The metaverse is continuing to worm its way into the current zeitgeist with tweets on the subject skyrocketing 8181 percent according to a new Twitter report.
The 2022 Twitter Trends Report shows decentralised finance (DeFi) and esports are some of the most popular conversations being had on Twitter by Australian users.
According to the report, conversations on gaming have increased by 93 percent year over year and AR is up 12 percent.
The trends report analysed billions of Tweets from 2019 to 2021 and found the three biggest movements floating to the top of conversations, from finance and gaming to social inequalities.
From these billions of tweets, neither Angus Keene, managing director of Twitter ANZ nor a Twitter rep could tell Digital Nation how many tweets were sent by bots.
A Twitter rep told Digital Nation Australia, “While we are not able to provide specific numbers in regards to this report, over the past year, we’ve taken action on millions of Tweets and accounts for crypto spam and we’re always evolving our efforts.”
Twitter said it is seeing these conversations expand to metaverse technologies including avatars, NFTs, and VR.
With the emergence of cryptocurrencies and play-to-earn games, the possibilities of decentralised gaming will be a growing topic of conversation among content creators and others in the gaming industry. This includes conversations around TreeVerse, crypto gaming and cloud gaming, according to the report.
Keene said, “If we look again, to the emerging topics, there’s another interesting insight here and that is that if you look back in the past around gaming, it started with single player games, it moved to multiplayer, it moves to online, and then it’s moved to the metaverse.
“What we’re seeing in this emerging topic is over the last 12 months, it’s moving into decentralised-blockchain-based games. Not only is the platform decentralised, but instead of a centralised platform, it’s also being overlaid with NFTs. You’ve got NFTs where gamers can own their own assets and then you’re also overlaying that again with crypto, which is all around ingrained in-game purchases.”
One of the other major trends focuses on the emergence of decentralised finance (DeFi) with a 101 percent growth in digital currency tweets, a 108 percent growth in blockchain conversations and 172 percent growth in Bitcoin.
Keene said people are educating themselves broadly around decentralised finance, different crypto types and exchanges, where people are trading.
“We’ve seen conversations around these big exchanges like Binance. But some of these lesser-known exchanges, so Bitpay and Bitstamp, have risen to the top. What we’re seeing here is some of these exchanges have different features, or they might look and feel a little bit more like traditional finance so you may be able to trade standard finance currencies as well as cryptocurrencies,” he said.
Keene said the DeFi community is becoming more educated and more sophisticated and they have this thirst for knowledge on Twitter.
“We’ve got a big community of influential voices that are driving change around key issues that Australians care about. We’ve also seen Twitter users having this thirst to stay at the forefront of gaming and the new technologies that are coming out. The finance conversation is really evolving, so it’s evolving from traditional finance, and it’s moving into, deep into DeFi,” he added