Beyond purely digital sovereign virtual assets, new specialized protocols like Boson Protocol solve the digital to physical redemption problem, by representing physical items as NFTs which can be redeemed in the real world without the need for intermediaries. Enabling decentralized autonomous commerce across the metaverse blurring the distinction between virtual and physical.

As a result of both the necessity for governing the growing landscape of decentralized technologies and networks and the ideals of its community, a class of tools and concepts for decentralized governance has emerged. The concept of a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) enables individuals and entities to form groups, jointly own assets, make decisions and participate in the economics of the DAO. Several mature building blocks for DAOs have emerged, including Aragon and DAOStack. They include and extend to tools like voting structures, and multisignature wallets for joint custody of assets. On the level of protocols, mechanisms for staking and slashing have emerged to incentivize participants in these open networks to behave benevolently. The Open Metaverse can benefit from insights and tools from decentralized governance both for governing metaverse platforms and their components, and enabling economic participation in each, as well as for people to organize themselves within it, such as with gamer guilds or clans.

The idea that The Cloud of distributed storage and compute could also be decentralized by specialized protocols like Filecoin or CUDOs, so not reliant on or giving any advantage to any one company for example Amazon, Google or Microsoft which control 66% of the market. It almost means people that invest in expensive hardware to access the metaverse and increase performance can offset some of the cost by renting out capacity and in turn earning crypto-currencies and joining the virtual economy. It is also believed at a certain scale, and density in a given physical locale, it could increase the proximity of physical hardware to The Cloud at any given time as we unlock the bandwidth and compute of neighboring connections, and therefore allow greater ‘edge computing’ for ubiquity.

For a truly Open Metaverse, it is crucially important for people to have security of an online identity which they can protect and accumulate value with. Sovereignty and by consequence self custody of what the user owns are core principles to Web³. However for what is called a true SSI (Self Sovereign Identity), we need dedicated protocols solely for the preservation of privacy of identity itself vs being public and on-chain when identity and its data is treated as just another digital asset. Innovations in Self Sovereign Identity and Verifiable Claims specifically mean we can identify ourselves, transact and prove things about ourselves (attest) without revealing the underlying or associated data. This is critical to avoid the role of a government or platform as the sole arbiters of our online identities, de-platforming, or even state violence.

Computer programs with economic agency or autonomous agents that live and transact on blockchains to carry out increasingly complex automatic programs, such as AEAs (Autonomous Economic Agents) via Fetch.ai.