You own the data you create or bring online if you have a self-sovereign identity. It's "sovereign" because you may choose to disclose specific components of that data only to the extent necessary to achieve a desired outcome.

With Web 3 connecting so many diverse aspects of our digital and physical lives, exact control over how we are portrayed across these domains is essential.

The terminus is where you go to get goods, services, or join online communities. From a fundamental standpoint, self-sovereign identity is made up of several components.

It's private, but it's also accessible and expandable

Companies are first and foremost concerned with their customers. Everything they do, from the initial design to marketing, is based on one major question: Can this help attract more users? Can this assist us in bringing them on in a frictionless manner? Is there a more straightforward approach to "acquire" them? As a result, corporations must consider clients in the metaverse as they develop their "Web 3 strategy."

The way a company handles identification will have a big impact on how they interact with customers. Many potential clients will be turned off if the procedure is lengthy, intrusive, and repetitive. The onboarding process must be simple to use and, most all, as quick as feasible.

It becomes too much when consumers are required to enter information numerous times or upload multiple pieces of identification, then wait 48 hours or more for these papers to be accepted, then have further processes to complete.

It's a business risk to persuade customers to abandon their acquisition funnel. Crypto firms are acutely aware of the importance of know-your-customer regulations, if only to keep unscrupulous actors out. Of course, some will fall through the cracks; it's part of the job.

When it comes to identity solutions, a Web 3 developer's objective is to provide the highest degree of trust without getting in the way of user acquisition. In this case, composable, reusable, and cross-chain identification solutions are essential.

Web 3 will benefit from a one-click ID verification process.

Identities at many levels

But, in the metaverse, who are we?

So, who do we aspire to be? Identity doesn't have to be a life-or-death situation. For example, you may present yourself as a professional on LinkedIn, less formal on Twitter, and an anonymous degen on Discord.

We can customize our public-facing identities in the metaverse using self-sovereign identification systems. We have a say in how we are portrayed.

Companies typically know who the person behind the avatar is on social media sites today. When we create an account, we submit verified information, but we have no say over how that information is utilized. The data is stored, controlled, and repurposed on these Web 2 platforms.

Our identities will be reducible to verifiable information on a blockchain if Web 3 identification standards are applied to the metaverse – potentially utilizing non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which may be anonymous. We'll figure out which data points a counterparty needs to evaluate and which we wish to disclose.

Tokenized identification is also always authenticated, eliminating the need to generate logins, passwords, and backup solutions for websites with firewalls on a regular basis.

At any time, these levels of identification may be deployed dynamically across all platforms. This is how a linked metaverse should be constructed.

NFTs as social identity building elements

On Web 3, our crypto wallets are increasingly representing us, and the NFTs in those wallets constitute a true, if illegal, digital identity. On the blockchain, we are what we do. Without using words, NFTs can indicate what communities we care about, our ambitions, and our beliefs – and they can do so in a dynamic, ever-changing fashion. (A picture is worth a thousand words.)

NFTs are a visual language that is ideal for today's internet users who are obsessed with high-resolution photos and video. Are NFTs the last step towards web-based representational identification, or merely a pit stop on the way? Beyond JPEGs, what's next?

Humans are tribal creatures that seek to join and integrate into communities of like-minded people who share our interests. We yield to our inherent inclinations to join tribes, set communication norms, and defend one another, just as we have since the birth of civilization.

The fundamental (or, if you're a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, primitive or simian) yearning to join is expressed in NFT groups. Things get bizarre when groups emerge without the limits of physical place. Our identities are becoming increasingly ambiguous.

The metaverse's horizon looks boundless from a bird's eye view of this rudimentary yet technological enterprise, as does our power to remake ourselves. As a result, we must endeavor to maintain people's right to self-identify by including those technical capabilities into Web 3.0's DNA.

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Unlike tether, UST was not backed by a reserve of fiat cash. Instead, it relied on some intricate engineering to maintain price stability by destroying and creating UST and its sister token luna. The promise of 20% savings rates from Anchor, Terra's flagship lending platform, enticed investors, despite the fact that many investors believed the rate was unsustainable.

Do Kwon, the founder of Terra, had amassed billions of dollars in bitcoin and other tokens through his Luna Foundation Guard fund, but the assets were nearly exhausted in a vain attempt to save UST.

Nonetheless, the UST panic has increased attention to other stablecoins, namely tether.

Regulators and economists have long questioned whether Tether's holdings are sufficient to support the stablecoin's ostensible peg to the dollar.

Following a settlement with the New York attorney general, the corporation acknowledged that tether was backed one-to-one by dollars in a bank account, but that it was also utilizing other assets as collateral, including commercial paper (short-term corporate debt) and even digital tokens.

Tether announced last week that it had cut its commercial paper holdings and increased its holdings of US Treasury notes. The British Virgin Islands-based company revealed for the first time that it also carries foreign government debt. Tether did not elaborate on the source of its funds, but said say it is doing a more thorough examination of its reserves.

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Although centralized marketplaces like OpenSea have occasionally intervened to halt transactions of stolen assets (on their own platform), this places the ability to determine "actual" ownership in the hands of the marketplaces that sell them rather than the NFT itself.

In addition, an NFT is only unique within the context of the blockchain on which it was produced. When minting a token on the NFT marketplace Rarible, for example, users can choose from three different blockchains, but what happens when two people mint the identical digital commodity on different blockchains? An artist could choose to mint their work on numerous blockchains, creating a "original" on each, but determining which blockchain is the "authoritative" or "genuine" one remains a social and platform issue.

Twitter, for example, has recently begun to allow NFT profile images, which are displayed in a unique hexagonal frame, but it presently only accepts Ethereum-based coins. You won't get that hexagon if you have an NFT on the Flow or Tezos blockchains, which Rarible supports and are frequently cheaper to mint right now. Twitter may alter its mind in the future, and other platforms may opt to support or even develop their own blockchains, but this once again puts the authority in the hands of centralized platforms to decide which chains are the "genuine" ones.

Furthermore, there's nothing stopping someone from creating numerous NFTs of the same image on the same blockchain. Multiple examples of users on the OpenSea marketplace stealing artists' work, producing replica NFTs, and selling them alongside the original have been documented by Twitter user @NFTTheft (or selling NFTs of artworks that the original artist never intended to make into an NFT).

Because the blockchain does not verify that a person minting an NFT has the rights to the asset they are minting, platforms must fix this problem (or not, as it were). "It's more of a social problem than a technological problem to verify ownership of an asset at the moment where it's minted into an NFT," White remarked. "It's difficult to do solely through programming."

Over 80% of the NFTs listed on OpenSea's marketplace were pirated art, false collections, or spam, according to an audit of the marketplace by OpenSea. The firm attempted to address the issue by limiting the number of free listings users could create, but after user backlash, the decision was reversed. Meanwhile, DeviantArt has attempted to safeguard its artists by using automated algorithms to search for theft, which have delivered over 80,000 infringement notifications to artists in just five months, although this technology is clearly limited to DeviantArt users.

To counteract the problem, OpenSea has begun authenticating accounts and collections, however verification is solely at OpenSea's discretion. As a result, any given NFT is no more reliable proof of ownership of the digital item it refers to than, say, a Twitter handle. Every Twitter username is possibly unique, and claiming yours first may imply that you're the true person behind the account. However, because a spoof account claimed @DonaldTrump first, the 45th president of the United States kept "real" in his username. Twitter's manual verification procedure, like OpenSea's, is the only reliable means to determine which account belongs to a real person. It's not a flawless system, to be sure.

To add to the confusion, marketplaces are merely one way to connect with the blockchain, but anyone can do it. So, even if every major NFT marketplace implemented measures to prevent stolen artwork from being minted and vetted all of its creators—a huge and difficult undertaking in and of itself—no there's way to prevent someone from minting stolen artwork on a blockchain like Ethereum with reasonable simplicity.

NFTs can only ever be proof of ownership of themselves in the best-case scenario. External data—artwork, digital objects, and so on—that NFTs refer to must still be verified by third-party systems.

Digital Items Cannot Be Transferred Between Games or Apps Using NFTs

One of the more far-fetched promises about NFTs is that they'll assist enable the actual metaverse by allowing users to transfer digital things from one game or platform to another. While this is technically doable for extremely simple data such as photos (which are already quite easy to move from one app to another), it is nearly difficult for complicated goods such as video game stuff.

In a lengthy Twitter thread, game developer Rami Ismail illustrated some of these issues, using the example of a simple six-sided die. Even the simplest 3D model contains sophisticated data, such as the object's geometry and textures, physics and motion information, and deceptively simple information like which direction is up. Because some game engines use Y as the vertical axis and others use Z, transferring a game from one engine to another may result in a model that is upside down.

A human game developer or animator can make changes to the 3D model asset to make it function in a different game or engine, but this takes time and effort (and labor). The presence of an NFT of an item from one game does not imply that it will be supported by another game.

Aside from that, there's the issue of intellectual property. In World of Warcraft, say you own Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker. Blizzard owns the model, texturing, and all related materials for that item. Blizzard could theoretically give gamers an NFT for the item, but no other game could import it without the company's consent. Even if Blizzard granted permission to another developer, they would have to work closely with that company to provide assets and ensure that everything runs smoothly.

Crossovers like these are already prevalent in games like Fortnite, which has teamed with franchises like Marvel, Star Wars, and God of War to bring characters from different games together. Developers have also given promotional gifts to gamers who have owned specific games for a long time or who have achieved certain achievements. However, none of these collaborations require NFTs to achieve, be marketable, or prosper.

Even if NFTs could be used to create a hypothetical external inventory system—assuming that this is something developers or publishers would desire in the first place—it would only be a small part of the labor required to transfer things, characters, or outfits from one game world to another. The majority of the job still relies on unique humans choosing to collaborate with other specific humans, and no level of future development automation will be able to prevent this.

NFTs have the potential to cost artists more money than they earn

Another advantage that proponents of NFTs claim is that they can assist artists in making money by selling NFTs of their own artwork, however demand for that NFT artwork may be fictitious. In March 2021, for example, the jaw-dropping $69 million NFT sale from artist Beeple made news. However, a project named Metapurse had purchased 20 other unrelated Beeple artworks a few months before to this sale, grouped them together, and sold 10 million fractionalized ownership tokens of the collection, known as B20 tokens, in January 2021. The goal was, ostensibly, to let those who couldn't afford to buy pricey artworks to purchase pieces of the collection and participate in the art market speculation.

Angel investor Vignesh Sundaresan, popularly known as Metakovan, who purchased the $69 million Beeple in March also held 59 percent of the B20 coins. B20 tokens were first sold to the general public on January 23 for 36 cents apiece before reaching a high of $23.62—a 6,461 percent increase—just days before the two-week-long $69 million Beeple auction ended. By the end of May, B20 was trading for less than a dollar. The coin is now trading for 40 cents as of this writing.

Beeple also held a 2% stake in the B20 tokens. This means that both the seller and the buyer of the most notable NFT sale at the time had a strong interest in increasing demand for the artist's work, with the buyer standing to profit more than the seller—the artist himself.

More broadly, according to an analysis by the Alan Turing Institute based on data from OpenSea, 75 percent of NFTs that sell at all sell for less than $15, and the majority never sell at all. Only 1% of stocks traded for more than $1,500. Mauro Martino, the head of IBM's Visual AI Lab and one of the study's researchers, says, "It's extremely evident that very few people can really go beyond $1,500 in selling." "This isn't a magical land where everyone becomes wealthy." In any other form of business, the situation is essentially the same."

Wash trading, in which one person sells an item to their own sock puppet accounts to create the illusion of high demand, makes it impossible to determine how many of the high-value NFTs sold are genuine. CryptoSlam, an analytics startup, discovered more than $8 billion in wash trading on the NFT marketplace LooksRare, which had only roughly $9.5 billion in total deals at the time.

"Many people connected the concentration that we observed—that 90% of transactions are conducted by 10% of wallets—as a signature of wash trading," says Andrea Baronchelli, an associate professor at City University of London who also worked on the investigation for the Alan Turing Institute. "Can we say that this is correct?" "I'm not sure," Baronchelli adds. "A market with a lot of wash trading wouldn't necessarily appear any different." So far, what we've observed is consistent with a lot of wash trading; nevertheless, we can't prove anything."

When gas expenses (money paid to the miners and validators who make up the Ethereum blockchain) and fees paid to marketplaces that advertise the NFTs are factored in, the low yield for smaller sellers can wind up costing artists money. There is an added step of changing money into cryptocurrency for buyers and sellers who only have traditional currency like US dollars to deal with—which is to say, most people—just to interact with the system. Currency exchanges, which facilitate the trades, take a share as well. "It's not enough to pay the cost of gas, for example," Martino says of the 75% of sales that are less than $15.

"The biggest winners are the exchanges and marketplaces," says Dan Olson, a video essayist and internet researcher who recently released Line Goes Up, a feature-length deep dive into NFTs on YouTube. "Transaction fees, service fees, and a percentage cut of royalties are all taken." They're the ones who are making money by the bucketload."

In principle, marketplaces like as OpenSea and Rarible provide "free" NFT minting for artists, although there are significant restrictions. For starters, the NFT will not be built unless it is purchased. The minting fee is also passed on to the buyer (increasing the buy-in price for each transaction), and because gas prices fluctuate over time, even the cost of carrying out the transaction can be difficult to forecast.

The average fee for an Ethereum transaction over a moving 30-day period was hovering around $14 to $15 at the time of writing, but individual transactions can and do spike so dramatically by the hour that the same transaction can cost several times more depending on the time of day or week it occurs.

Most artists who want to participate in NFTs face a difficult decision: they can either invest a large sum of money to mint their work as NFTs in the hopes that an audience will come along and buy enough to make the fees worthwhile, or they can pass those costs on to the buyer, pricing out a portion of their potential customers—and in the meantime, they won't have a record of their NFTs on the blockchain at all.

Another annoyance is the royalty function. Royalties are not built into NFTs by default. Instead, royalties might be included in the "smart contract" that administers the NFT. But, like any other piece of software, these contracts are prone to flaws, compatibility issues, and manipulation.

NFTs don't understand the difference between being sold between two persons and being transferred from one wallet to another held by the same person in general. Instead, markets such as OpenSea must arbitrate a sale and notify the NFT of the transaction. Although a marketplace can impose royalties on NFTs created and sold on its own platform, trade on other platforms can completely exclude royalty payments, whether by accident or design. This makes it quite simple to avoid paying royalties entirely.

While there have been proposals to standardize royalty payments across marketplaces, they can be difficult, if not impossible, to implement. NFTs can cause more hassles for artists than benefits when combined with the prevalent fraud in the NFT space—and the extra time it takes artists to issue takedowns and notifications to prevent fraud of their work.

The devil is in the details, and they're always changing

The majority of this article has focused on Ethereum's issues, as well as NFTs built on it and the largest exchanges that employ them. Due to the highly particular characteristics of how each project and blockchain operates, it's difficult to map the exact structure of how each specific NFT or crypto project might be exploited or downright scammed.

For example, when the US Postal Service printed roughly 25,000 NFTs of their Day of the Dead–inspired stamps, it used a less well-known mobile app platform called GoChain, which is Ethereum-compatible but not Ethereum-based. The app merely offers $1 "gems" (which serve as a user-friendly interface for the underlying OMI tokens), which users can then use to purchase NFTs within the app. The Day of the Dead NFTs each sold for 6 gems.

The hitch is that cashing out gems earned from selling NFTs is still "under testing," after being completely unavailable for nearly a year. Users can buy NFTs with the app's special currency, but they can only be swapped with other app users for more gems after that. Despite users requesting a means to cash out their gems for at least a year, the functionality has yet to be implemented, despite the platform attracting brand deals such as Marvel, DC, and Star Trek during that period.

Because the NFT and crypto space is dominated by technical details, projects and news coverage that explains them are frequently motivated to simplify. To reduce complexity to easier-to-understand phrases and concepts, and to frequently depict vastly disparate projects as a monolith, despite the reality that services like the one mentioned above can operate very differently than, example, OpenSea, despite the fact that both "sell NFTs."

This simplification might often come at the cost of fully comprehending the technology. Which, at the moment, is fraught with fundamental security and privacy vulnerabilities baked into the design of most major systems, a confusing and misleading feature set, and aspirational claims ranging from moonshots to the practically unattainable.

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One thing about me is I’ma walk that talk baby. #dogecoin #buythedip pic.twitter.com/SNuOBm7SBR

— SlumDOGE Millionaire (@ProTheDoge) July 6, 2021

Contessoto abandoned his day job at a music studio in Los Angeles in June to focus on his expanding "dogecoin billionaire" reputation online. He admits, "I had no notion how I was going to make money going ahead."

He makes some money by selling items on his website, but his major focus is on growing his social media following.

He earned $28,000 in one month from social media ads and promotions, the majority of which was paid in dogecoin. Contessoto explains, "That's around six months salary at my prior position."

Contessoto intends to continue investing as much as he can in dogecoin after paying all of his expenditures, including rent, food, and other living expenses. "[I'm] all invested in doge," Contessoto says, despite experts' warnings. "Doge is where I keep my money."

His dogecoin assets are valued roughly $931,689 as of around 12:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday.

According to CoinMarketCap, Dogecoin is currently selling at roughly 23 cents as of 4:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday. "If it gets below 20 cents next week," Contessoto says, "I'll buy the dip again." The digital coin sank to roughly 47 cents on May 9 after hitting a record high of around 73 cents on May 8, and Contessoto invested another $17,500, he had stated.

Financial professionals, on the other hand, are wary of dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies. Experts warn that it's a risky, speculative investment because of its tremendous volatility.

And some warn that investment in dogecoin in particular should be approached with caution, as it lacks the scarcity and technological progress that bitcoin, for example, possesses. Investors should only invest what they can afford to lose in order to avoid being burned.

"You risk losing almost all of your money," James Ledbetter, publisher of the fintech newsletter FIN and a CNBC contributor, told CNBC Make It before. "It has no intrinsic value, and it could go down in price just as readily as it might go up."

Nonetheless, Contessoto's dogecoin prognosis is quite positive. He believes the price could grow depending on what occurs in the next months. He is optimistic that it will reach $1 by the end of the year.

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At cryptocurrency exchanges, the pay is extremely competitive. They also frequently provide remote work opportunities and other enticing perks. Employees at bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges typically receive stocks, stock options, and restricted stock units as part of their total remuneration packages, which could result in future windfalls if the company performs well.

Here's what people say they make working in the cryptocurrency field at a big exchange, according to self-reported salary data on Blind. These are the phone numbers for engineers. Other professions, managers, and executives may see their pay rise even more:

• Software engineers and technologists have reported job offers as high as $900,000 a year. The nearly $1 million pay package for a senior-staff software engineer includes stock-based compensation of $450,000 a year, plus cash bonuses that range from 5% to 15% of an employee’s base salary. These professionals can easily command total compensation packages earning more than $1.5 million.
• An infrastructure engineer may earn $672,550 a year, broken down by a base salary of $237,000 and a cash bonus of around $35,550, along with stock-based compensation potentially worth $400,000.
• $464,500 a year for a senior staff software engineer who said they could earn a base salary of $230,000, cash bonus ranging up to $34,500 and stock-based pay of about $200,000.
• Another senior software engineer, deciding whether or not to stay at the current company or move to a digital asset firm, contemplated an offer of $401,600 a year—comprised of a $206,000 base salary, cash bonus of $206,000 and cash bonus of $20,600, followed up with a stock-based pay of $175,000. 
• Asking advice from the members of the verified anonymous platform, a job hunter asked about the fairness of a possible offer of $362,000 a year for a senior protocol engineer role. The person wanted to get a sense if the total package—including restricted stock units, with a base salary of $170,000, cash bonus of $17,000 and stock-based pay of $175,000—was reasonable.

Talent for bitcon, digital assets, NFTs, and related platforms is in high demand. In the United States, a search for "crypto" on LinkedIn's employment site gets 15,433 results. There were 4,656 "bitcoin" job listings and 6,381 "NFTs" job listings. Unfortunately, most of the job advertisements on the site do not include compensation information.

Companies are giving better compensation, sign-on incentives, remote, hybrid, and flexible workstyles, one-on-one coaching, and free college tuition in an effort to attract and recruit talent. Some businesses are investigating another perk to entice individuals to work for them: accepting bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as payment.

We watched digital assets go stratospheric in 2021. The slew of new crypto initiatives and the asset class's meteoric growth in value drew the attention of the United States and the rest of the world. To some, buying digital assets was seen as a way to protect themselves from the depreciation of the US dollar as a result of rising inflation and dubious practices by the federal government and the Federal Reserve Bank. Others, particularly young individuals, saw cryptocurrency as a YOLO (you-only-live-once) investment that could swiftly make them wealthy.

With enormous college tuition debt payments, extravagant apartment and housing costs, and an alarming inflation rate, digital assets appeared to be the only way to get ahead financially.

If you are paid in US dollars, the value of your paycheck diminishes as inflation rises. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released data that shows rising costs. In September 2021, the consumer price index increased by 5.4 percent. The rate of growth was so rapid that the US government announced a roughly 6% cost-of-living boost for Social Security recipients. This was the most significant increase in four decades. Inflation has increased by 7%.

We're starting to notice a shift in payment patterns. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has stated that he would accept a wage "100% in Bitcoin" and that cryptocurrencies will be made available to government employees as well. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has also stated that he is considering paying people in bitcoin and other digital assets, and that he will accept his first three paychecks in bitcoin. According to Bloomberg, "Russell Okung, Odell Beckham Jr., and Aaron Rodgers have all stated that they will be compensated, at least in part, in cryptocurrency."

If you take a crypto wage, you must have a strong stomach and be willing to experience both strong gains and terrifying price drops. The use of cryptocurrencies for payment is not without danger. There is a lot of turbulence in this market.

The price of bitcoin peaked at $67,000 in 2021, then plummeted to under $30,000 before rebounding. On December 1, Ethereum reached new highs of over $4,800, only to drop to roughly $3,600 to $3,900. You will owe taxes based on the higher value you were paid in bitcoin, ethereum, or other coins at a high point and then the price cratered.

Payment in Bitcoin may be an exciting new approach to boost your wealth for those that fervently believe in the future of crypto, are open to volatility and risk, and have a long-term time horizon.

It's a NEW ERA & to kick that off I'm hyped to announce that I'm taking my new salary in bitcoin thanks to @CashApp. To ALL MY FANS out there, no matter where u r: THANK YOU! I’m giving back a total of $1M in BTC rn too. Drop your $cashtag w. #OBJBTC & follow @CashApp NOW pic.twitter.com/ds1IgZ1zup

— Odell Beckham Jr (@obj) November 22, 2021

Beckham agreed to a one-year contract worth $750,000 in base salary and $4.25 million in bonuses. According to the NFL wide receiver, he is receiving his entire paycheck in bitcoin. According to MarketWatch, he apparently turned a $750,000 paycheck into bitcoin and may have lost the equivalent of nearly $350,000. While bitcoin's price has subsequently risen significantly, it has not fully recovered and remains extremely volatile.

It's possible that bitcoin will rise in value, causing his next cheque to be significantly higher. Beckham could most likely afford the erratic fluctuations. Others see it as a warning story about the vagaries of cryptocurrencies and the risks of turning your cash salary into highly volatile and mostly unregulated digital assets.

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