随着元宇宙概念的迅速发展，各种多元宇宙平台不断涌现。据不完全统计，仅 2022 年前 5 个月（截止 5 月 22 日），元界相关公司和项目的活跃投资就超过 30 亿美元。（数据来源：Cointelegraph [1]、Coindesk [2]、Blockchain Daily [3]）

其中，游戏公司 Epic Games 宣布今年已筹集 20 亿美元用于打造虚拟世界。同月，风险投资公司 Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) 为专注于元界游戏的游戏初创公司推出了 6 亿美元的基金。除了这两项大笔投资外，自今年年初以来，其他 30 多家元界公司已经筹集了总计超过 4 亿美元的资金。

值得注意的是，5 月，首个集成元界游戏化平台获得了 1000 万美元的融资，该轮融资由字节跳动最早和最大的投资者之一 Susquehanna International Group 领投。

多元宇宙的出现

区块链技术正在逐步完善，为元界平台的建立和用户的涌入创造了不可或缺的条件。以太坊提供了占用户和 TVL 很大比例的网络和基础设施。Arbitrum、Polygon 和其他第 2 层 chainz 必须依赖以太坊来确保安全。同时兼容以太坊的开发商 Aurora、BSC 等公链进一步加强了对以太坊帝国生态的应用。总体而言，功能性基础设施领域几乎存在“垄断”局面。

相比之下，构建它的 Metaverse 平台几乎不是垄断的。平台直接面向用户，不同的元界平台具有不可替代的特性，用户的差异化需求可以支持多个元界平台。例如，人们会在支持摄像头和共享屏幕的 GatherTown 参加会议和工作，下班后在精致的视觉平台 Decentraland 参观时装秀，或者在 Sandbox 平台上进行区块链游戏体验。

一组不同的元节空间是 Multi-Verse。比如，这么多的外卖应用已经被淘汰出市场，并持续了几个市场的领导者。然而，直接面向顾客、实现差异化风味的餐厅始终是和谐共存的。多元宇宙是当前的情况和不可避免的未来情况。

多元宇宙的新问题

随着 Multi-verse 的出现，用户又遇到了一个新的问题——不同 Metaverse 平台的数字资产不互通。用户精心打造的头像无法在其他平台上使用，身份不一致会导致社交互动受限、体验单一等问题。而用户高价购买的服装、建筑、土地等资产无法转让，资产价值难以体现。

抽象的

本文主要分析了 Sandbox、Decentraland 等主流元界平台的现状，分析了 Multi-Verse 的出现及其带来的新问题，介绍了 DigiFun 提出的 Cross Metaverse Bridge。

主流元界平台

去中心化

Decentraland 是一个在以太坊和 Polygon 上运行的元宇宙平台，自 2020 年正式向所有人开放以来，已一跃成为世界上最受欢迎的元宇宙平台之一。

在 Decentraland 中，用户可以建立自己的头像、社交、购物、玩游戏、交易虚拟房地产、浏览艺术品收藏等等。在 Decentraland 的市场中，用户可以使用其代币 MANA 在 Decentraland 内购买头像、虚拟时装、可穿戴设备甚至域名。

大多数这些虚拟物品都是由 Decentraland 的非官方创作者制作的，这一概念吸引了许多内容创作者，并将平台的吸引力扩展到了潮人和时尚领域。

According to the New York Times [4], in November 2021, Tokens.com, a blockchain technology company focused on NFT and metaverse properties, purchased a bunch of virtual land in Decentraland’s Fashion Street Estate for about $2.5 million, with plans to develop it into the metaverse’s “Fifth Avenue”. Company executives believe Tokens.com will soon reap the benefits of leasing and advertising from the resident brands.

Based on this, Decentraland hosted Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW) in March this year, being the world’s largest and completely digital fashion week, it attracted more than 70 international brands such as Dolce & Gabbana, Etro, Jacob & Co, and NFT giant FEWOCiOUS.

According to data published by Decentraland, the platform attracted over 108,000 visitors during Fashion Week, and wearables generated nearly $80,000 in sales.

Many brands began buying and leasing land in Decentraland as a way to layout and sell their products in the metaverse. luxury brands such as Dolce & Gabbana and Etro opened stores that debuted during fashion week, and luxury retailer Selfridges launched a flagship store during fashion week that included an exclusive NFT art gallery for visitors.

In addition, many brands are allowing visitors to purchase digital, physical goods and NFTs from virtual stores and cryptocurrencies directly linked to the platform through a digital wallet.

E-commerce brand Cider is one of them, the brand launched its retail space during Fashion Week and hosted a fashion show where visitors could purchase wearable. In April, digital fashion brand Republique opened an accessories store in Decentraland’s Fashion District, where users can also browse and purchase its products. The brand is also one of Decentraland’s regular tenants.

In addition to Fashion Week, Decentraland also hosts occasional social events such as the Metaverse festival and Art Week, covering music, culture, hipster, and other fields. In 2022, the platform will launch new features that will allow users to personalize their avatars, such as using Bored Ape as an avatar and even customizing their emojis.

According to its current CTO Esteban Ordano, the platform expanded by 3,300% between 2020 and 2021 and now has more than 800,000 registered users. Its market cap also peaked at $12 billion.

As of press time, Decentraland’s total market cap remains stable at around $2 billion. (Data from CoinMarketCap, as of 2022.5.22)[6]

The Sandbox

The Sandbox is a meta-verse gaming platform and also a gamified virtual world (LAND). Currently, it is also one of the mainstream metaverse platforms.

Similar to Decentraland, players can also buy and sell land here. The difference is that The Sandbox has a significant voxel style, is relatively simple to build, and does not require 3D modeling or mapping.

However, content creation in The Sandbox is much stricter, and only whitelisted artists can create assets in The Sandbox, such as buildings and in-game items, which also need to be officially reviewed after creation.

Although more restrictive, owners can use these assets to build diverse experiences, including music hosting, fashion events, design competitions, and even benefiting from the games they created themselves.

With the goal of “Play to Earn”, The Sandbox leverages SAND to enable a range of tokenized gaming features, including purchases, rewards, and asset creation, giving it a strong in-game economy.

The Sandbox has secured over 60 partnerships to develop a range of business verticals, including gaming, music, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle. Well-known IPs such as Smurfs and Shaun the sheep, brands like Adidas and Deadmau5, several game studios represented by Dapper Labs, and investors such as Square Enix (Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider).

According to The Sandbox’s Q1 2022 summary report[7], its overall trend continued to grow in the first quarter and it now has over 2 million registered users. And The Sandbox’s ambitions don’t stop there, as it aspires to become one of the largest experiential entertainment platforms.

CryptoVoxels (renamed Voxels on May 3, 2022)

Crypto Voxels is also a metaverse platform running on Ethereum and Polygon that allows players to buy and sell land and build stores, art galleries, music studios, and anything that you can imagine.

Compared to the previous two platforms, Crypto Voxel is the least restrictive. It has no mint fees and anyone can create 3D assets on the platform without reviews. It has even set up a free space for users to build to provide maximum convenience to creators and is also available for VR devices.

Its gameplay is very intuitive and similar to Minecraft. players start by placing blocks and gradually add text, images, GIFs, audio files, etc. Players can purchase tokens of COLR to add color to the building.

Currently, Cryptovoxel has not received any commercial investment and the team is committed to pioneering new features and improving the game experience.

Cryptovoxel has attracted a large number of artists, including painters, graphic designers, 3D modelling experts, digital artists, and creators of all types, joined by many practitioners such as individual and institutional collectors and curators.

Here, people are often struck by the highly stylized and aesthetically pleasing virtual architecture. The installations, buildings, and venues are changed from time to time according to the needs of the builders, and exhibitions of various forms are held almost daily.

According to MetaCat [8], Cryptovoxels ranks fifth in parcel sales and total parcel sales in 2021 and 2022 (as of May).

Later this year, Cryptovoxels will launch a new renamed website. The move is far from a mere name change; it means the platform will move to attract a broader audience.

With the rapid growth of metaverse platforms, the metaverse is gaining more attention from mainstream brands, companies, and industries. Previously, Crypto Voxels’ primary users were people familiar with cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, but now it plans to expand its users to a mainstream audience.

As founder Ben Nolan explains, “Crypto Voxels was founded on April 1, 2018, before NFT became mainstream. We are proud to have launched almost simultaneously with Cryptopunks and Cryptokitties. The word “crypto” may have a negative connotation in the public mind, but the future of decentralization is bright.” [9]

Multi-Verse：the coming of the multiverse platform

Thus it can be seen that each metaverse platform offers a very different experience. They are clearly positioned and ought to make a push in niche tracks.

Decentraland is known for its four major events, namely Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW), Art Week, Metaverse Festival, and Pride Parade, which correspond to fashion, art, music, and LGBTQ, respectively, covering the needs for fashion, hipster fun, and socialising for most young people in reality.

The Sandbox, on the other hand, focuses on the gaming space. Early on, it was best known for its two mobile games, The Sandbox (2011) and The Sandbox Evolution (2016), which reached a total of 40 million downloads on IOS and Android. In 2018, developer Pixowl decided to bring this successful game to the blockchain ecosystem. With the number of users accumulated in the early years, The Sandbox is well ahead of the metaverse gaming platforms.

Cryptovoxel has become the go-to place for crypto artists, art institutions, and collectors, and people go there mainly to enjoy various art exhibitions.

In addition to the three platforms mentioned above, others are coming into prominence from a unique angle.

For example, the emerging online meeting metaverse platform Gather. Different from Zoom and other video conferencing software, users first have to build a virtual image in the virtual office, when you walk to the side of colleagues, the other party can see your real-time image, if you walk away, the sound and picture will also disappear, it almost restored to the real atmosphere of communication. In addition to meetings, people can also work and study in Gather.

More than 10,000 teams are already using Gather virtual offices and have even started using remote work policies because of Gather. [10]

Thus it can be seen,no single metaverse platform can cover the needs of all different scenarios for users, each platform has its own unique and irreplaceable characteristics.

The problem is emerging since more users join various metaverse platforms.

Different Metaverse platforms are independent and with closed systems, most of them are not yet interoperable. Although some virtual assets can be traded on large platforms, aforementioned, Virtual lands, clothing, and NFT assets in Cryptovoxel can be sold on Opensea, however, after purchase, users can only return to the original platform i.e Cryptovocel to use them.

In other words, users can only display their assets in one Metaverse. Whenever users come to another platform, they need to start from scratch, which is not only detrimental to the construction of their virtual identity but also makes it difficult for users to add value to their digital assets on that platform once it faces closure.

A growing number of young people spend most of their time in the virtual world, and virtual identity is seen as an extension of their image, for authentic metaverse players, identity is everything.

Once the various metaverse platforms are interoperable, it is certainly tempting when users’ carefully constructed virtual identities are consistent in the different metaverse.

Similar to the inter-blockchain technology of cryptocurrencies, users hope to transfer items such as wearables, buildings, and others across multiple metaverses to showcase their style and establish a consistent virtual identity across multiple platforms.

Multi-Verse will bring more user requirements, one of the most important needs is the use of digital assets in different metaverse platforms. If buying, using and trading products across platforms are achievable, then each user will have a larger, more stable market, and stronger correlation will also weaken the asset risks. When the time comes, the lifespan of each metaverse platform will also be extended.

DigiFun Cross Metaverse Bridge ：A Revolutionary Technology Innovation

DigiFun, a digital wearable brand founded in 2021, has introduced the Cross-Metaverse Bridge to enable the seamless migration of DigiFun’s digital assets across different metaverses.

Firstly, different metaverse platforms adopt different model formats. DigiFun modeled and released the same set of wearables across different metaverse platforms. In addition to production, since Decentraland uses the ERC-721 protocol and Cryptovoxels uses ERC-1155, the cross-metaverse bridge needs to interface with different protocols to accomplish NFT checking and secure transfer.

Since both Decentraland and CryptoVoxels publish wearables on a polygon, the cross-meta-universe bridge can be accomplished through deployment contracts.

Currently, users can already transfer DigiFun’s metaverse wearable between Decentraland and CryptoVoxel via the cross-metaverse bridge.

Through a cross-metaverse bridge, users can safely transfer NFT assets in Decentraland and Cryptovoxel, accomplishing interoperability of the multiverse. Users can purchase virtual assets on A platform, use the cross-metaverse bridge to B platform, and continue to enjoy the metaverse with their friends on platform B.

Before DigiFun, no projects have accomplished to move assets across metaverse, it is an unprecedented technological innovation.

In the future, DigiFun plans to combine NFT cross-metaverse bridge to accomplish asset conversion across more metaverse platforms, to further interconnect metaverse.

DigiFun Introduction

DigiFun is a digital fashion brand in the metaverse (@DigiFun_), launching a line of metaverse wearables and looking to build a broad product ecosystem, all products will be interoperable within the multiverse platforms, to support users in creating consistent digital identities.

The brand’s content is not produced by any set group of artists, instead, all DAO members can participate in the design, modeling, promotion, and even decision-making. In return, profits and long-term income are distributed in percentage to contributing members.

Currently, DigiFun has gathered dozens of designers and modelers, mainly focusing on designing and producing wearables to use in Decentraland and Cryptovoxel. In the future, it will incorporate more technologies to enhance brand content and create a metaverse fashion brand.

DigiFun 与各大传统时尚品牌合作定制虚拟可穿戴 NFT，包括快时尚电商 Cider、个人设计师 KINGWEN 等，并受邀参加 3 月 Decentraland 首届元界时装周（MVFW）。

概括

元界的概念不断发展壮大，各种平台和机构争先恐后地斥巨资进入，给元界生态带来繁荣。但是一些问题正在逐渐出现，用户可以通过跨元界桥将 Etc 从 a 等原生链轻松转移到多边形，但无法将可穿戴设备、资产、个人图像和其他 NFT 从 A 转移到 B 元界平台。DigiFun 的出现通过创新智能合约技术，实现了 Decentraland 和 Cryptovoxel 的互操作性，解决了这个问题，未来的元界值得期待。

参考

1. https://cointelegraph.com/news/3b-flows-to-metaverse-and-web3-gaming-this-month-as-a16z-s-tips-in-600m
2. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/05/10/susquehanna-leads-10m-funding-in-metaverse-platform-starrynift/
3. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/w6C4n_lRDoKhGvavkVPleQ
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/business/metaverse-real-estate.html
5. https://www.voguebusiness.com/technology/metaverse-fashion-week-the-hits-and-misses
6. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/decentraland/
7. https://messari.io/article/state-of-the-sandbox-q1-2022
8. https://www.metacat.world/en-US/analytics?typoe=cryptovoxels
9. https://nftevening.com/cryptovoxels-metaverse-game-is-rebranding-to-voxels/
10. https://www.fortunechina.com/zhuanlan/c/2022-05/12/content_411533.htm
11. https://www.metapunk.co.uk/metablog/7-2021-the-tools-of-the-metaverse

** **