Among other things—like multiple virus variants and spiking retail prices—2021 will be remembered as the year cryptocurrencies went mainstream.
Wall Street finally went all in, establishing divisions to research and invest in them. Joey Baggodonuts finally got busy and opened a Coinbase account and learned what a hot and cold wallet is. Your Granddad, who made fun of you for talking about bitcoin in 2019, is now asking you how he can get started. And Elon Musk made Dogecoin a thing on SNL.
Add to that the evolution of the space including NFTs, DAOs, second layer blockchains, and so on, and you can say crypto is coming into its own. And with this head of steam, I believe the crypto space is going to continue to explode in 2022 and beyond.
The Metaverse: The Mega-Trend for 2022
Love him or hate him, Mark Zuckerberg—and Facebook—has been central to the last major evolution of the internet, what was known as Web 2.0. If you think back to the internet of the 1990s, everything was one-directional. Someone with a website pumped information (or offers) out at you.Web 2.0 offered an internet where users could easily interact with content providers and even other users. And a lot of that progress has been thanks to the rise of Facebook.
A platform where old and new friends could connect and share information about their lives, it didn’t take long to become a widely accepted way to stay connected. And, to a certain degree, it revolutionized the way we humans interact.
Well now Zuck, in all his modesty, is on a revolutionary mission again, one to build a new vision of the future. And whether you agree with him or not, this future is coming.
Last year, in a “surprise” announcement, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta—short for metaverse.
What’s a metaverse?
Well in basic terms, the metaverse is a virtual world where people can socialize, work, and play.
But that’s really an oversimplified way to explain it.
Think of it as a 3D version of Facebook that promises all kinds of Tony Stark/Ironman technology. A virtual place where you now actually CAN “get together” to share the company of family, friends, and colleagues, as well as interact with the virtual world around you. And those virtual worlds can be some fantastic places.
Bigger Than Just Facebook (If That’s Possible)
One aspect of this new evolution in the tech space that makes it so compelling is that there are social as well as business applications for the concept coming right out of the gate.If you think about Facebook’s early days, it was pretty much strictly a way to stay in touch with friends. The business applications we take for granted now didn’t pop up for some time.
Now think of Zoom—a group video conferencing app whose mission was to create an app that was brain dead easy to use (as opposed to some of the other platforms in use at the time). Zoom garnered both personal and business fans from the get-go. (Not to mention a few growing pains exacerbated by a meteoric rise in business thanks to a pandemic.)
Like “crypto” is about more than just bitcoin, the metaverse is way more than a simple virtual reality. And it goes far beyond Facebook. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg is trying to rebrand his company as the next evolution of tech is really just a marketing ploy.
There are numerous software as well as hardware developers that touch in the “meta” space that will be well worth investigating.
By the end of 2022, I believe a massive number of investors will have discovered that the metaverse not only represents the next significant advancement in the internet, but that they’ve missed their chance to secure early-stage investments in its development.
And while Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) is making a play to be THE leader in the industry, there will be a ton of small-cap companies in essential areas related to this new tech evolution that will make 2022 the year of the Metaverse.
