Blockchain Meets Metaverse and Digital Asset Management: A Comprehensive Survey

Envisioned to be the next-generation Internet, the metaverse has been attracting enormous attention from both the academia and industry. The metaverse can be viewed as a 3D immersive virtual world, where people use Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) devices to access and interact with others through digital avatars. While early versions of the metaverse exist in several Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, the full-flesh metaverse is expected to be more complex and enabled by various advanced technologies. Blockchain is one of the crucial technologies that could revolutionize the metaverse to become a decentralized and democratic virtual society with its own economic and governance system. Realizing the importance of blockchain for the metaverse, our goal in this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey that clarifies the role of blockchain in the metaverse including in-depth analysis of digital asset management. To this end, we discuss how blockchain can enable the metaverse from different perspectives, ranging from user applications to virtual services and the blockchain-enabled economic system. Furthermore, we describe how blockchain can shape the metaverse from the system perspective, including various solutions for the decentralized governance system and data management. The potential of blockchain for security and privacy aspects of the metaverse infrastructure is also figured out, while a full flow of blockchain-based digital asset management for the metaverse is investigated. Finally, we discuss a wide range of open challenges of the blockchain-empowered metaverse.