MetaChain: A Novel Blockchain-based Framework for Metaverse Applications
This addresses interoperability and scalability issues for Metaverse developers and users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing blockchain and game theory concepts.
The paper tackles challenges in Metaverse applications, such as resource demands and security, by proposing MetaChain, a blockchain-based framework that uses smart contracts, sharding, and an incentive mechanism, showing through experiments that it can attract more users and resources.
Metaverse has recently attracted paramount attention due to its potential for future Internet. However, to fully realize such potential, Metaverse applications have to overcome various challenges such as massive resource demands, interoperability among applications, and security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose MetaChain, a novel blockchain-based framework to address emerging challenges for the development of Metaverse applications. In particular, by utilizing the smart contract mechanism, MetaChain can effectively manage and automate complex interactions among the Metaverse Service Provider (MSP) and the Metaverse users (MUs). In addition, to allow the MSP to efficiently allocate its resources for Metaverse applications and MUs' demands, we design a novel sharding scheme to improve the underlying blockchain's scalability. Moreover, to leverage MUs' resources as well as to attract more MUs to support Metaverse operations, we develop an incentive mechanism using the Stackelberg game theory that rewards MUs' contributions to the Metaverse. Through numerical experiments, we clearly show the impacts of the MUs' behaviors and how the incentive mechanism can attract more MUs and resources to the Metaverse.