44 The Metaverse Overview : Vision, Technology, and Tactics | Metaverse tactics for enterprises 4.2 Potential risks The advance of the Metaverse will present potentially significant risks related to addiction, privacy, intellectual property, economics, oligopoly, and governance. • Addiction: With continuous development of the Metaverse, addiction risk is becoming more significant. The Metaverse breaks the physical rules of the real world, redefines production and lifestyles in the digital world, and transforms social productivity. However, brand- new visual stimulus and interactive experiences could make people addicted to the virtual world and unable to extricate themselves from it. It is therefore critical to find a way to balance the relationship between the real world and the Metaverse, letting the latter play a more positive role. • Privacy: The Metaverse will become a massive, extremely complex, open, and dynamically optimized system that is more deeply integrated than the "old" internet has been in people's daily work and lives. Any malicious use of the data recorded by every interaction of people with the Metaverse will bring huge risks to people's privacy. • Intellectual Property: With the integration of the digital and real worlds, the ownership and distribution of intellectual property in the virtual world and the problem of virtual item embezzlement will challenge intellectual property management. • Economics: Economic risk includes the possibility that the contradiction between huge economic value in the virtual world and the virtual nature of this value leads to speculative behavior, or that the Metaverse is attacked, invaded, disrupted, and destroyed, damaging real-world economic and social development. • Oligopoly: Construction of the Metaverse requires a huge amount of investment to realize mass user interaction and form unified standards, and needs stable service providers, which creates potential oligopoly risk. Avoiding this risk is crucial to Metaverse development. • Governance: The most desirable relationship between virtual and human humans; whether decentralization of the digital world is realized or it merely becomes the embodiment of a group of developers' personal will; the influence of the digital world on the real world; and the division of governance across the virtual and real worlds are key problems and complex to solve. 4.3 China's attitude to the Metaverse Generally, China's attitude towards the Metaverse has been to embrace it actively but move forward cautiously. China welcomes Metaverse technology innovation and industrial cultivation, but is strict with digital currency and NFT trading. Embrace actively Source: Deloitte analysis Figure40: Potential risks Capital Manipulation There are still many uncertainties in the embryonic Metaverse, and industries and markets need to return to rationality Opinion Bubble Irrational public opinion bubbles echo irrational stock market volatility Hashrate Pressure How to ensure the stability of cloud computing, low-cost computing power resources, and many other problems, remain to be solved Economic Risk Economic risk can spill over from the virtual to the real world Ethical Constraints How to construct the ethical framework consensus of the Metaverse in a decentral- ized framework needs to be explored from multiple perspectives Monopoly Tension Competition among the giants determines the relatively closed nature of their ecology, and it is difficult to achieve complete openness and decentralization. Privacy Risk As the base resource supporting the continuous operation of the Metaverse, individuals’ data needs to be updated and expanded constantly, and the compliant collection, storage and management of data resources remains to be discussed Addicted to Risk Excessive immersion in virtual worlds can exacerbate psychological problems such as social anxiety and alienation Industry Evolution Conceptual breakthroughs have not fundamentally changed the status quo of industrial evolution Intellectual Property Multi-agent collaboration and adaptation applications across the virtual-real boundary are likely to lead to disputes over production rights