Payment system providers will undoubtedly follow all other domains to leverage the metaverse. While accepting payments to improve the effectiveness of the metaverse as a sales channel is feasible, careful design and implementation that are ultimately focused on the user experience, are necessary.
It’s crucial to emphasize that the ideal picture of the metaverse offered by organizations like Meta is still more of an idea than a reality, making it difficult to do more than speculate what it will imply for payments.
However, it should be observed that the metaverse still faces difficulties due to the absence of conventional guidance. The payment system and the question of whether the concept will truly live up to the great expectations many businesses have for it are among the metaverse main challenges.
Immersion
The idea of the metaverse, in which physical and digital personalities are seamlessly integrated into one smooth experience, does not fit well with the reality of payment. As the non-alignment between these personas when it comes to payment, breaks down the metaverse concept.
This barrier of having a metaverse concept is because multi-factor authentication or any other means of confirming your identity in payment processes is still required. The metaverse requires payment to be seamless as possible. But the payment testing needs a security code in order to confirm the transaction.
This will break the metaverse experience because transaction verification needs to be done via notifications or SMS code, which is contrary to metaverse goals.
Therefore, payment testing in the metaverse will be crucial to ensuring that actual end users can easily make payments in their preferred form of currency, whether it be digital or physical, and that businesses can easily authenticate the transaction. It won’t be simple for the metaverse to live up to its high billing without complete immersion.
Security
The multi-factor authentication and Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) like protective measures are providing extra card security to users’ accounts. Still, crafty operators might find ways to breach weak security postures.
For example, hundreds of thousands of dollars of Ethereum and NFTs were stolen in the hacking of the community manager account of a popular NFT project, which enabled a broader phishing attack on members of a Discord server.
This type of hacking creates issues for many unsecured or less secured networks which can let hackers access and steal information. In the metaverse, these types of security concerns – gaining illegal access to any account could conceivably cause good damage to the finance and reputation of the user.
Cybersecurity will always be vulnerable, exploited, and patches to keep up with. Therefore, customer security should be the first priority of any organization.
Regulation
Authorities restrict any illegal dark web transactions because identity masking with digital wallets is simple.
It appears to be a difficult task for businesses to fully embrace these decentralized currencies until a framework for handling, managing, and securely processing cryptocurrencies as a payment mechanism at scale is implemented.
Payment Platforms
Consumers may be tempted to make purchases in the metaverse if initiatives are crypto-native and demand the use of crypto wallets. According to studies, users in the metaverse wouldn’t need to utilize cryptocurrencies, providing a more “seamless” experience.
However, if cryptocurrency is required to fully use the benefits of the virtual world, this could be a barrier to entry for others. As of now, the metaverse lacks any such payment systems, but even if there were, one platform might wind up controlling the entire metaverse.
In that case, the question of whether the dominant metaverse will demand the use of its own currency for all products and services, will arise.
But more on that later.
