Even Yat Siu, chair of Animoca Brands, the group that owns Sandbox, conceded the crypto-metaverse has a long way to go. “People look at the blockchain and say, ‘it’s just a database, it’s not very efficient’, and that’s true,” he told me. But the same once applied to the Internet, he added.
Soon after I enter Decentraland, I fall through a fountain and land in a bar, where an octopus is serving drinks. In the corner, two bots are having a scripted conversation about why the NFTs on display in the metaverse are superior to physical artworks. (It’s because they aren’t hidden away in a collector’s archive.) At least at the Tate my ability to view the art isn’t limited by my computer’s processing power, I think, as I try – unsuccessfully – to order a virtual pint from the octopus.
By Tim Bradshaw © 2022 The Financial Times
