Evolution is inevitable with several trends combining to create entirely new phenomena across all fields. Currently, technologies are converging to change our world forever. We’re witnessing tech advancements like 3D printing; 5G; artificial intelligence; voice recognition, augmented reality and virtual reality; blockchain technologies and much more. So, with so much rapidly developing around us, how do we embrace possibilities with a positive mindset?

Ester Martinez, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of People Matters suggested becoming exposed to what’s happening around. “One of the very important trends today is the exponential growth of science and technology. In the 5th Industrial Revolution, some of the emergent technologies converging are metaverse, crypto and NFTs,” she said and explained the impact of these emerging technologies:  

Metaverse

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes meetings will be done via personal avatars in the metaverse by 2024. Another great example is how a nine-minute digital concert in Fortnight grossed Travis Scott roughly $20million including merchandise sales, 20 times more per show than his four-month-long, 56-stop Astroworld tour from 2018 to 2019. Organisations like PwC, JP Morgan, Samsung are buying land on top virtual worlds – Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, Somnium – that have cornered the metaverse real estate market.

Crypto and NFTs

All of our assets are moving online. The aforementioned virtual worlds allow users to buy plots of land that they can navigate, build upon, and monetise, and they sell these plots as NFTs or non-fungible tokens, making them unique, tradeable digital assets, the ownership of which is recorded on the blockchain. In fact, NFTs are one of the most-used cases for blockchain technology beyond cryptocurrency. NFTs are guaranteed proof of origination and ownership. For an illustration of how that works, it is the difference between the value of the guaranteed original Mona Lisa painting versus the value of a Mona Lisa painting that you bought at Target.