Feb 16, 2022
The First Major Bank on Metaverse
JP Morgan has gathered its years of experience in investment banking to cultivate a digital bank in Decentraland!
Metaverse is the best solution for the increasing demand for the non-face-to-face environment, which has become the new normal since the global pandemic. For example, a few mid-sized Korean banks recently deployed their virtual environments on Metaverse, enabling their customers to bank virtually like they do in the real world.
In layman’s terms, Metaverse is a 3D virtual world that is an extended version of the existing virtual reality. Metaverse endows the real-world ecosystems with an opportunity to accumulate and utilize data in a dedicated virtual space. As a result, people worldwide can seamlessly communicate without any spatial constraints, enabling them to explore new horizons of knowledge and experience, which would be practically impossible in the real world.
JP Morgan — First Major bank in the Metaverse
JP Morgan officially became the first major bank to open a lounge in Decentraland named “Onyx Lounge.” Decenetraland is a blockchain-based virtual space that sells lands in the form of NFTs to people and organizations. JP Morgan sees this as a step towards capitalizing on a $1 Trillion Metaverse market.
JP Morgan named the lounged after its blockchain-based payment solution Onyx. Onyx by JP Morgan is the world’s first on-chain platform for wholesale transactions, revolutionizing how money, information, and assets are moving around the world. Similarly, JP Morgan has gathered its whole institutional banking experience to cultivate the Oynx lounge on the Decentraland, acting as a reliable infrastructure for all financial services in the virtual world.
The lounge is located in Decentraland’s Metajuku mall, and the visitors to the lounge are greeted by a tiger and a digital portrait of Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan himself. On walking upstairs, the visitors could see the presentation of the economics of cryptocurrency by an executive.
The real bank and the Onyx lounge are pretty much the same as JP Morgan operates the same way it does in the Decentraland, too, since the virtual space has its own population, currency, and economy. Onyx Lounge in Decentraland supports forex, trading, safekeeping, and cross-border payments.
Need for the big leap
Metaverse will be the future of digital spaces, and it will infiltrate every sector with no exception. The market value of Metaverse is expected to reach a trillion dollars per year, which is fueled by the fact that people spend $54 billion on virtual goods every year. This is a huge amount and is twice the amount spent on purchasing music. The amount spent on buying the plots of virtual lands increased from $6000 to $12000 in just six months, between June and December last year. JP Morgan predicts that in-game advertisement spending will hit $18.4 billion (‘B’ it’s a billion) by 2027.
JP Morgan feels that this is the right time to shift to the virtual spaces as a driving force behind their new economy being built in the Metaverse. JP Morgan’s idea of the Onyx lounge is inspired by a few big names like Adidas and Nike. They have their NFT-based products and shopfront available for the public. Recently, Samsung had announced its cultivation of Metaverse stores.
JP Morgan released a full report on the types of business opportunities companies can expect to find in the Metaverse. Read the full report here.
What’s next?
Everything JP Morgan stated on its development of the Onyx lounge was not on a positive note. It had expressed its critical need to balance the navigating hype and the reality. JP Morgan said to keep itself up with the growing expectations on the possibilities of its lounge; it has to deliver its full potential for community building, customer engagement, and commerce. These key areas should be further developed and matured. However, it still feels that there are some flaws in the UI/UX and the avatars have a poor performance.
