Crypto investment behemothic Grayscale has published a bullish report on metaverses, estimating that the "market opportunity" for bringing the metaverse to the mainstream may be worth over $1 trillion in the next few years.

The November report titled "The Metaverse, Web 3.0 Virtual Cloud Economies" was authored by Grayscale head of inquiry David Grider and inquiry analyst Matt Maximo. The duo explores the burgeoning sector primarily from the perspective of open up metaverse worlds backed by an "interconnected crypto-economic system" such as Decentraland.

The report highlights that metaverse platforms integrated with crypto tokens, decentralized finance services such as staking and lending, nonfungible tokens (NFT), decentralized governance and decentralized cloud storage take "created a new online feel" that'south rapidly alluring new users.

Analyzing "global all-time active metaverse wallets" data since the offset of 2022, it found the user base has grown by 10x since that time to sit at around 50,000 as of June 2022.

"Compared to other Web 3.0 and Spider web 2.0 segments, Metaverse virtual world users are withal in their early innings, just if current growth rates remain on their current trajectory, this emerging segment has the potential to become mainstream in the coming years."

The report highlights that in that location's no shortage of venture capitalists taking a punt on the sector'south potential. Co-ordinate to the report, fundraising totaled $1 billion for blockchain gaming in Q3. That represented 12% of full fundraising for the entire crypto sector in the quarter, ranking information technology as the "acme sub-sector" within the Web 3.0 and NFT category.

Market opportunity

The researchers note a range of key dynamics that could significantly contribute to the growth of the metaverse sector, including growing average leisure fourth dimension and money spent on digital hobbies, a cultural shift from premium games to gratis-to-play gaming, and Web 3.0 innovations such as play-to-earn.

Global acquirement from virtual globe gaming totaled $180 billion in 2022, with "premium spending" accounting for around $40 billion, with estimates the sector could pull in more than $400 billion by 2025, primarily driven by the in-game spending model.

The study argues that this shift is "accelerating further with the transition from Web ii.0 closed corporate Metaverses to Web three.0 open crypto Metaverse networks" due to the play-to-earn potential they represent.

"Spider web iii.0 Metaverse virtual worlds take benefited from rapid innovation and productivity gains. Crypto virtual worlds accept created a multi-million dollar primary and secondary market place for creators and nugget owners past eliminating capital controls and opening their digital borders to free-market place capitalism," the report reads.

Related: Metaverse and blockchain gaming altcoins rally while Bitcoin looks for support

The prices of the native tokens for open up metaverse platforms such as Decentraland (MANA) and The Sandbox (SAND) have been on a tear of tardily, gaining 49% and 102% each to sit at $5.03 and $seven.lx, respectively, at the fourth dimension of writing.