Could Crypto Shape the Future of the Metaverse?

As interested investors and gamers alike all flock to the metaverse, crypto-enthusiast Chris MacDonald and The Motley Fool's Eric Bleeker discuss how crypto plays, such as Decentraland (MANA 7.15%), and even an opportunity in traditional stocks, may reshape how we think about the metaverse on this episode of "The Crypto Show" from Backstage Pass, recorded on Nov. 10. 

Eric Bleeker: This is a chart for Decentraland.

As I mentioned earlier, narratives matter, especially in the space where people are looking to get into projects before many of these network effects begin. What happened was simply, if you're looking at this huge spike that you cannot miss it with all that volume associated with it -- well, Decentraland is an idea for bringing metaverse concepts into the crypto space.

Chris, when you see something like this furious rise in Decentraland, how would you feel about this? Because a lot of people, they see a lot of this attention on metaverse after Facebook [now Meta Platforms] (META -4.13%) rebranded to be a metaverse company as something that's really going to be a driver for cryptocurrencies across the next 5-10 years.

Chris MacDonald: Yeah, there's definitely been that big shift for sure with Facebook making that big move. I think we're seeing a lot of -- whether it's a metaverse options or various gaming options in the crypto space.

To me, I think about it similar as I would to an NFT argument for why you would want to own an NFT. You're owning a digital asset, or the ability to own digital land, or a place on a crypto game. Let's say that you can own avatars, you have a piece of the digital world, whichever digital world you choose to be on. There's a lot of interest and momentum in this space.

To be honest, it's one that I'm still learning about. There's so many different options, we talked a little bit about Alien Worlds (TLM) and Axie Infinity (AXS) on a recent program. The growth in this space is just incredible.

I think this is one that I know I'm going to keep researching and looking into it a little bit more. Decentraland is certainly a compelling one that's on quite the run. The graph that you just showed is pretty impressive. I didn't see this scale on that, Eric, when was--?

Bleeker: Yeah, I had to cut off, stupid formatting. I believe so, it start at 78 cents and that was headed into November. This run was around Facebook's announcement, so it went from under the $1.80 range. It crested past $3.50. Right now, it's trading for around little north of $2.50. [laughs].

MacDonald: Yeah.

Bleeker: Incredible gains for a short period of time. You're seeing that in the stock space as well though.

Unity (U -2.31%) last night, they actually released earnings that initially disappointed on a numerical basis, but I believe they were down and now they jumped up and they're up about seven percent. Part of that earnings release was they're actually buying Peter Jackson's old studio, what is it? It's Weta studios [Weta Workshop], I believe.

You're just seeing enthusiasm across the space. I own Nvidia, Nvidia (NVDA -10.01%) has been a core holding of mine for a long time. The kinds of gains-- it's a $700 billion stock and we're seeing 20 percent. One day it was up 20 [laughs] percent midday, I think it closed up 12, and then up four.

Again, these narratives matter and people are trying to get ahead of the big trends that are going to define the next decade because we've seen the gains that were had, getting them from the technology trends of the past decade.

It's definitely an interesting space and I think at the Motley Fool, we want to look at and help investors win a number of ways. For cryptocurrencies, we see that as a portion of a full investing strategy. I definitely think the metaverse and the fact that it is digital first and cryptocurrencies are digital first, there's some overlap there and there's going to be benefit.

I think if you're an investor looking to target this opportunity, though I would definitely look at some of the ideas like Unity first. I own Unity, it's a company that had stalled throughout much of this year in part because year over year growth rates weren't as interesting for investors who are looking at a lot of rival SaaS stocks with higher rates. But we see with a lot of momentum moving to the space, people are taking on that longer term perspective of Unity's position and where that's going to be for a leading metaverse company. I think it's definitely interesting.

I think it's something we, as you said Chris, we will continue covering it. I don't know, do we have a metaverse show? We might even have one at this point on Fool Live, [laughs] I don't know. We definitely have a video game show.

I should note. For people who are joining Digital Explorers and this is maybe your first show, "The Crypto Show" is one block of our programming on Backstage Pass, but we've got a lot of programming, so if you've got interest, we've done AI show, we have a video game show. You should definitely check out the calendar because we're just one humble show among many.