This Is How The World Economic Forum Jumps Into The Metaverse: Davos 2023

Web3 and the Metaverse take a seat at the World Economic Forum table in 2023 as the ecosystem continues to drive innovation across industries.

As Cointelegraph continues to find out, The presence of the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem is mainly found outside the walls of the WEF., Blockchain Hub Davos and GBBC’s Blockchain Central were two central events in the city that brought together the wider crypto community that has been somewhat left out of the WEF’s discourse on the sector.

The Metaverse is a notable exception to this trend. While some metaverse applications do not operate on decentralized blockchain systems, prominent proponents of this space have attended high-level workshops within the WEF seeking to understand and plan for the future integration of the innovative technology.

The WEF’s agenda included two workshops directly addressing the metaverse as part of the “Define and Build the Metaverse” conference initiative in 2023.

The first workshop, “Creating a New Reality: Building the Metaverse,” was led by Chris Cox, Meta’s product manager, while the second, “Deployment in the Industrial Metaverse,” explored how industries can take advantage of the metaverse while avoiding its disruptive potential.

The World Economic Forum is also exploring metaversal experiences within the conference. The 2023 conference offered delegates the chance to experience the Forum in their own immersive 3D digital sessions, called the Global Collaboration Village.

A personalized digital avatar allowed WEF delegates to explore Davos in the metaverse and experience it during the week of the conference, Decentralized or not, organizations are harnessing the power of Web3 to offer delegates more through virtual experiences.

Blockchain-based Metaverse platforms were also present at Davos, as representatives from the wider traditional finance industry, policy makers and others sought to learn more about the promise of Metaverse ecosystems and their potential impact.

playing in the sandbox

Cointelegraph spoke with Sandbox co-founder Sebastian Borget at an exclusive networking event called Swedish Lunch Midweek. every January, Hotel Schatzalp hosts this meeting, with many WEF delegates dining and meeting on the snowy terrace of this picturesque spot at the top of Davos.

The Sandbox has become a popular decentralized metaverse platform around the world. Its collaboration with leading brands and companies is one of its main draws, which is why Borget participated in some high-level workshops on the Metaverse within the 2023 World Economic Forum.

Borget held meetings with ministries and those responsible for digital transformation to start a dialogue about the empowerment and protection of digital assets and digital economies. He said it’s a fair point because half of the world’s population is now ahead of Gen Z as digital natives:

“We still have to figure out a little bit about what the metaverse is today and what it might be three, five, ten years from now.”

Lensing in metaverse-focused conversations within the World Economic Forum, Borget revealed that stakeholders were focusing on privacy and data security considerations:

“How can we be sure that the Metaverse platform respects user privacy, will implement sufficient rules or controls to ensure that users can be safe and secure and their digital assets as well?”

Borget said he had the opportunity to speak with representatives of the European Parliament about its General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force in May 2018, as well as how artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) should be, Rule on it. treated differently.

Borget believes that space regulation is inevitable, but hopes that these dialogues will ensure that the industry has room to innovate and experiment. This could prevent the Metaverse from being crippled by restrictive measures for years to come:

“There is an opportunity to make sure those rules are not too prescriptive so that entrepreneurs can really create something interesting here and develop and take their ideas forward. So, instead of trying to solve the problem too late, we Join the conversation as soon as possible.

The Sandbox co-founder highlighted the “productive” nature of WEF’s Metaverse workshops, describing the meetings as different from a typical conference with panels or talks., The working groups held extensive discussions on key topics within the WEF, while Borget had ample opportunities to network and engage with the wider crypto community at various events throughout the week in Davos.

we need a bigger voice

It appears that the World Economic Forum and major institutions are well aware of the Web3 functionality and promise of metaverse experiences. Dirk Lueth and Idan Zuckerman, co-founders of metaverse platform Upland, shared these sentiments in a conversation with Cointelegraph on a snowy Thursday afternoon outside the Blockchain Hub headquarters on the waterfront.

The couple was in Davos, attending conferences and networking with the cryptocurrency and blockchain minded. The conversation around the Metaverse application provided an opportunity for learning, and Lueth highlighted the need for industry leaders to have a “big voice” among policy makers and industry leaders at conferences like WEF.

“I think everyone has gotten used to the idea that the web will evolve into a comprehensive version. It will take time, but people are realizing it and are taking the first steps to understand how they fit into the plan. are”Zuckerman explained.

According to Luth, decentralization is another important principle that drives digital ownership and economies. In his view, the open networks of the metaverse provide many business and media opportunities that closed systems cannot.

Zuckerman was more thoughtful, suggesting that the future of the metaverse will be hybrid, with centralized and decentralized elements:

“I always look at decentralization, it’s not like one or zero, it’s a gradient. So there are things that are needed and should be and that can be decentralized and they will be first.”

Cointelegraph saw live examples of this at Davos. Moderating a panel on Institutional Adoption of the Metaverse, two speakers represented leading Metaverse solutions in terms of VR.

Accenture’s David Treat discussed its advanced augmented reality technologies, while Vince Cacus discussed Vertebrae’s augmented reality and 3D commerce platform. Both projects are powered by blockchain technology and serve mainstream commercial customers and institutions.

Interoperability in the metaverse may become an important part of the development of different platforms and applications, but Davos 2023 shows that collaboration and innovation are already happening. Decentralized and centralized are already interoperable, which allows us to glimpse the future of this space.

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