Insights: Managing data across metaverses – Data portability

The metaverse has redefined how we live, work, and play. The industry has shown tremendous growth over the past two years, with organisations and brands adopting and investing in the virtual worlds. Bloomberg reported that the metaverse market will be valued around $800bn by 2024. And social networks like Facebook, online game makers, and other companies have chipped in for a slice of the pie. It is deemed to be the bridge between the physical world and the virtual realms.

Major global brands, including Nike, Gucci, and Coca-Cola, are also experimenting with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) across metaverse platforms like the Sandbox, Decentraland and Everdome. These brands utilise virtual reality technology to market their merchandise and products to a wider audience. For instance, brands like Gucci and Nike are setting up virtual showrooms to capture the virtual economy. Gucci, for one, launched its collection in the Roblox game, where avatars can purchase limited editions of Gucci merchandise through NFTs.

The younger generation in this space create an enormous customer base for brands and corporations. However, besides the virtual economy, the metaverse also creates a social community, where individuals can interact with each other. But the building blocks of the metaverse dictate how the metaverse will operate, creating a vast digital bazaar of disparate tools, products, and platforms. This means that it will not be owned or controlled by a central entity.

Leveraging the virtual realms
The growing integration of NFTs and the metaverse has unlocked new opportunities for brands and individuals. For example, brands can commercialise their merchandise in the virtual realms via NFTs, host seed rounds and virtual events to exhibit artworks and products, and engage with customers via loyalty schemes. Brands also penetrate the metaverse market to introduce their customers to new ideas, experience, and designs.

However, as online game makers, brands, individuals, and social networks find unlimited opportunities in the metaverse, the data capacity keeps burgeoning. The brands’ existence in the metaverse will bring in big data, which will generate levels of data complexity, interoperability, and security concerns. Combining user-generated content and the big data that will saturate the space, demand for decentralised database solutions will arise.

Governance: Data portability
The user data currently exists in walled garden environments, where the big tech dictates the rules and conditions. The data doesn’t leave the metaverse, nor is there interoperability within metaverses. However, having data portability privileges and making the environments open-source will enable brands to share with and access other metaverses with ease.

Data portability means that users and brands can move data or transfer digital assets across metaverses seamlessly, and set their own governance policies. Put simply, brands need to access their data anywhere, anytime. Therefore, brands need to ensure data portability if they intend to create resilience in the near future. It is important for brands to make sure that their customers retain their loyalty. They should also create alternatives to purchasing affordable storage across multiple providers to cut costs.

Other key components to consider for data management in the metaverse include interoperability, data ownership, and security. New ecosystems are being developed to handle the new, complex data pipelines that metaverse creates. A first-mover into this space is IneryDB, a decentralised database management solution. IneryDB enables cross-chain interoperability to connect the disintegrated data within the metaverse and Web3 industries. This will enable brands and individuals to transfer data from one metaverse to another at greater speeds.

The Inery ecosystem solves the issue of data ownership, interoperability, and data portability without compromising security. The decentralised DBMS counterpart incorporates metadata management into its distributed infrastructure to enable complex query searches and access to Web3-specific data from its library.

Dr Naveen Singh is the the CEO and co-founder at Inery

Read: Luxury hypercars manufacturer W Motors ventures into metaverse