Have you watched the Facebook/Meta announcement? If not, you need to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvufun6xer8 The first 20 minutes or so should be enough context for this post, but I'd suggest you watch the whole thing. This is important beyond just Star Citizen. Seen it? Okay, let's talk about this. It's apparent that a lot of the things that Star Citizen has been building are going to be key technology implementations in the metaverse. VR integration, inner thought system, face animation sync, the friggin' mobiglas... if you're reading this the parallels are probably overwhelmingly obvious to you, so I won't yammer on about it. Cloud Imperium has a massive head start in this new race to the metaverse. What's more important is what Star Citizen is MISSING. There are a number of things that Star Citizen is not currently doing that will hold it back from realizing its potential as THE killer app in the metaverse, and we need to have a bigger discussion as a community about how we want to approach the next steps. Actual ownership of digital assets. Star Citizen was announced a lifetime ago, before NFTs were a thing. But now we have an open standard we could attach our space ships and digital land ownership to! Imagine being able to fly your Carrack around Metaverse Square, or host your company board meeting from your beachfront space outpost. If we can make assets scarce they will have a lot of real tangible value. (And before you get up in arms about NFTs, know that the "bad for the environment" narrative is 100% false. And we're already basically doing the digital ownership thing just not using the open standard). Ability to integrate with 3rd party digital spaces. We will need to implement whatever standardized VR API allows people to drop in/out of Star Citizen. This is going to be difficult. This means that some avatar I got in World of Warcraft II (or whatever) will need to be able to be represented in Star Citizen somehow. Ability to export Star Citizen assets to 3rd party places/games. I want to be able to use my Star Citizen avatar when I'm playing other games damnit. This may be even harder than spaces, since the assets are already created and changing every single asset to be compatible with a standardized API... Since Star Citizen has a head start on this, we can lead the rest of the world into the metaverse and then they could follow OUR standards instead. Facebook is working on this, but if they just took what Cloud Imperium had already developed and integrated it, it would be mutually beneficial. AR. I want to reskin my Subaru to look like a TONK. People walking around with AR glasses on could see it. Being open means embracing the grey market. Let me sell my Mustang NFT on OpenSea, let me swap USDC for UEC on Uniswap. This is probably a terrifying thought for a game economist, but if you look at games like Axie Infinity, there's a potential for us to earn a real living income by just playing a video game! That's the kind of thing that Star Citizen can pull off that other games will be copying frantically forever after. I think if we pulled it off, not only would it bring a lot of value to the metaverse, but it could cement Star Citizen's place at the top of gaming for decades to come and bring in a lot of new players as well. I have more thoughts on this, but I want to hear what you think! Should Star Citizen embrace the open metaverse? EDIT: Boy those emojis really hurt.