The metaverse may be a reality more present in people’s daily lives faster in Brazil than in regions such as the United States and Europe, said Accenture executives citing results of a survey carried out by the consultancy.
“We are betting that it will happen in Brazil two, five years from now,” said Paulo Ossamu, Accenture’s chief technology officer in Latin America, in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday (5). “There will be an impact as early as the next two years.”
According to the 2022 edition of the Accenture Technology Vision annual survey, carried out in 35 countries, 78% of executives in Brazil said that the metaverse, a term used to indicate the virtual world that tries to replicate reality through digital devices, will have a positive impact. in your business.
The survey surveyed 4,650 senior executives from a range of industries, with nearly half of them from areas linked to telecommunications and information technology.
Without mentioning details, Accenture stated that the results for Brazil are much higher than the average for other countries and that this may partly reflect the fact that the Brazilian population is younger than in more mature markets, in addition to the jump in the use of devices electronics during the pandemic.
“We’ve seen a lot of optimism among executives [no Brasil] and venture capital companies investing in content for the metaverse for products like games,” Ossamu said, citing applications in e-commerce and education.
For the executive, comparative technological restrictions in the country, such as lower computing capacity and the 5G network still in its infancy, should have a definite impact on the development of the metaverse in the country, given the continuous drop in solution costs.
“We are already seeing companies hiring high-performance computers to solve specific problems,” said Ossamu. “Quantum computing power is still a dream, but there is already a lot possible because costs are coming down,” he added.
For Daniel Franulovic, innovation director at Accenture in Brazil, although there is a frenzy on the subject, the metaverse has a different potential than “Second Life”, a service launched in the early 2000s that was based on a virtual life in internet, but that soon lost strength.
“That was more escapism from reality,” Franulovic said. “Now we see the use of technology more integrated into people’s daily lives,” said Franulovic.
Enthusiasm for NFTs wanes
The NFT bubble is not bursting, but there may have been a leak. A year after a single non-fungible token sold for $69.3 million worth of cryptocurrencies at Christie’s auction house, the strange and wild market is showing signs of slowing down.
Sales on OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, hit nearly $5 billion in January, a giant leap from the previous year’s $8 million, but dropped to about $2.5 billion last month.
About 635,000 people bought NFT last month, at $427 each on average, according to tracker CryptoSlam, up from about 948,000, averaging $659 in January.
Even so, companies continue to pile up in the fashion “metaverse,” where digital assets like virtual land and avatar clothing can be purchased for cryptocurrencies like NFTs. JPMorgan and HSBC are among companies that have opened up virtual spaces in NFT-based worlds this year, while YouTube and Instagram have plans for the industry.
Total NFT sales have totaled about $11.8 billion so far in 2022, according to DappRadar, excluding $19.3 billion in sales from a platform suspected of being dominated by irregular trading, where a small number of accounts exchange items for inflated prices.
Nima Sagharchi, head of digital assets at auction house Bonhams, said that unlike the traditional art world, the NFT market can swing between bullish and bearish cycles in less than a week.
An NFT depicting a piece of computer-generated abstract imagery from a collection called Art Blocks would sell for around $15,000 on average at a peak in September 2021, but grossed just under $4,200 last month, according to with CryptoSlam.
Meanwhile, the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s NFTs — a set of 10,000 variations of a cartoon primate — still sell for around $300,000 on average.
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