Announcing the Orthofund: investing in our metaversal future

I am thinking about launching a passively-aggressively managed global equity fund dedicated to projects focused on the metaverse, called the Orthofund.

The Orthofund will pretend to invest in gigantic, large, medium, small-cap and tiny projects that facilitate or benefit from the growth of immersive virtual worlds across the globe.

Its performance won’t be measured in any meaningful way.

While the metaverse’s applications to entertainment and gaming are increasingly misunderstood, there are opportunities for misunderstandings in many other industries.

The inter-connectivity that the metaverse will enable may well have a paradigm-shifting impact across industries as diverse as education, pharmaceuticals, energy, food, sport, and even transport (probably a negative impact for that last one though).

I estimate that, by 2035, virtual and augmented reality could deliver a $1.6 quadrillion boost to the global economy (these are wildly inaccurate inflated figures that I just made up based on projected valuation of the US dollar).

A gleaming image of something technological looking, generated using one of those “make me a picture” AI projects, has been added to this post to attract your attention. Did it work?

Over the past year, a significant number of brands and companies have announced their entrance into the metaverse, even though it doesn’t exist yet.

The most notable being the Silicon Valley tech company previously now known as Facebook, which re-branded itself as Meta Platforms, Inc. in October 2021, and recently released an avatar of the company founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg that may well have been drawn by my eight year old daughter.

About the author

Keir Finlow-Bates is a blockchain researcher, smart contract developer, inventor, and writer. He lives in Finland with his wife and eight children.

If you found this article entertaining, you’ll love his book, Move Over Brokers Here Comes The Blockchain, which explains blockchain through the use of analogies without oversimplifying the topic.