A Beginner’s Guide to the Metaverse

Imagine going online…

But it’s not words on a screen…

And you’re not watching a video either…

It’s a 3D virtual world – and you’re inside it.

Welcome to the Metaverse!

It’s the next evolution of the internet. And it’s rapidly going mainstream.

What is the Metaverse?

Why is it such a ground-breaking development in tech?

And how can you profit?

It’s all in your Weekly Pulse video at the top of the page. It’s where I (Chris Lowe) and host Tom Beal break down the most important market story on our radar for the week.

Regards,

Chris Lowe
Editor, The Daily Cut and Legacy Inner Circle

Transcript

Tom Beal: One of the ways to grow and protect your wealth at a large level is to be ahead of huge trends that are up and coming. Today, we’re going to be discussing one of those trends called the metaverse.

My name is Tom Beal, host of The Weekly Pulse, where we break down the biggest wealth growth story of the week. I’m here today with the editor of Legacy Inner Circle, Chris Lowe. Chris, how do we kick off today’s conversation?

Chris Lowe: Today, we’re going to be talking about something called the metaverse. Have you heard about this, Tom?

Tom: I have not. And I’m excited to hear about it.

Chris: It sounds pretty out there. But I’ve been writing about it a little bit at my free daily eletter, The Daily Cut. It’s basically the next big evolution of the internet. And it’s the hottest idea right now in Silicon Valley.

It’s a huge opportunity for us as investors. And it’s coming a lot sooner than you may think.

So today, I want to do three things.

First, I want to talk a little bit about what the metaverse is, so folks watching this can understand what we’re talking about.

Number two, look at why it’s so exciting for investors.

And number three, have a little peek into the future and see where all of this is going.

Tom: Sounds very interesting, Chris. And as always, I’m pumped to hear things that are on your plate and the Legacy Research experts’ plates, because it is helpful to me growing and protecting my wealth, as it is for the viewers of The Weekly Pulse. So I’m super-pumped to hear about this.

Chris: I actually heard about it reading Palm Beach Daily, the eletter that Teeka Tiwari puts out. So this isn’t something I came across myself. This is something I learned about by being inside the Legacy Research team, and reading something that Grant Wasylik, who works with Teeka on the Palm Beach Letter, started writing about.

And I’ve been doing my own research. To be honest, my mind has been blown ever since about what’s coming.

Basically, you can think of the metaverse as an embodied internet. So instead of words on a screen, it’s a three-dimensional (3D) world. You don’t watch it, you step into it. You become an avatar, which is a 3D representation of yourself, and you interact with others in this virtual world. If you’ve used a virtual reality (VR) headset to play a game, you experienced some of what the metaverse has to offer.

So now, imagine that kind of experience in a non-gaming situation. You might be in the metaverse with your VR headset on, shopping at a mall. You might be meeting clients in a virtual meeting room. You might even be going to a concert.

There have already been huge concerts with real-life musicians playing inside virtual worlds. The big one was 27 million people last year turning up to a concert by a rap artist called Travis Scott inside the Fortnite virtual world game.

So this is already starting to happen, where you’re having real-life stars performing in these virtual worlds. You also had J.J. Abrams, the director behind Star Wars, previewing the new Star Wars movie inside Fortnite as his avatar. And he played the clip in the virtual cinema in the virtual world. So this does get kind of crazy to think about.

But a very important part of the metaverse is that these virtual worlds have their own economies. One of the things you may have heard about – we’ve talked about it on The Weekly Pulse – is something called NFTs, which are non-fungible tokens.

NFTs are digital artworks and other digital images that are authenticated on a blockchain. This certifies the originality of them and their ownership.

Last year, huge news broke when a U.S. artist called Beeple, who’s out of North Carolina, sold a digital artwork at Christie’s Auction House for $69 million as an NFT. This just blew my mind. It’s one of the most expensive artworks ever sold. And that includes Picassos and all the very famous artists you’ve heard about.

The guy who bought this Beeple artwork for $69 million is an Indian crypto and blockchain investor called Vignesh Sundaresan. He plans to put this artwork on display in four blockchain-based virtual worlds. So he bought this digital artwork, and he’s going to put it on display in a virtual art gallery in one of these virtual worlds.

And that’s not the only thing, Tom, that has real value in these worlds. One of the worlds – again, it’s based on blockchain technology – is called Decentraland. In Decentraland, land is limited like the way bitcoins are limited in supply. Because they’re on a blockchain, you can limit the amount of virtual land or digital land.

One of the plots of land sold for $572,000 in April. The platform, Decentraland, has done $50 million in sales since it went live to the public in February of this year. So huge money is already going into these digital artworks, digital land.

This sounds kind of crazy, but you can actually start to see why it makes sense. Because these digital pieces of land, you can build shopping malls, you can build galleries, and you can start to sell things in the digital world.

And real companies in the real world are getting involved. In June, Sotheby’s, a huge auction house based out of London, England – has bought a replica of its new Bond Street Headquarters in London as a virtual gallery in Decentraland.

There’s a digital real estate investment fund, Tom. Digital real estate, right? In June, this company, which is called Republic Realme, paid just under $1 million for 259 parcels of land in Decentraland. It plans to turn those parcels of land into a shopping district.

So, Tom, I might hand it back to you. I’ve talked about a lot of pretty crazy things. How are you processing this so far?

Tom: Chris, I think I’d like to say to the viewers of The Weekly Pulse, if you’re watching or listening to this and saying, “I don’t want anything to do with this stuff. I don’t want to participate,” that’s OK. You can still get ahead of the curve to recognize this is where the puck is going – if we’re going to use that analogy. You can still build your wealth and protect your wealth by implementing strategies that Chris and the experts of Legacy Research are bringing it to you, whether or not you want to participate in this. So I think that’s a nice frame for people out there hearing this.

I have no desire to go to virtual land, or whatever the heck this is. However, I will state this, Chris… A couple of years ago, I was at the release of some virtual reality type of thing. As soon as I was done, I took the headset off and I said, “This is the future. It’s just a matter of time. This is where we’re going.”

That was a few years ago. Now, it’s progressed way further. And it is the future. It is where great wealth will be created and protected. And that is whether or not you have any desire whatsoever to participate in the virtual reality.

But to grow and protect your wealth, following what Chris and the experts of Legacy Research are going to point out, obviously, it’s the old thing with any property – buy low, sell high. Sounds simple, but not if you don’t know how to do it, right? Most people buy high and sell low… if they can even sell.

So I’m excited to hear about this. Not so much for me to have any desire to participate in it. I really don’t have that. But I do have a desire to protect and grow my wealth. So that’s what I felt is important as I’m processing what you’re saying.

Chris: Yeah, Tom. I think it’s a really good point. The idea of going into virtual worlds is not high on my agenda, either. But I am aware. I had graduated from University when I first heard about the internet. I’m 45 years old. And I remember thinking the internet itself was kind of crazy. I had no desire to go on the internet. And look at me now… I’m on the internet all the time. A lot of folks watching this probably are, too.

So I wouldn’t rule out that maybe you and I, one day, Tom, will be doing this kind of thing in one of these virtual worlds. I wouldn’t rule it out.

But I totally get your point. You don’t have to be interested in going into a virtual world as an avatar to profit from this. This is really the way the internet is headed. Just like we had Web 1.0. You remember that, probably. It was these static web pages. You could jump between one web page and the other. There wasn’t even video, which seems crazy to us now, in the early phases of the internet.

And then we had video streaming, we had social media, we had the mobile web, where we accessed the internet on our mobile phones. And I really do believe that this is going to be the next quantum leap of how we use the internet and how we interact online.

The benefits for investors are pretty clear. I did a little bit of research on how much you would have made had you invested in Amazon.com when it went public in May 1997, at a price of $18 a share.

As of May of last year, $10,000 invested on the IPO day in Amazon shares would be worth more than $12 million. That just gives you a flavor of how much money you can make by getting in on these megatrends early on. That’s a return of more than 120,000%, which is even more than any of the gains we’ve seen in crypto in any of the tracked portfolios we have at Legacy.

So this really is a big opportunity. This is very early days. The technology isn’t quite there yet. But I do believe it’s hugely important to have on the radar because of the potential there.

One of the big players in this is Epic Games. It’s the company behind Fortnite, the cartoony game kids are playing. It’s where that virtual concert with 27 million people showing up happened – It just blows my mind every time I say it.

Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, he believes that the metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else we’ve seen before, including the internet as we know it today.

The third thing I wanted to look at today, Tom, was where is all this headed? As you probably know, Teeka Tiwari’s mantra for how to get rich as an investor is that, if you don’t already have a fortune to invest, the way to make a fortune is to invest early in a market megatrend before it goes mainstream, and then hold on for the long run. The metaverse checks those boxes.

Now, we’re in the early stage of this. You hadn’t heard of the metaverse before. I hadn’t heard of it before I read Grant Wasylik’s piece over at Palm Beach Daily. But this is going mainstream very fast, Tom.

The reason I know that is because Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, the fifth-largest U.S. company by market cap, a huge tech company, has said that he wants to turn Facebook into a metaverse company.

That’s because there’s a huge amount of potential for a social media company. At the moment, we put up profiles on Facebook and Instagram. We have pictures, we have some videos, and then we text each other via these platforms.

Well, you can imagine that social media would be pretty cool if we could put on virtual reality headsets and go into one of these virtual worlds and just hang out with other people.

And that’s what’s already happening in the game Fortnite. Kids are actually going into the game. It’s a shoot-em-up game – but they’re not even playing the shoot-em-up part of the game. They’re going in and they’re hanging out with friends, just like, say, the millennial generation did on regular social media platforms.

The Zoomer generation – the generation behind the millennials – they’re going into these virtual worlds and they’re hanging out with friends.

It may seem totally crazy to you and I, who were not digital natives, as they’re called. We remember the world before cellphones, the internet, a mobile web. This seems crazy to me. It seems crazy to you. But for an 18-year-old or a 19-year-old or a 15-year-old, it’s absolutely normal to be inhabiting these virtual worlds, not only for gaming, but also for social networking.

That’s why Zuckerberg calls the metaverse the next chapter for Facebook.

So you better pay attention to this. When the fifth-largest company in the U.S., one of the biggest tech companies in the world, says it’s the next chapter for that business, it’s worth paying attention to.

The way to play this… You could invest in shares in Facebook, or any of the big tech companies – Apple, Amazon, Google, all are going to be playing in the metaverse. They’re going to be coming out with products, and they’re going to be getting revenues out of this next evolution of the internet.

There’s also an ETF. It’s called the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF (META). That’s another way, if you want to just pick up some shares, get a little bit involved in this megatrend right now. It invests in 50 of the leading companies actively involved in the metaverse.

The great thing about these companies is they’re not tiny little startups. There are often big companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon. So it isn’t as speculative as you might think. It’s very early days. We’re going to be talking about this a lot more at The Daily Cut, and probably, here at The Weekly Pulse.

I just wanted to put it on the radar and get people thinking about how the internet as we know it is evolving. It’s always been evolving. The next evolution, just like all the other evolutions, is going to take a lot of people by surprise.

But if you have a fair idea where it’s going, a lot of the top insiders in Silicon Valley, along with some of the biggest analysts at Legacy, see it going towards this metaverse concept. So that’s it, Tom. I don’t know how that’s registered with you, but it certainly has got me quite excited.

Tom: Yes, it does have me excited. I’ll just circle back. If you’re sitting there listening to this… As my mind was processing it, I was like, “Man, I don’t have any desire.” But like Chris said, you don’t have to have that desire. You don’t have to be in there. But just like we, Chris and I, and possibly you years ago, when the internet came out, “Man, I don’t have any desire to do that,” now, that’s part of our daily lives. That’s kind of where this is going.

So just keep that in mind. As Chris said, this is putting it on your radar. He shared some ways you can tap into some of the tech companies to protect and grow your wealth ahead of the curve for this. Because it is coming.

I’m sure you’ll hear more from Chris and the experts here within Legacy Research. But this is now on your radar, Chris. It’s on my radar. Thanks for bringing it to my and the Weekly Pulse viewers’ attention. Looking forward to hearing more about it as the story unfolds.

Chris: Thanks, Tom.

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