Last week, Facebook rebranded to Meta and announced its plans to kickstart the evolution of the Metaverse — an entirely new way of interacting and navigating the cyberspace. Now, the Metaverse landscape has a multi-billion dollar corporate behemoth vying for the helm, which has made its future all the more than uncertain.

Whether we similar it or non, major corporations will likely play a major role in how the Metaverse develops and evolves. Only volition it be plagued by the same problems faced by today's social media giants, or will decentralized platforms and services accept center stage?

Related: New manufacture, new rules: Building the Metaverse without bias

Edifice a digital walled garden

At last week's Facebook Connect conference, Meta founder and CEO Marking Zuckerberg announced plans to spend $10 billion this year alone on the development of the Metaverse — an ecosystem of interconnected digital experiences, services and platforms that seamlessly blend with the real earth.

But as Facebook has shown fourth dimension and time again — such every bit when it backpedaled on its pledge to non crave a Facebook account to use its Oculus products — it volition almost certainly expect to enforce strict controls on how the Metaverse is used and accessed. After all, ecosystem lock-ins are a popular, tried-and-tested way to force continued engagement while isolating the contest.

Given that Zuckerberg himself billed the Metaverse as the "side by side generation of the internet" that will be used by hundreds of millions of users, it seems unlikely that a corporate goliath with shareholders to delight won't do everything in its power backside the scenes to position Meta at the center of the Metaverse.

As a vast, upcoming landscape that will without a incertitude introduce new means to create, socialize and work online, the Metaverse stands to become a ubiquitous medium that almost cyberspace-savvy individuals volition interact with to some degree.

Too, given the recent release of the damning "Facebook Files" by The Wall Street Journal, information technology has been revealed that the social media platform has been suffering from a whole plethora of issues and operating with some seriously dubious business concern practices — ranging from a huge lawsuit to lax content moderation to the preferential treatment of certain users. All of which is in stark contrast to Zuckerberg's supposed egalitarian vision for the Metaverse.

If the Metaverse is fabricated in Facebook's image, count me out.

These documents also testify that Facebook is quickly losing favor amidst millennials — the generation most likely to interact with Metaverse technologies.

Meta has already been widely slammed for its plans and was recently labeled a "cancer to commonwealth" by American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a contempo Twitter lashing. This sentiment appears to exist the general consensus on Crypto Twitter, which didn't react favorably to the news.

The game is rigged and it'south not in your favor. Meta wants to own your digital identity, and given its way, it will have access to more of your data than ever earlier. No, cheers!

The blockchain catapult

Blockchain is widely expected to become one of the key technologies enabling the development of a truly pervasive virtual infinite that tin be navigated only as securely as the Spider web 2.0 cyberspace.

Thanks to blockchain-powered digital identity solutions that will power truly persistent digital avatars, along with digital assets that provide region-agnostic admission to services and products, the Metaverse looks fix to inherit the values that the blockchain manufacture was founded on — namely, permissionless access, censorship resistance, security and decentralization.

Related: Regulators are coming for crypto: Is digital identity the reply?

Still, tech incumbents will eventually look to muscle in on the blockchain infrastructure side of things in an endeavour to direct the development of the Metaverse and shape it in their ain image. After all, given that the Metaverse manufacture is slated to abound at a chemical compound almanac growth rate of xiii.1% over the next few years, while the blockchain engineering science sector is projected to soar by 32.4% until at least 2025, there is a strong financial incentive to establish an early foothold.

Twitter is prepare to exist ane of the first to make it on the action with Bluesky, a decentralized social media protocol that will somewhen be used to host a variety of social networks — Twitter included. However, given that Twitter too has been subject area to more than than its off-white share of controversies, including dubious account suspensions, high-contour account hijackings, and numerous reports of regime censorship, it isn't so clear-cutting equally to whether this will support the aforementioned core tenets.

Not to mention the fact that Twitter (and many other social media platforms) are banned in several countries. And as we take seen earlier with Facebook'southward Novi wallet product, corporate crypto projects tend to attract excessive regulatory scrutiny, often severely restricting their scope and eventually resulting in a watered-down product, wherein the residue between profit and progress is often skewed to the onetime.

A range of crypto-native social media platforms and metaverse projects are currently in development and arguably accept a major caput-starting time and technical advantage over corporate-backed offerings in that they can remain truly permissionless and democratic. This includes the likes of Decentraland and Bloktopia — which already provide an early view into what the Metaverse could be through their circuitous, user-controlled economies, virtual real estate and digital VR-based digital experiences.

Other pure-play decentralized social media platforms are as well on the horizon, including Bitorbit. Based on Velas (a Solana fork), Bitorbit is designed to tackle the very problems that make corporate-owned social media such a bleak experience for users and creators — using blockchain to restore privacy and assist users better monetize their content and transact securely online.

Given its potential to radically change the style we collaborate with 1 another and go about our daily lives, the Metaverse is shaping up to exist a pivotal technology for all of us.

But with corporate giants prepare to clash with the motivated and resourceful blockchain customs over the development and nature of the Metaverse, it is nevertheless unclear whether information technology volition exist yet another tool designed to exploit the masses or the promised land we all want.

This article does not incorporate investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves gamble, and readers should bear their ain research when making a decision.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author'due south solitary and practice not necessarily reflect or stand for the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Kalani Moe is the director of ecosystem growth at Velas, a decentralized smart contract platform forked from Solana. A serial entrepreneur and early builder in the blockchain space, Moe previously founded the Divi Project and helped grow CoinPayments into the world's leading cryptocurrency payment processor every bit its former artistic managing director.