A new chapter in the saga surrounding the relationship between the Winklevoss twins and Mark Zuckerberg, following their dispute over the creation of Facebook, seems to be on the horizon. Their company, Gemini, is reportedly ready for a $400 million funding round, much of which is to be invested in the new business launched by Facebook, the metaverse.
Gemini enters the Metaverse and challenges Facebook
After this transaction, the twins’ personal wealth is expected to grow from the current $6 billion to nearly $10 billion.
Cameron Winklevoss stated:
“There’s these two parallel paths, in terms of technology right now,” says Cameron Winklevoss, 40, speaking from his home in California. “There’s a centralized path, like Facebook or Fortnite, that is one step away from being a metaverse, and that’s totally fine. But there is another path, which is the decentralized metaverse and that’s the metaverse where we believe there’s greater choice, independence and opportunity, and there is technology that protects the rights and dignity of individuals”.
Currently, the Internet is based on a centralized infrastructure. It is a series of so-called “walled gardens”, where the big platforms, Facebook, Amazon and Google, collect data and information on central private servers.
With the metaverse this could all change, as even Zuckerberg said when presenting his plans for his new creature “Meta” stating that:
“no one company will run the metaverse — it will be an ’embodied internet’ operated by many different players in a decentralized way”.
According to the financial magazine Forbes, the Winklevoss twins intend to invest in these actors in the coming months.
Instead of the advertising-based model, most of the metaverse will probably require cryptocurrencies.
The metaverse conquers all
Last month, dozens of blockchain start-ups raised around $4 billion to enter the new metaverse business, which seems to be of interest not only to Facebook but also to giants such as Coca Cola, Epic Games and Gucci.
There are already some companies that have been focusing their business on the metaverse and virtual reality for some time, such as Decentraland and The Sandbox, which run on Ethereum; Upland, which runs on the EOS blockchain; and Victoria VR, which should soon be launched on Ethereum.
Decentraland has built a parallel virtual world consisting of 90,601 plots of land. The virtual properties are NFTs that can be bought by the native cryptocurrency MANA, which just after Facebook’s announcement reached an all-time high.
An $800 billion business
The business looks very promising, especially for sectors such as games, where the play-to-earn model, guaranteed by the new model of NFTs and decentralized finance, will be, according to experts, the real driver of the coming years, considering that it already involves around 800 thousand users.
Entrepreneur.com reported on Monday that the metaverse could represent an $800 billion market by 2024.
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