This article is part of a series exploring the key themes from the Metaverse Roadmap 2007—a foresight exercise conducted nearly two decades ago by a group of developers, technologists, and futurists from the games industry.
One of the earliest and most fundamental insights from the Metaverse Roadmap was that digital economies were already forming inside virtual worlds, and that their evolution would demand new ways to define ownership, value, and identity. Even in 2007, we saw that players and creators weren’t just participating in these economies—they were building them. In doing so, they were challenging traditional notions of who controls digital assets.
By 2007, while the term Metaverse had yet to break into the mainstream, it had already been a topic of conversation for well over a decade, largely thanks to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992).
More than just coining the term, Snow Crash envisioned a world where virtual real estate, digital avatars, and decentralized economies existed beyond the control of corporations and nation-states. Many of us in the games industry saw MMOs, social virtual worlds, and emerging digital economies as early signals of that vision coming to life.
By the early 2000s, visionaries like Brock Pierce—who had been deeply involved in the virtual goods and digital currency markets of games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft—were already recognizing that the ability to create, trade, and monetize digital assets was a revolution in the making. The question wasn’t if digital ownership would become valuable, but rather, who would control it.
As blockchain technology emerged, figures like Adam Back and Samson Mow extended this vision beyond games, seeing Bitcoin not just as digital money, but as the infrastructure for decentralized economies and trustless ownership.
The same principles that governed virtual world economies—scarcity, interoperability, and self-sovereign assets—were now being applied at a global scale.
At the time, platform-driven virtual economies—from Second Life’s Linden Dollar to Eve Online’s complex player-run markets—were proving that digital goods could have real-world value. Users were investing time and money into virtual land, in-game currencies, and digital identities. Yet, these economies were still largely walled gardens, entirely dependent on the rules and policies of the companies that owned the platforms. If a virtual world shut down, all of its assets and economic activity could vanish overnight.
The Metaverse Roadmap predicted that over time, users would demand greater control and sovereignty over their digital assets, pushing for persistent, transferable, and platform-agnostic ownership models. What we couldn’t fully articulate at the time—but which has since become clear—is that this shift would require new infrastructure, leading directly to blockchain, Web3, and tokenized economies.
From Virtual Gold to Bitcoin: The Direct Line from Digital Currencies to Blockchain
What was happening inside game economies and virtual worlds in the early 2000s directly foreshadowed the rise of Bitcoin and blockchain-based assets. The documentary Play Money (2017) captured how gold farming in MMOs, virtual item trading, and in-game currencies were already functioning as real-world financial markets. Players and traders were earning a living inside digital spaces, arbitraging virtual gold across different economies, and in doing so, they were unintentionally stress-testing the idea of decentralized digital money.
This was the missing piece of early virtual economies—the ability to separate digital currency from the platform itself. Bitcoin, introduced in 2008, was the first fully decentralized, trustless currency that wasn’t controlled by any single platform or entity—precisely what virtual world economies had been lacking.
As blockchain evolved, so did its application to digital ownership, leading directly to:
NFTs and digital assets: What started as virtual world skins and game items has now evolved into blockchain-backed ownership of art, collectibles, and in-game items with real-world value.
Interoperability across platforms: Players once dreamed of moving assets between games—blockchain enables this by creating assets that exist independently of any single game or virtual world.
Decentralized identity (DID): Just as MMOs required persistent avatars and reputation systems, Web3 now enables self-sovereign identity that is portable across platforms.
DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks): A logical extension of decentralized ownership, where compute power, storage, and connectivity are distributed rather than controlled by central entities. This echoes the shift from server-based MMOs to decentralized infrastructure.
However, Bitcoin in its early form lacked smart contract functionality, which led to the rise of Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens. These platforms introduced programmable digital assets, but often at the cost of greater complexity, governance centralization, and unsustainable tokenomics.
As we move forward, Bitcoin itself is evolving. Innovations like BRC-20, Taproot, and Layer-2 solutions are proving that Bitcoin is no longer static—it is absorbing the best aspects of alternative chains while maintaining its core principles of security and decentralization.
The long-term trajectory, as Jeff Booth suggests in The Price of Tomorrow, is that technological efficiency will drive out inefficiencies, and economic structures will consolidate toward trustless, decentralized, and deflationary models. As alternative chains thrive today, their functions are ultimately converging back toward Bitcoin’s more secure and immutable foundation.
Beyond Virtual Assets: RWA, Culture, and the Future of Digital Property
The idea of tokenized economies isn’t just about virtual items anymore—it’s extending into real-world assets (RWA), intellectual property, and cultural value. This is one of the driving reasons behind Greenstone’s work in exploring the tokenization of historical, cultural, and entertainment-based assets through Owner Champion and other initiatives.
Just as early virtual world assets were the first experiment in digitally scarce goods, we are now seeing a similar evolution with high-value cultural artifacts, music rights, and entertainment IPs. If tokenization can ensure verifiable ownership, fractional access, and new forms of monetization, it can fundamentally change how value is stored, accessed, and transferred across both digital and physical realms.
The Challenges of True Digital Ownership
But even as these technologies have advanced, many of the original challenges of digital ownership remain unresolved. Platforms still exert significant control, regulatory frameworks are evolving unevenly, and user sovereignty remains contested. True digital ownership isn’t just a technological shift—it’s a philosophical and economic transformation that challenges long-held assumptions about how value is created and controlled in the digital world.
For me, this was one of the most compelling themes of the roadmap because it highlighted the deeper implications of digital economies—not just as game mechanics, but as a preview of how the future global economy would operate. Games were always the early testbed for these ideas, but their significance now extends far beyond entertainment. The rise of Web3, crypto, DePIN, and decentralized finance (DeFi) is the direct continuation of that trajectory, and we are still in the early stages of seeing how it will evolve.
This is why projects like the Pacific Commons Protocol Institute (PCPI), which I am proud to be a part of, are pushing this exploration further—not just redefining ownership, but also addressing governance, ethics, and the long-term sustainability of decentralized economies. For digital ownership to fulfill its true potential, it must be designed for resilience, ensuring that value isn’t concentrated in the hands of early adopters or speculative investors. The future of digital economies depends on commons-based governance, non-speculative models of tokenization, and systems that align incentives with long-term societal benefit.