tl;dr: the Metaverse is coming. How are you preparing?

I saw a great infographic on Twitter titled “Why are people buying NFTs?”

As I glanced through it, 5 of the 6 immediately made sense and then I came to the term “metaverse prepper,” which stopped me in my tracks.

It took me a few seconds to realize what it meant and when I figured it out, it all made sense.

The Metaverse–A Very Basic Primer

For a deeper background on “the metaverse,” take a look at Outlier Ventures’ paper, The Open Metaverse OS.

The poor man’s version is that it is the world which we will inhabit shortly (and we already do, in some ways) where a digital environment is the location where our lives primarily take place. Think of it like a virtual world but with connections back to the physical world.

The best example I can think of is the movie, Ready Player One, if you have seen that.

In the Metaverse, there will be completely virtual worlds (like Decentraland) and then worlds of augmented reality that overlay the digital world with the physical world.

In those worlds, digital items that are unique, scarce, and rare will have tremendous value.

After all, items that are unique, scare, and rare have value in the physical world so it stands to reason that this property trait will pass over to the digital world.

Preppers

A “prepper” refers, typically, to someone who is a survivalist and thinks about disasters before they come. They are the people who have butane stove, water filters, and a year’s worth of food…in a bunker. They are fully aware that, at any moment, the game could change and they want to be prepared.

A “metaverse prepper” is someone who recognizes that the arrival of the ‘digital-first’ world is coming at even faster rate than it was pre-Covid, thanks to the innovation of blockchain as well as advances in VR and AR.

Essentially, these preppers are making a bet that these NFTs, which are digitally scarce items, are going to be valuable assets in the future and thus are investing/hoarding now so that they have the digital resources they need to survive and thrive.

In some respects, it’s speculation as to which items will have value. In other respects, it’s very forward-thinking.

A bit of a both and the ‘prepper’ mentality makes sense to me, so a metaverse prepper mentality make a ton of sense to me.