What’s Your Digital Identity in The Metaverse?

Digital identity and personalization in the metaverse will be a hot topic for many years to come. We all wear different masks wherever we go. In your group with your closest friends you might be ‘the planner’, who always organizes everything. While on D&D nights you turn into the bloodthirsty warrior Grogu The Fearless. We’ve been shaping our online identity for years, and in every new game world or application we started all over again. This will end in the metaverse, but who will you be?

Online identities have been developed by everybody in the past twenty years. People have become internet-famous through YouTube videos, TikTok dances, Instagram portfolios, and funny Vines. However, not every internet celeb is recognizable by their physical appearance. Even in the blockchain ecosystem we’ve seen anonymous characters like Blue Kirby and Pranksy getting enormous amounts of clout. “The more you use it, the more others will relate to you as that visual reference that you chose”, said Daniel “Toxsam” Garcia from Crypto Avatars.

According to him the metaverse will allow us to form an identity that will never change and that we can take everywhere. Garcia believes the metaverse is now in its early stages, and a new part of our lives. It frees our identity for the shackles of every day life. “In real life building your identity can take up years, and destroying it could taint you forever. In some cultures it can even affect your family in the present and the future”, he told us. However, the identity we build online or in the metaverse is always disconnected from your physical persona, which can be used for good and bad.

Avatars represent online identity

At the center of everything someone does on the internet, is the individual. All the data obtained from watching videos on YouTube, search queries on Google and liking pictures on Instagram only makes sense when it’s tied to an individual. Traditionally an e-mail address would connect all the dots, or a Facebook account. It’s not without reason that companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are among the most powerful tech companies in the world.

With the rise of Web 3.0, crypto wallets will also play a role in defining our identity. In a wallet you might find traces of someone’s gaming preferences and love for digital art. Maybe you can find which exchanges they’ve been using. However, a wallet isn’t really a nice way to represent an identity… and an avatar is. That’s why Garcia and the team of Polygonal Mind are working on Crypto Avatars. These unique avatars are a way to give your digital identity a visual representation in 3D worlds: they are your identity in the metaverse.

“The avatar is the centralized point of attention, chosen by the user, to express themselves. It adds another layer of information to their online narrative”, Garcia explained. And face it, it’s easier to remember a crazy or cute looking avatar than it is to remember a crypto wallet or username.

One avatar wherever we go?

In Ready Player One we’ve seen the main character move between different virtual environments without ever changing their avatar. “That’s the goal, but we’re extremely early for that to happen”, Garcia responded to the ultimate goal of the metaverse. According to him virtual worlds first need bigger crowds before this feature becomes a necessity. In addition the availability of high-speed internet across the globe, needs to improve, while VR headsets still need to find a mainstream audience.

“Avatars are and will be a huge market in the future, everyone wants a piece of the cake”, he added. Garcia believes that major brands and companies will also jump on the bandwagon. They will bring their characters and intellectual property in various ways into virtual worlds. However, this will not happen over night.

“The adoption of open standard that support interoperability between different virtual worlds is key to speed up this process. In the end technology isn’t the issue these days, but coordination between people and companies is”, Garcia concluded.

One step ahead of the curve

Daniel Garcia is working with his team at Polygonal Mind on various projects across different virtual worlds. However, their efforts for Crypto Avatars is the one project that potentially connects everything together. Crypto Avatars are unique, one-of-a-kind avatars that users can buy from OpenSea.

At the moment Crypto Avatars can be used across a wide variety of applications. These digital avatars are all tokenized, providing a true proof-of-ownership for the token holder. These avatars are certified on either the Ethereum blockchain or Matic Network. Currently they are auctioning two avatars per week.

There’s a wide variety of applications that supports the use of Crypto Avatars. For example, among those projects are the blockchain-powered virtual world Somnium Space, and the pop culture hit VR Chat.

When you buy a character from the Crypto Avatars collection and shape your digital identity, you will be the only person in the metaverse that actually owns it. You won’t be the first by the way, as they already sold plenty in October last year. Yet, you’re so far ahead of the curve, it’s like you’re mining bitcoin back in 2015 on an old laptop. These avatars simply provide a fun way to shape your online identity in the metaverse.