I'm going to plug my open-source metaverse - Substrata (https://substrata.info/ https://substrata.info/) - and talk about it a bit, since it seems relevant to a

I'm going to plug my open-source metaverse - Substrata (https://substrata.info/ https://substrata.info/) - and talk about it a bit, since it seems relevant to a lot of the topics in this article. A single world: There is a single main Substrata world, which is filled with user-generated content and scripts. Rendering this and running physics for it is such a difficult technical problem that most other metaverses don't even try! Instead they tend to have lots of separate worlds / rooms. A single main world was important for me, partly as a result of reading Snow Crash. Technology sharing: I recently added Luau scripting, which is a fantastic Lua fork from Roblox. It allows sandboxed script execution, has a JIT mode, and has all the usual benefits of Lua (easy binding code etc.). Substrata also imports standard formats like GLTF. GLTF actually allows pretty good reuse of assets between metaverses. Crypto: Substrata optionally uses Ethereum NFTs for land - people can pay for land in Fiat, and then optionally mint the land as NFTs. The big advantage of using NFTs here is that allows land to be traded on the 'secondary market', without me having to do anything, and without my permission and involvement. If I didn't use crypto then i would need to implement some kind of marketplace myself, perhaps with an escrow system for land transfer etc, and have to deal with fraud and chargebacks etc.