You’re cozied up in your palatial bungalow right in the middle of a lake, just like you want! You wake up, set out to meet your friend, who lives in a high-rise, and buy a dog and a cat, along with a piece of land, just like that! You also sell off your vintage car in the way to buy an upgrade.

Back on your way, you feel like attending a Taylor Swift concert, because why not? So, you groove to some of her songs, come back, and buy yourself a Bored Apes NFT (Non-Fungible Token) to add to your repertoire.

And then, you log off the internet, leaving this world behind. But not quite.

In 2021, Facebook re-modelled itself to Meta, in a bid to represent and extend the fantastical idea of Metaverse- a living, breathing, thriving alternate world, essentially a virtual environment, where you can have different, innumerable, life-like characters and identities, which play cricket, read Shakespeare, work at an upscale cafe anywhere you want in the world, cook your favourite dish.

And all this, while you sip your tea on your desk, working a regular day-job, sitting in some part of India, or even the world, trading in bitcoin or any of your favourite crypto on popular platforms like CoinSwitch Kuber .

Way before, in 1992, Neal Stephenson, in his dystopian, cult-science fiction novel Snow Crash, had already envisioned a similar, digital-physical hybrid world wherein private entities like Facebook command immense power over our realities and even our digital selves. Metaverse is essentially a real-world beyond the world we live in, just virtual. Your actual existence is deeply and intrinsically intertwined with your digital world.

In stride with this nod to Stephenson and the major rebranding effort that Facebook recently underwent post their announcement on October 31, meta-coins collectively jumped a whopping 164 percent in just 12 hours, per data from Coinbase.