The market of virtual worlds — also known as the metaverse — could be between $8 trillion and $13 trillion by 2030, analysts at Citi forecast. In a recent report titled "Metaverse and Money," the analysts say getting to that market level is going to require sufficient infrastructure investments such as computational efficiency improvement of "over 1,000x today's levels."
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"Investment will be needed in areas such as compute, storage, network infrastructure, consumer hardware, and game development platforms," the report says.
Polygon Co-Founder, Sandeep Nailwal, shares that deadline, adding that by 2025 he believes that the market will have at least 50 million users. He added:
"I believe Web3 could take over the internet, even as Web2 continues to coexist."
Citi's experts also added that over the longer-term (2025-2030), the metaverse market could see "greater integration" across devices, which will likely require more work to be done on the software side. The bank projects that big techs have a "good chance" at continuing to play a dominant role in the emergence and access to the metaverse as they remain in control of a key system — the mobile app marketplace.
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