The World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) first live meeting in two years kicked off on Sunday (May 22), and the cryptocurrency industry is out in force.
The annual gathering of world leaders, central bankers, business titans and cultural influencers is an important event for the crypto industry, in large part because WEF was an early adopter in taking the world of digital assets seriously and giving it access to, and a hearing in front of, an influential global audience.
That worked both ways, and Davos, Switzerland, is now a place where the crypto world is taken very seriously indeed.
Which goes a long way to explaining why the WEF unveiled a new partnership with Microsoft and Accenture to build a “Global Collaboration Village” in the metaverse.
The Monday (May 23) announcement by WEF founder and CEO Klaus Schwab that the organization “is embarking on an ambitious new journey to harness the potential of the metaverse as a platform for collaborative, inclusive and effective international action,” certainly has the sweeping grandeur metaverse true believers tend to use when extolling its virtues as the future of social media, of socializing, and even of marketing and commerce. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, for example, recently predicted that the immersive virtual world we are promised will be a $3 trillion reboot of the internet.
See also: What’s a Metaverse, and Why is One Having a Fashion Show?
And while the 3D metaverse is still in its early days, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said it nonetheless has the potential to redefine how people work. And for his part, Schwab is betting that it “will provide immersive spaces where stakeholders can convene, create and take action on the world’s most pressing challenges.” And extend the WEF’s influence footprint, of course.
Then there’s the WEF’s new Defining and Building the Metaverse initiative, aimed at creating governance and policy rules of the road for metaverses in order to “create an equitable, interoperable and safe digital environment from the onset.”
Which is certainly an undertaking for a barely existent technology that can fairly be described as a social media platform on steroids, particularly when many developers want to see it be made as open and censorship-free as possible.
See also: Meta Opens Its Metaverse Platform to Payments, and It Doesn’t Come Cheap
However, they aren’t the only blockchain dreamers in Davos. Lockheed Martin announced a partnership with the Filecoin Foundation to build an open source and seriously decentralized blockchain node network in space.
Read more: PYMNTS Crypto Basics Series: What’s a Consensus Mechanism and Why Is It Destroying the Planet?
The Filecoin Foundation is behind the protocol that the metaverse-believer set also thinks the next-generation, decentralized internet, Web3, will be built on.
See more: Web3: Is There Any ‘There’ There? And if so, Where Is It?
Just Say No
Back on terra firma, the central bankers and financial leaders at Davos aren’t quite as impressed. Bank of France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau said “cryptocurrencies are not a reliable means of payment.” That requires someone being responsible for the value, and it must be accepted universally as a means of exchange, he said, adding that crypto has neither, CNN reported.
Bank of Thailand Governor Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput expressed what is becoming a more common refrain of government officials from Indonesia to Turkey to India that “we don’t want to see it as a means of payment.”
Speaking on the same WEF panel, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva criticized Bitcoin as an unstable store of value that “may be called a coin, but it’s not money.”
At the same time, Bloomberg News reported, she also said, “I would beg you not to pull out of the importance of this world. It offers us all faster service, much lower costs, and more inclusion.”
That said, she also referred in passing to the $45 billion collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin on the week of May 9, arguing that good projects have to be separated out and regulatory guardrails put in place to protect against bad ones.