Remember the Metaverse?

Before stocks started their long slide, tech talk was dominated by the metaverse. Last year, it was hard to miss the conversations about a coming wave of virtual reality and augmented reality meant to simulate real-world situations. Facebook bet its future on the idea, and changed its name to Meta Platforms last fall.

But things have changed since then. Tech stocks peaked shortly after Facebook's name change; the tech-heavy Nasdaq is down 30% from its all-time high in November. Meanwhile, Google searches for "metaverse" have tumbled since peaking in late October. But to the tech believers, the promise of the metaverse hasn't changed.

My colleague Tae Kim recently spoke with the metaverse's biggest booster, a venture capitalist named Matthew Ball.

Ball has a new book due out tomorrow called The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything. Tae writes: 

Vast fortunes will be made and lost chasing the metaverse, according to Ball. He believes that some of the current tech giants will be displaced, others will adapt, with still other new giants being formed along the way. Predicting new winners and losers won’t be easy, but investors should stay on top of developments, at the very least to ensure their existing portfolio doesn’t get stale or disrupted.

Even as the metaverse is touted as a disruptive force, Ball sees large tech companies benefiting from its success. Here's what Ball told Tae about some of the incumbents: 

The metaverse requirements in computing, data centers, and edge services are so extraordinary that companies like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are likely destined for success. Nvidia is a company that has spent 40 years waiting for this moment. Jensen Huang [CEO of Nvidia] spent decades investing for the era of graphics-based computing.

Ball helped to create an exchange-traded fund intended to track metaverse-focused stocks. The top five holdings in the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF are Meta Platforms, Nvidia, Microsoft, Roblox, and Autodesk. The fund, whose ticker symbol is METV, is down about 45% since it launched a year ago. Good thing the metaverse is supposed to be a long game. 

You can read the rest of Tae's interview with Ball here.