Quick take:
- The bank has opened its Onyx Lounge in Decentraland.
- It has also published a paper discussing business opportunities in the metaverse.
- The bank wants to help solve metaverse issues related to finance and banking.
Wall Street giant JP Morgan opened up its Onyx Lounge in Decentraland yesterday. It is the first bank the enter the metaverse.
Named after the bank’s blockchain-based division, Onyx Lounge features a tiger and an image of CEO Jamie Dixon. Alongside the unveiling of its virtual lounge, JP Morgan has also published a paper on business opportunities in the metaverse.
With the opening of the Onyx Lounge, JP Morgan is starting to capitalise on the metaverse, which it calls a $1 trillion opportunity. “We are not here to suggest the metaverse, as we know it today, will take over all human interactions, but rather, to explore the many exciting opportunities it presents for consumers and brands alike,” the paper states.
The firm notes that the metaverse is now at an inflection point as there is not a day that goes by without a brand or celebrity announcing that they are building a presence in a virtual universe.
“While the buzz can partially be attributed to attention grabbing headlines, there is a convergence of emerging trends. A number of new technologies have come together to enable this vision of the metaverse. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets have become cheaper and more powerful, improving the user experience,” reads the report.
JP Morgan believes that a robust and flexible financial ecosystem is essential for successfully scaling the metaverse. The bank sees a parallel between the existing virtual landscape and the global economy, as each virtual world has its own population, GDP, in-game currency and digital assets.
The bank plans to play a major role in the metaverse by offering crossborder payments, foreign exchange, financial assets creation, trading and safekeeping and at-scale customer foothold.
In enabling the metaverse gaming ecosystem, JP Morgan wants to offer support for metaverse onboarding with products focused on account validation, sanctions screening, transaction status and fraud prevention. It also wants to help content creators easily commercialise their offerings through a full suite of payment services including microloans and wallets that support multiple payout methods among others.
On top of that, JP Morgan has an ambitious goal of scaling the metaverse industry worldwide by creating custom solutions such as embedded and interoperable stored value virtual wallets, flexible single pay or multiple pay options, fast and secure checkout, and the ability to support more than 120 currencies.
The bank ends the report by saying: “The asymmetrical risk of being left behind is worth the incremental investment needed to get started and to explore this new digital landscape for yourself.”
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