Metaverse Millionaires - The Daily Gwei #314
You're not still flexing your wealth in the physical world, right anon?
The crypto ecosystem has minted 10’s of thousands of new millionaires and a fair few billionaires over the last 12 years. Many of these people didn’t come from money but just invested really early into things like BTC, ETH and DeFi and held on for dear life. Now, these people are the “new money” of the world and the way they display and store their wealth is vastly different to the “old money” that we’re all used to.
The above tweet is the perfect meme to encapsulate this phenomenon that I like to call “metaverse millionaires” - that is, people who’s wealth is all tied up in crypto and the metaverse rather than in physical things. Of course, there can be overlap here as people can have a really nice house while also storing most of their wealth in crypto but given that much of the world is becoming more and more digitized, being able to replicate the meat-space experience in the virtual world is critical. This is one reason why you see people paying millions of dollars for an NFT like a CryptoPunk - it’s both a wealth flex and a status symbol - one of my friends even said to me the other day that if you got rich off of ETH then it’s your “duty” to buy a CryptoPunk. Of course, this may sound silly, but the idea of being part of an exclusive club for rich people is not something unique to crypto.
One less-talked about aspect of this new virtual world that we find ourselves in is that people can be whoever they want to be - there’s no need to tie your real life identity to your metaverse persona. We see plenty of anonymous or pseudonyms accounts on Twitter where their identity is tied to a character such as an animal - hell, many of them even got featured on the cover of Fortune magazine recently which I think represents the decisive shift from old money to new money quite elegantly. And given that much of this new money belongs to young people, they are essentially the ones who will be shaping this new virtual world to fit their own agenda, interests and views rather than inheriting the ones from the world of old.
Lastly, given that crypto is a social revolution as much as it is a technological and monetary one, we’re going to see plenty of old world institutions disrupted and replaced by new world ones (which we of course call ‘DAOs’ in the crypto ecosystem). These new institutions will not conform to the old world rules - they will forge their own paths by leveraging online social tools such as Discord and Twitter instead of physical locations and fax machines. These DAO’s will also have members from all around the world that are judged based on their merit rather than their credentials or status within society.
Unfortunately, there’s plenty of examples of young people feeling disenfranchised by the “old world” and I think that’s a major reason why we’re seeing such a massive shift from the physical world (where the young own very little) - to the digital world (where the young have an outsized share of the pie). I believe that this trend will continue and only accelerate over the coming years and that’s why I’m betting my life on both crypto and the digital revolution more broadly.
If we can’t own the old world - we’ll own the new one.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.