Source-linked AI summary
Fusing Blockchain and AI with Metaverse: A Survey
Qinglin Yang, Yetong Zhao, Huawei Huang, Zehui Xiong, Jiawen Kang, Zibin Zheng
TL;DR
The paper addresses how to build an intelligent, open, fair metaverse amid challenges in integrating physical–virtual activities, AI, blockchain, and high-volume digital economies. It surveys metaverse components, digital currencies, AI applications, and blockchain technologies, then identifies open issues and concludes that interdisciplinary collaboration is needed for future development.
Problem
Metaverse development involves integrating rich virtual-world activities with AI and blockchain while addressing challenges such as high transaction volumes and limited machine-learning automation.
Method
The paper surveys state-of-the-art work across metaverse components, digital currencies, AI technologies and applications, and blockchain-empowered technologies.
Results
The survey identifies critical challenges and open issues and concludes that AI and blockchain are expected to play essential roles in the expanding metaverse.
Takeaways & Limitations
Further exploitation of AI–blockchain fusion toward metaverse requires interdisciplinary collaboration between academia and industry.
Takeaways & Limitations
Current machine-learning algorithms often require manual feature selection and large amounts of labeled data, limiting broad application.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Metaverse as the latest buzzword has attracted great attention from both industry and academia. Metaverse seamlessly integrates the real world with the virtual world and allows avatars to carry out rich activities including creation, display, entertainment, social networking, and trading. Thus, it is promising to build an exciting digital world and to transform a better physical world through the exploration of the metaverse. In this survey, we dive into the metaverse by discussing how Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) fuse with it through investigating the state-of-the-art studies across the metaverse components, digital currencies, AI applications in the virtual world, and blockchain-empowered technologies. Further exploitation and interdisciplinary research on the fusion of AI and Blockchain towards metaverse will definitely require collaboration from both academia and industries. We wish that our survey can help researchers, engineers, and educators build an open, fair, and rational future metaverse.
3 Guangdong University of Technology, China
This section identifies the paper’s authors’ institutional affiliation and lists the survey’s main keywords.
- The survey keywords are Metaverse, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Economy System, and Digital Currency.
1 Introduction
The introduction presents the metaverse as an integrated physical–virtual environment with rich avatar activities and explains why AI and blockchain are central to its development. It positions the paper as a survey of their fusion, challenges, and future research directions.
- Metaverse motivation: The metaverse integrates physical and virtual worlds, enabling avatars to engage in display, entertainment, social, and trading activities.Examples include collaborative meetings, motion-driven virtual dance, and autonomous avatar capabilities.
- Metaverse motivation: Metaverse economic activity affects physical-world behavior and requires a digital economic system for creating, exchanging, and consuming digital items.The passage identifies high transaction volumes as a reason centralized physical-world economic systems may operate inefficiently.
- AI–blockchain fusion: Blockchain offers decentralized-ledger capabilities, while AI addresses metaverse challenges through analytics, content generation, and intelligent deployment.
- Paper scope: The survey emphasizes fusing AI and blockchain to establish an intelligent, open, and fair metaverse.Its contributions include reviewing state-of-the-art studies and envisioning challenges and open issues.
2 Preliminaries of Economic System in Metaverse
The metaverse is framed as a self-consistent digital economy comprising creation, assets, markets, and currency. Its economic logic differs from conventional economies and motivates AI–blockchain integration.
- Economic system components: The metaverse economic system comprises digital creation, digital assets, digital markets, and digital currency.These components are presented as drivers of transformation from the conventional economy.
- Economic system components: Digital creation supplies the foundation of the metaverse, with creator numbers and accessible authoring tools shaping economic development.Decentraland is cited as providing authoring tools for interactive applications.
- Economic system components: Blockchain supports digital-asset confirmation through encryption and consensus mechanisms, while digital markets enable avatars to trade for income.Existing trade platforms may create privacy concerns by making user accounts publicly known.
- Comparison with conventional economy: Compared with conventional economies, metaverse economics emphasizes identity and experience, with increasing marginal benefits, decreasing marginal costs, and near-zero transaction costs.The paper argues that frequent transactions follow from near-zero transaction costs.
- Open development needs: The metaverse economic system remains at an early stage, motivating fusion of AI and blockchain for an intelligent and secure metaverse.
3 Artificial Intelligence in Metaverse
This section surveys representative AI algorithms and their roles in building intelligent metaverse environments, avatars, and interactions with the physical world.
- 3.1 Representative AI Algorithms: Machine learning algorithms enable systems to learn from experience and data, supporting pattern classification, regression, and ranking tasks.Support vector machines are presented as a representative machine learning algorithm.
- 3.1 Representative AI Algorithms: CNNs use shared convolutional weights and layered processing to extract feature maps for computer vision applications such as facial recognition and augmented reality.The architecture comprises convolution, pooling, and fully connected layers.
- 3.1 Representative AI Algorithms: Reinforcement learning models sequential decision-making through trial-and-error interaction with dynamic environments, including value-function and policy-search approaches.Deep reinforcement learning combines Markov decision processes with deep neural networks and includes algorithms such as DQN and TRPO.
- 3 Artificial Intelligence in Metaverse: AI supports metaverse infrastructure, authoring tools, digital twins, immersive environments, and avatar behavior by processing large-scale data and enabling intelligent interactions.The survey discusses applications ranging from virtual-world construction and digital-twin systems to low-latency augmented reality and avatar control.
- 3.3.1 Avatar and Non-player Characters: Reinforcement learning can produce avatars and AI agents whose behavior transfers between virtual and physical environments.OpenAI Five achieved superhuman performance in Dota 2, while a learned controller transferred virtual demonstrations to a physical Baxter robot.
4 Blockchain in Metaverse
Blockchain is presented as foundational infrastructure for the metaverse, supporting its economic system through cryptocurrency, transaction processing, authentication, storage, and smart contracts. However, metaverse-scale transaction volume and latency requirements expose important limitations in existing blockchain mechanisms.
- Blockchain infrastructure: Blockchain links metaverse sectors and provides transparent, open, efficient, and reliable economic rules.Hash algorithms and timestamps support data traceability and confidentiality.
- Cryptocurrency: Cryptocurrencies support value circulation, payment, and settlement, while blockchain enables their creation, recording, and trading.The survey examines whether conventional cryptocurrency-issuing rules apply to the metaverse.
- Transaction characteristics: Metaverse transactions require high throughput because users trade across many applications, burdening full nodes that store historical transactions locally.The metaverse is expected to generate a giant volume of transactions involving intra- and inter-metaverse applications.
- Transaction characteristics: Metaverse applications require low confirmation latency, with three-dimensional interaction requiring latency within 10 milliseconds to avoid dizziness.Human-oriented internet applications typically operate between tens and hundreds of milliseconds.
- Transaction characteristics: Existing consensus protocols do not directly satisfy metaverse requirements: PoW consumes substantial resources, while PoS may undermine miner fairness.The survey therefore calls for new consensus protocols and blockchain mechanisms.
- Market & business: Smart contracts extend blockchain beyond token transfer to programmable crypto-business, while DeFi and decentralized exchanges support new metaverse economic models.Uniswap is cited as an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange that automatically provides token liquidity.
5 Integration of Blockchain and AI on Metaverse
The survey frames blockchain intelligence and intelligent blockchain as complementary integrations for the metaverse. Blockchain can supply trusted data and AI resources, while AI can optimize blockchain design and detect attacks.
- Integration rationale: Decentralized AI combines AI and blockchain to perform analytics or decision making on trusted data without trusted third parties.The integration is examined through the question of what intelligent systems can contribute to the metaverse.
- Blockchain for AI: Blockchain marketplaces can provide AI with datasets, algorithms, and computing power through decentralized trading.The survey reviews blockchain-based decentralized access to personal data for AI-moderated healthcare exchanges.
- AI for blockchain: AI can help blockchain systems tune design trade-offs, improve performance, detect attacks, and invoke appropriate defenses.The passage identifies incentive, consensus, and security as parameters requiring coordination in blockchain design.
6 Challenges and Open Issues
The survey identifies open issues spanning digital creation, governance, currency, scalability, AI robustness, blockchain platforms, market regulation, and privacy. These challenges reflect the metaverse’s large scale, open environment, and economic complexity.
- Digital creation and economy: Digital creation requires low-cost authoring tools, rewards for original content, and value conversion between physical and virtual economies.Unlimited digital creation and differing marginal benefits create a need to bridge the two environments.
- Governance and currency: Future metaverse governance must address expensive virtual goods, currency exchange across metaverses, high-frequency transactions, and possible inflation.The survey connects these issues to cooperation among worldwide companies and decentralized economic systems.
- Artificial intelligence issues: Current deep-learning systems impose deployment burdens and often lack robustness, interpretability, and adaptability in open, dynamic environments.The passage also notes that many systems remain designed for specific tasks and closed static settings.
- Artificial intelligence issues: Meta-learning is proposed as a route toward automated machine learning by learning from how approaches perform across diverse tasks.It can accelerate pipeline and neural-architecture design and replace some hand-engineered algorithms with data-driven approaches.
- Blockchain-related issues: Blockchain-related issues include scaling NFT platforms, designing healthy market rules, coordinating large companies, regulating manipulation and money laundering, and protecting privacy.DAOs, new platforms, new consensus mechanisms, and metaverse-oriented cryptography are identified as possible research directions.
7 Conclusion
The conclusion presents AI and blockchain as essential technologies for an expanding metaverse that supports social and economic activities beyond real-world limits. The survey synthesizes research across metaverse components and technologies while highlighting the need for interdisciplinary collaboration.
- Conclusion: AI and blockchain are expected to play essential roles in a metaverse where users engage safely and freely in social and economic activities.The metaverse may also accelerate application of these technologies.
- Conclusion: The survey reviews metaverse components, digital currencies, virtual-world AI applications, and blockchain-empowered technologies.It also identifies challenges and open issues for constructing metaverse foundations through AI–blockchain fusion.