Metaverse

Intermediate

更新済 Oct 2, 2026

What Is the Metaverse?

The metaverse is a concept describing a network of persistent, interconnected 3D virtual environments where users interact through digital avatars.

Origins of the Metaverse

The term was coined by author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash, which depicted a virtual reality-based successor to the internet.

Today, the “metaverse” label is applied to a range of virtual world projects, immersive gaming platforms, and spatial computing experiences.

A fully realized metaverse would allow people to work, socialize, play, and conduct commerce within shared virtual spaces rather than navigating separate websites and applications, with identity and digital assets carried between experiences.

While technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have matured significantly, a single unified metaverse does not yet exist. Some platforms, particularly in gaming, offer elements of the concept through persistent worlds, virtual economies, and social features.

Metaverse and Blockchain

Blockchain technology is well suited to supporting metaverse economies, though it is not required for all virtual worlds. Some examples of applications that can straddle both the blockchain and metaverse worlds are:

Crypto wallets: These give users direct control over digital assets without depending on a centralized platform.
NFTs: They represent verifiable ownership of unique items including virtual land, digital collectibles, and in-game objects that can be transferred across compatible platforms.
Ownership records on-chain: They support secondary markets for virtual goods, where items carry provable scarcity and transfer history rather than being locked to a single game account.

Blockchain additionally enables transparent governance through token-based voting, giving communities a way to participate in decisions about how a virtual world operates, from land use rules to treasury spending.

Blockchain-based virtual worlds such as Decentraland and The Sandbox have put these principles into practice, letting users buy virtual land, build experiences, and trade assets with other participants.

However, adoption has been uneven. Active user numbers across dedicated blockchain metaverse platforms have varied significantly since their peak in 2021 and 2022, and the sector now competes with large centralized gaming and social platforms that offer similar experiences without blockchain rails.

Metaverse vs. Web3

Web3 refers to a vision of a decentralized internet built on blockchain, giving users greater control over their data and digital assets. The metaverse describes immersive 3D virtual environments. The two concepts overlap when blockchain platforms host virtual worlds through projects like Decentraland or The Sandbox, but neither concept requires the other.

A metaverse could exist on centralized servers, as many game worlds already do, and Web3 does not have to be immersive, since tokenized finance and decentralized identity operate without 3D environments. In practice, the strongest overlap appears in blockchain-based virtual worlds where ownership, payments, and identity all run on-chain.

Learn more: What Is the Metaverse?

投稿を共有