Metaverse
‘Metaverse’ broadly refers to shared, immersive digital environments where people can meet, create, socialize, work, buy goods and services, and attend events with other people who are not in the same physical space. A true metaverse is meant to perfectly replicate real life, although it is unclear how many more years it will take to develop. The term metaverse was coined in the dystopian novel ‘Snow Crash’ three decades ago. It gained recognition this year after social media giant Facebook renamed itself Meta to reflect its new metaverse focus.
Web 3.0
Called the next version of the internet, Web 3.0 will be built on the concept of decentralization, openness, and greater user utility. It will be based on the blockchain record-keeping technology, where users would have ownership stakes in platforms and applications. In retrospect, the current version of the world wide web or Web 2.0 is characterized by social media platforms, which allow a greater proliferation of user-generated content.
This is a far cry from Web 1.0, which was all static and non-interactive - an entirely top-down approach towards information dissemination.
'Web 3.0' envisions a decentralized future where users and machines are able to interact with data via smart, digital contracts' over peer-to-peer networks, without the need for Big Tech.
According to the report by crypto and digital asset exchange Cross Tower in partnership with US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF), the digital asset economy's value to India's GDP will grow at 43.1 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) -- from $5.1 billion in 2021 to $261.8 billion over an 11-year period, resulting in a $1.1 trillion contribution to India's GDP.
Digital asset market capitalization was nearly $1.5 billion in 2013 and stands at about $3 trillion today.
According to the report, most of the $1.1 trillion in total economic growth in the next 11 years can come from ancillary digital asset-related businesses that are yet to be invented.
"India is poised for growth to become a $5 trillion economy by 2024-25. Digital assets are expected to have tremendous potential in the next 11 years across countries, due to their rapid adoption. They are expected to help India achieve the $5 trillion economy goal," said Dr. Mukesh Aghi, President and CEO of USISPF.
According to the findings, the adoption rate of digital assets (as reflected by accounts opened on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges) is growing nearly twice as fast as that of the Internet.
It took the Internet approximately 7.5 years to go from around 100 million users to one billion users.
Blockchain
Blockchain is essentially a database, but very different from every other database you may have seen. As the name suggests, a blockchain is a chain of blocks, with each block storing some information. Other key features of blockchain are that it is decentralized and by the very nature of that design, it is immutable. While cryptocurrency is the most popular use case of blockchain, governments around the world and in India are moving fast to leverage this technology for purposes of governance and public administration.
NFT
NFT is short for non-fungible tokens. It is a unique digital certificate, registered in a blockchain that is used to record the ownership of an asset such as an artwork or a collectible. Most people did not know what an NFT was until this year, when sales boomed, sparked in large part by Twitter ex-CEO Jack Dorsey selling an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million. In India, the NFT craze arrived after the Bollywood superstar and actor Amitabh Bachchan auctioned his collection, including an autographed poster of his movies, as NFT.
Source: The top technology buzzwords of 2021 | Business Standard News (business-standard.com)
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