By Jana Arbanas, Allan V. Cook, Kevin Westcott, Chris Arkenberg, and Kevin Downs

Looking past the hype and critique, Web3 and the metaverse are shaping a new application layer for the internet. How can leaders better understand this evolution and what it means for businesses, organizations, and society?

By removing distance, connecting everyone and everything, and unleashing massive flows of information, the internet has been the greatest disruption since the printing press. In a few decades, it has reshaped much of the human world, enabling great progress and historic change, and revealing the many challenges that come with such transformation. There is now a growing need for standardization and interoperability across services and systems, more coherency around market fragmentation, more intuitive and seamless user interfaces, and governance that effectively regulates content and experiences while still supporting progress. Smart cooperation and governance by providers and regulators may be critical to overcoming Web2-era challenges and enabling the next internet platform: the metaverse and Web3.

Moving further into a world that blends the physical and digital may require greater integration, more modern standards and protocols, and capabilities that give people more control of their digital selves—their identity and representation, what they own, and who has access to the data they create. Just as we use standardized protocols and devices to interact with digital experiences on the internet, the promises of Web3 could help enable consistency and interoperability across metaverse experiences—uniting disparate, disconnected metaverses into a single coherent platform.  Similar to the web, there can be walled gardens and open commons and any number of creative innovations, accessed by browsers, mobile apps, AR glasses, VR headsets, and more.

Read more: The metaverse and Web3: The next internet platform