Will Metaverse Altcoins Rise? How Does Meta’s Description Affect?

After previously limiting its social VR platform to users aged 18 and over, Meta announced today that it’s opening Horizon Worlds to young users in the US and Canada. As part of the expansion, the company says it’s introducing a set of age-appropriate protections and security defaults.

Today’s announcement came as no surprise, as revealed in a leaked note back in February that Meta plans to open access to Horizon Worlds to users ages 13 to 17. At the time, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Ed Markey wrote to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging young people to halt the plans, arguing that giving access to the potentially harmful digital space would be a bad idea. Before introducing Worlds to this age group, Meta says it’s investing in new security features, including back-end protections and parental surveillance tools that enable parents and teens to help manage the experience. The company says it’s gradually rolling out Horizon Worlds to teens so they can carefully study usage before it rolls out more broadly.

Teens can choose who to follow and who can follow them back, and their profiles are automatically set to private, meaning they can approve or reject anyone who wants to follow them. Meta also doesn’t show a teen’s active status and Horizon Worlds location to other people by default, but these settings can be changed as teens can choose whether their connections are active online and can see what public world or event they’re at.

In the short term, this cannot be expected to initiate a large wave of adoption. Naturally, we should not think that this news will have a serious impact on metaverse altcoins for now. But there is more. In the previous period, meta had opened its metaverse product to older age groups. However, there is a problem. This age group has seen the Web1 and Web2 era of the internet. So Web3, it’s much harder for them to embrace the metaverse narrative. But the 13-17 age group was born in the middle of the digital age. They started to spend time on the Internet at the age of 4-5, and the rate of access to the Internet was not low as in young people over the age of 20. So we’re talking about a more fortunate age group. Moreover, the metaverse is more understandable for them, as they are introduced to concepts such as the internet, computer and tablet at a young age.

The second important detail is that these will be the young population of 10 years from now. If the 13-17 age group gets acquainted with the metaverse early, it can help them spend time here in their future years. Moreover, the children of this generation will be the sons of people who met in the metaverse during adolescence. Finally, this age group does not have the things that occupy most of the day such as work, social life, etc. For most of the day, the metaverse can be a digital socializing space for them.