Cryptocurrency Grid Money

The views expressed below are not necessarily those of the Open Metaverse Research Group, but are the author's alone.

A cryptocurrency for a metaverse will need to have very low transaction fees, enabling feasibility of microtransactions, including distribution of freebie assets. The basic unit of the cryptocurrency coin should be divisible by up to 12 digits to ensure that even if the blockchain becomes a multi-trillion-dollar economy, the smallest decimal place unit is still a microtransaction in value. This also necessitates scalability to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second.

While proof of work is more demonstrably secure than proof of stake, PoW is very computationally expensive and has low block size and long block generation time. The Proof of Stake Algorithm and its variants have taken the lead in ability to handle transactions on-chain. Conversely, Bitcoin has shifted most of its transactions off chain to the Lightning Network that relies on person to person proofs to speed up transaction capacity, since the bitcoin on chain transaction rate remains around 7 transactions per second.

Lightning Network, however, is somewhat unreliable particularly if one participant in a transaction does not happen to be online at the moment of the transaction. Given this is the majority of most 3d content transactions, it is nonfeasible for our needs.

To get past the inherent limitations of a single blockchain, even one using proof of stake, algorithms have been emerging like Hederal Hashgraph, Ethereum 2.0, etc that use multichain systems that are woven, or sharded, to add capacity to the network.