- Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin thinks that the metaverse needs 28 years to mature
- Lubin compared today’s metaverse to the internet in 1994.
- He also believes augmented and virtual reality will be at the core of our daily lives.
Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin thinks that the metaverse as we currently know it needs another 28 years for it to reach its full potential. Lubin compared today’s metaverse to the internet in 1994 which was characterised by sluggish performance and low quality applications. He added that virtual and augmented reality will take over our daily lives once the current challenges are solved.
Metaverse is 28 Years Behind
Speaking to Decrypt, Lubin, who is also the Chief Executive of ConsenSys, said that he thinks we still have 28 years before the metaverse takes over our daily experiences, although it will eventually be at the centre of our lives.
Lubin bases this theory on the history of the internet, saying that the metaverse today has the characteristics of the internet in 1994. At the time, connections were so slow that even simple tasks like checking emails took an inordinate amount of time, especially if there was a picture attached.
Lubin founder observed that the current iteration of the metaverse is likely to undergo a complete overhaul before it works as intended.
VR and AR are the Future
Despite his scepticism on the current metaverse world, Lubin is confident that virtual and augmented reality will be a critical part of how we work and make money. Lubin’s observations align with previous comments by another Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin:
My critique is deeper than “Metaverse Wikipedia will beat Metaverse Encyclopedia Britannica”. It’s that we don’t really know the definition of “the metaverse” yet, it’s far too early to know what people actually want. So anything Facebook creates now will misfire.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 31, 2022
The ConsenSys founder’s comments come at a time when big names like Meta and Apple are expressing interest in the virtual immersive world, with Apple CEO Tim Cook saying recently how he preferred augmented reality over the potential of metaverse.
Buterin also summed up just how far away we are from true metaverse adoption when he added that “we don’t really know the definition of ‘the metaverse.’”
