Just as in real life, the metaverse is going to make a lot of lawyers a lot of money. Let’s say you bought a Bored Ape NFT. Because you own the ape NFT, can you open a restaurant in its image? Could you make “Bored Ape: The Movie?” Clothing apparel? The King of NFT marketing, Gary Vee, also opened a private dining membership club where you buy your NFT for entrance. 

Photo Credit: Andy Nguyen, Instagram  
Chef Andy Nyguen is putting his ape (#6184 ) to work at his new restaurant

Elsewhere there’s a different kind of NFT IP battle. Hermes, maker of the iconic Birkin Hermes bag, is suing NFT creator Mason Rothschild for creating a Metabirkin. (They sell for anywhere from $10K to $40K.) The artist says he’s not ripping off the bag design, just creating an artistic representation. Birkin doesn’t agree. Did Andy Warhol need permission from Campbell’s Soup? We have real world precedent. Campbell’s Soup thought about suing but in the end decided it was good PR and sent Warhol a few cases of the good stuff.

This opens a can of worms as to whether NFTs are intellectual property. And it’s going to unleash a storm of antitrust cases, particularly around the topics of interoperability and dominance. 

Finally, a large company buys an answer to its problems and might not kill it in the process. (Think Microsoft and Skype as the archetypal example.) We met Yarkin Sakucoglu, CEO of Socio, way back at an early VEG meeting. Around that time Socio was purchased by Cisco. Cisco’s in-house product was WebEx, often loathed for its cumbersome onboarding process. Under Sakucoglu’s stewardship they had a baby and it’s called WebEx Events. It looks really good and promises a soup to nuts enterprise-grade event environment for digital, live, and hybrid events. Interestingly, they surveyed their clients and created a picture of what 2022 will look like from an events perspective.

Image credit: Webex Events.

Bankers are the latest to set up shop in the metaverse. Most prominently, at JP Morgan's salon in Decentraland, which is called the Onyx Lounge, you can be mildly entertained by a portrait of Jamie Dimon, a wandering tiger and a couple of displays talking about smart contracts and the blockchain. HSBC is staking a claim in the Sandbox, where they are trying to lure a younger audience through game play and esports. It’s part marketing, part entertainment.

More interesting is Zelf, which calls itself the first bank of the metaverse. According to this profile in American Banker,  Zelf is building an embedded banking system for exchanging value from virtual worlds to the real world, in conjunction with a bank account. It already offers embedded banking in messenger apps. In a typical scenario, a 17-year-old boy might have $2,000 in tokens inside a video game, but needs $50 in real-world dollars for a date with his girlfriend. Zelf would hold the game tokens in escrow and provide the player with a payday loan. If the person couldn’t repay, Zelf would sell the game tokens on its marketplace to other players to compensate for the loss. And if you’re wondering about how to pay for that land you grab in the metaverse, visit TerraZero. It’s offering a “Metaverse Mortgage.”

• Charlie Warzel’s newsletter (he is an  Atlantic contributor) contains an interview with a reporter who’s spent 19 years in Second Life. They discuss the foundations of vibrant communities. 
• Kevin Roose says that the only thing we can all agree on about crypto is that it’s terribly explained. His NYT piece “The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto” tries to remedy that.
• Ad Age’s Asa Hiken has a pocket dictionary of metaverse-like terms you’ll need to know. (POAP -- Proof of Attendance Protocol? It’s a fancy name for a ticket on the blockchain.)
• This heady read by Patrick Rivera (thanks Jim Louderback) dissects the building blocks of Web3, making the argument that as the first native internet economy there are a lot of foundations to grasp and get right.