The metaverse is going to change the world as we know it, Dereck Hoogenkamp tells CoinGeek Backstage

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The metaverse has become the biggest buzzword of the past decade, with many touting it as the future of technology. Blockchain technology is at the center of this revolution. As Dereck Hoogenkamp told CoinGeek Backstage, combining these two technologies could change the world as we know it and push us towards a world we only see in sci-fi movies. 

Hoogenkamp, chairman and managing director of investment firm Yalla Limited, was on a number of panels at the LEAP 2022 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to share his expertise on the intersection of finance, real estate, and technology. He also joined CoinGeek’s Becky Liggero on the sidelines of the event to talk about the sessions, saying, “It’s really a lot of fun. It’s super interesting to talk about blockchain, metaverse, virtual land on the metaverse and more.”

Everyone has something that excites them about the metaverse, and for Hoogenkamp, it’s the intersection of the metaverse and the physical world. Developers of real estate projects are increasingly designing parallel twins of their projects on the metaverse.

“If something changes in the real world, it also changes in the metaverse. This has a lot of advantages, for example, through facility management,” he explained.

As Hoogenkamp explains, physical real estate projects will have changes made to them reflecting on the metaverse. For instance, if something breaks down in an apartment building, one can easily update that on the digital twin of the project and have it attended immediately.

As the metaverse grows, developers are becoming more and more creative in using the technology. One has created a ‘petaverse,’ a metaverse with pets, allowing pet owners to interact virtually on a random dog walk.

Bolder developments include having artificial intelligence-based recreations of people who have passed on, Hoogenkamp went on. This enables you to interact with friends and relatives you’ve lost along the way on the metaverse, which, as Becky noted, is the actualization of a Black Mirror episode.

The metaverse comes with its caveats, including online crime since people are emboldened by the perceived lack of consequences for their actions. Hoogenkamp believes that one of the ways to mitigate this is through linking any virtual world to the physical world.

“A lot of people hide behind fake characters or cartoons. […] But you can verify with blockchain. You can see if an avatar is really linked to an actual person. Then blockchain adds trust and verification and timestamps and everything else,” he noted.

“I believe the integration of blockchain with metaverse is mega important,” Hoogenkamp said.

Watch: AR & VR & the Metaverse on Blockchain