an infinite number of NFTs minted in the future while there is a fixed amount of NFTs from 2017.

44/ We see this same phenomenon play out in the IRL NFTs (think vintage cars, wine, retro video games, watches, antiques, etc).

45/ This is why many collectors are accumulating iconic, early NFTs such as Punks, Twitter Eggs, Rare Pepes, Spells of Genesis, @mitchellfchan Digital Zones, Autoglyphs, and many others. These projects each have a compelling narrative and will likely stand the test of time.

46/ I literally quit my job as a software developer last month to spend all of my time unearthing old projects. That’s how much I and many others like @adamamcbride and @WRabbit1111 believe in this.

47/ Now for a little alpha 🤫. Over the past 9 months, I have taken a look at nearly every NFT project from 2014 to 2018 and by far the best metaverse play I have come across is none other than the Spells of Genesis SATOSHICARD.

48/ The historical significance of the SATOSHICARD can not be understated. Not only is part of the first game to ever tokenize its assets all the way back in 2015 on Counterparty, but it is also the first tokenized asset to ever be integrated into two independent games.

49/ This makes the SATOSHICARD the first instance of NFT interoperability thus representing the humble birth of the metaverse. It marks the first crack in the walled garden that makes up the multi-trillion dollar gaming and social media industries.

50/ I acquired one SATOSHICARD last month and just put my money where my mouth is by spending 131Ξ to acquire two more. There are only 200 and I think things could get really interesting with them as the metaverse narrative continues to gain momentum.

51/ SATOSHICARD also has excellent potential to become known as one of the first pfps and they might just become the most coveted avatars in the metaverse. I just switched my pfp from punk 3722 to it. Who knows 🤷‍♂️

52/ For anybody wanting to check them out there is a market on Counterparty and now on OS as well via the @EmblemVault bridge: opensea.io/assets/emblem-…

53/ Big shoutout to @WRabbit1111 who has been beating the drum on them for way too long. Maybe he’ll switch over his pfp with me 😉

54/ The NFT asset class is in its infancy and is very much in a price discovery phase with around a $12B mkt cap. That’s one-half of one percent of the mkt cap of fungible tokens. There are ERC-20 meme coins that are 4x bigger than all NFTs combined.

WE ARE EARLY!

55/ When you pair this with the growth of the metaverse and the crypto space as a whole it all of a sudden doesn’t sound that crazy to say NFTs will 1000x over the next decade or two.

Place your bets accordingly.

56/ For everyone who is going to complain that they are priced out of the blue-chip markets, that is simply a myth. @NFTX_, @fractional_art, @uniclyNFT, and several dozen DAOs like @HeadDaoNFT and @JennyMetaverse make it easy to get exposure via fractionalized baskets.

57/ If you’re eager to learn more about the open vs closed metaverse I would highly recommend you read Snow Crash and Ready Player One, check out some of @punk6529’s and @DCLBlogger’s threads, and watch this 77-minute cringefest that Facebook just put out:

58/ With this space’s ethos and from what I’ve seen so far, I know that if we keep working together we can usher in a future bight than anything any of us could ever imagine. Now let’s go make the open metaverse a reality and kick Facebook’s ass!