Protect Your ID in a 3D World

As we move into 2022 a new technological theme is growing on Wall Street, and the stocks and tokens centered around this theme will soar. As one of our investment advisors, Luke Langeo, states in his latest email;

“In 2018, it was automated medical devices, as hospitals around the globe started to adopt robotic surgeon assistants in bulk. Industry leader Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) saw its stock price soar as much as 60% that year. In 2019, it was chip stocks, as semiconductor companies benefitted from an unprecedented surge in demand due to chip-reliant Internet of Things (IoT) devices going mainstream. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Lam Research (LRCX) both doubled in 2019. KLA Corporation (KLAC) nearly did the same. 2020 where electric vehicle (EV) stocks stole the spotlight, amid a pandemic that – for various reasons – rapidly accelerated consumer interest in electric vehicles. Tesla (TSLA) rose a whopping 743% that year, while NIO (NIO) surged more than 1,000%! Then in 2021, we watched as uranium stocks came to life, with investors warming up to the idea that the world's decarbonization efforts throughout the 2020s will likely include some uranium projects. The entire Global X Uranium ETF (URA) rose nearly 50% last year.”

So, what do Luke and other investment analysts believe is going to be the big tech scale-up in 2022?

As I have spoken about in earlier chats and you have likely heard from several other directions as well, it’s the #metaverse and all those companies and token projects related to it. You probably hadn’t heard about the metaverse until Mark Zuckerberg announced the corporate name change of Facebook to Meta. Zuck wants to own the metaverse just like he owns social media with his 2.9 billion users of Facebook and the other apps Meta owns (Instagram, Whatsapp).

You can think of the metaverse as a totally immersive world in 3D. It's not a gaming platform, but instead the ability for people to conduct their real life in a virtual world. They get jobs, spend their real money, and interact with real people from around the world as if they were meeting up at the corner coffee shop. People will be able to go shopping for real items virtually in the metaverse and have the products delivered to their physical world home. Zuck and Meta believe this should be controlled corporate enterprise by the current big tech players like them, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.

However, and to the point of my personal perspectives, the only way to protect our personal identity and private data in this metaverse is the same way we are building it today for Web2 through a decentralized identity wallet, like Thrivacy, and other Self Sovereign Identity wallets and decentralized systems.

You likely also heard about Jack Dorsey stepping down as CEO of Twitter to focus his time as CEO of Square, the payment system company. He believes in the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain so much he has changed the name of Square to Block.

Again, as these big tech corporates drive the evolution of Web3, this requires that people adopt SSI to protect their privacy and identity. This is the core subject of my new course at the University of South Carolina on Blockchain and Data Privacy.

A growing community of people is building excitement about the metaverse including the folks at Outlier Ventures led by Jamie Burke. While I am not a gamer, I do believe it will be very cool to plug into a virtual world with limitless possibilities that are more difficult for me to access from a regular ole computer connection to Web2 website and application. And who knows, I might be able to find an Ultimate pickup game to play in, or virtually tour the shops on King Street in downtown Charleston at my leisure.

Besides everyone entering the metaverse protecting their identity with SSI, the primary component needed to access the metaverse are Virtual Reality (VR) headsets which has sales of about 16.5 million units globally. This really wasn’t much, but that is because VR devices are as clunky as that 10 cellular phones we carried in our cars in the early days of mobile phones, which by comparison have worldwide ownership of about 4.3 billion smartphones today.

That means VR headset penetration only has one direction to go as Meta, Block, and the other tech giants spend their money to build the environments, and that is up!

After you have gotten your own personal decentralized identity wallet like Thrivacy for yourself, you should consider following the developments of Snap's Spectacles, Meta's Oculus Quest, Microsoft's HoloLens, and other VR headset companies. The problem is that also in Luke’s words,

“These are like the Blackberry phones of the early 2000s. They work, but ultimately, they suck.”

As more people begin to experience the metaverse in 2022, more investors will be convinced that it is the future and Wall Street has already started to place its bets.

Metaverse-related stocks and tokens will soar in later quarters of 2022.

At Thrivacy, we are already preparing for an overprescription of the memberships we have in our business plan. The most important aspect of all the activity of Web3 and metaverse, in particular, is to protect your identity, and de-identify your data!

Do that at Thrivacy.io