Opening up to the virtual world

Touted as a successor to the current Internet, the metaverse is defined as a digital duplicate of the physical world accessible via the Internet. It is an interoperable, persistent, synchronous environment, open to an unlimited number of participants, with a fully functional economy and offering a more immersive experience that encompasses the virtual and real worlds. It is about extending our reality into shared virtual spaces, which are modeled in a 3D environment. Sharing our lives between the real and the virtual is the ambition of the future with the metaverse. While the full potential of the metaverse is not yet apparent today, Ark Research estimates that metaverse revenues could approach $400 billion by 2025. Bloomberg Intelligence is more ambitious and estimates that the market opportunity could reach $800 billion by 2024. This thematic list highlights some 50 listed stocks that could benefit from this technological advance. The first companies and the future players in the metaverse are closely related to the IT, social networking, content creation, online payment, e-commerce, video games and cloud computing sectors.