Next Earth and Earth 2—The Next Apple and Microsoft of the Metaverse

The metaverse is a shared cyberspace that acts as a virtual layer on top of many areas we’re already used to, whether it’s real estate or art. The metaverse is an evolving ecosystem that will continue to grow as more people use it. It’s a new frontier that we are all exploring and discovering, but let’s look at two early players blazing trails in this area: Next Earth and Earth 2. Next Earth is building a virtual world on top of Ethereum. It’s a decentralized platform that allows anyone to create and monetize virtual real estate through NFTs. The Next Earth team has been hard at work building the tools, infrastructure, and developer community needed to make this vision a reality, in addition to recently running the world’s first ITO, or Initial Tile Offering [Editor’s Note: Link to ITO article]. In contrast, the goal of Earth 2 is to build a centralized virtual world, where the virtual assets are, at the end of the day, located on central servers instead of being truly user-owned. Centralized vs. Decentralized Metaverse Let’s compare and contrast the idea of a centralized versus decentralized metaverse. Decentralized Metaverse: Next Earth Decentralized metaverses have been gaining traction in recent months. In a decentralized metaverse, users own their assets and data, and can interact with each other without the need for middlemen like brokers, gatekeepers, or other third parties. One prominent example of a decentraliz...