From the perspective of technological platforms, we have witnessed the era of mainframe internet, PC internet, and in recent years, with the proliferation of mobile smart devices, mobile internet has seamlessly integrated into people's lives. With the development and widespread adoption of technologies like 5G, AR, VR, and MR, a new form of internet characterized by multi-interface, fully immersive human-computer interaction is emerging. It is currently difficult to precisely define the ultimate form of the metaverse. A realistic portrayal of the metaverse can be seen in the sci-fi movie Ready Player One (OASIS), which represents the closest approximation of the metaverse achievable with current technology.

The virtual goods market is estimated to be worth approximately $50 billion and is projected to grow to $190 billion by 2025, with a significant portion occurring in relatively opaque secondary markets, suggesting the actual figure could be even higher. This vast, untapped potential has the industry salivating, making the metaverse boom unstoppable. However, to some extent, the metaverse remains largely unknown today, even to those who have experienced VR or AR. In Piers Kicks' paper Enter the Void: When Crypto Meets the Metaverse, he outlines the metaverse's key attributes: "strong social connectivity, live synchronization, massive scalability, persistence, hardware-agnosticism, high interoperability, rich economies, bridging of different worlds, and abundant content." He also identifies five critical components of the metaverse: content, standard protocols, infrastructure, media, and culture. Ultimately, blockchain and cryptographic technologies will become indispensable to the metaverse, ushering in new business models and opportunities for the gaming and entertainment industries.

As blockchain merges with the existing digital economy, cryptographic technologies provide a foundational solution to enhance our virtual environments on an unprecedented scale. They offer incentive structures while coordinating large-scale, tamper-proof economic behaviors, establishing a robust economic system to underpin the metaverse. At the core of this perspective is the idea that native digital cryptocurrencies will play an essential role in enabling seamless value transfer across the digital world. Digital assets and cryptographic technologies appear to be the most urgent requirements for building the metaverse.

Of course, there is still a long way to go in analyzing the path to widespread adoption of cryptographic technologies, viable investment opportunities, and the embryonic forms of new business models. Currently, NFTs seem to hold the key to answering these questions, as they are expected to bring revolutionary changes to gaming and other digital economies. A deeper analysis suggests that in the era of the vast digital economy, as boundless content and culture are continuously produced, much of this digital input must be tokenized to significantly expand the granularity of connectivity: each unique item will have its own creator, history, and owner. In this process, NFTs encapsulate the intellectual property ownership of the assets they represent, while native digital "things" and their standards and economic identifiers are woven into the fabric of the metaverse, enabling the real and virtual worlds to merge seamlessly in a transparent environment. In this metaverse, the value of native digital, decentralized mechanisms for issuing and managing scarce and unique digital "things" is self-evident.