How Megabanks Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Are Talking About the Metaverse

Read the full article by Morgan Chittum

More and more Wall Street firms are addressing the metaverse and Web3 to clients and investors, a potential sign of adoption.

• Morgan Stanley like many others see big potential in the metaverse. The firm believes it has the potential to be an 8 trillion dollar market.

• Goldman Sachs said blockchain is one of the most “disruptive technologies” since the 1990s.

• Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street giant that manages $6.4 trillion in assets, said the metaverse will be “the next big investment theme” in a note to clients last month. On Tuesday, Goldman Sachs then described blockchain as being key to Web3 development in a report.

• Goldman Sachs sees blockchain as one of the most “disruptive technologies” in the past several decades, including the advent of the internet. 

• “We believe that the metaverse is likely to be an amalgamation of different 3D spaces and that users will move between these regularly,” Rod Hall, an analyst for Goldman Sachs, said. “If any virtual goods or services are unable to move from one space to another with the user, we believe their value is likely to be more limited.”

• “Given the speed at which they’re reporting it, I would say we are definitely mainstream. It took banks years to publicly sell interests in, or comment on, economics behind public networks and blockchains,” David said, who runs a startup that develops non-fungible token displays and a Web3 platform.

• According to Goldman, it will take “many years” and “cross-company collaboration” to seamlessly onboard millions of users into the virtual augmented world. 

• “Investment implications are hard to predict at this juncture, but companies who are dependent on centralized control of user identity will likely find their business models challenged by the adoption of blockchain,” Goldman said.