Hailed as the next evolution of the mobile internet, the metaverse has so far seen the greatest roll-out in the worlds of gaming, entertainment, and the workplace, with augmented and virtual reality transforming how workplace meetings, customer service and employee trainings happen. Yet, fully realized, it could offer an interconnected virtual world in which people virtually attend concerts, collaborate in virtual work-spaces, play immersive games, gamble, and buy virtual products, such as art, clothing and even real estate, among other activities.

Needless to say, an expansive virtual world radically transforming the way we play, learn, work, and even buy, also raises myriad questions as well as risks.

Several concerns relate to the complexity of building a coherent cross-world ecosystem. Specifically, a shared interface will be needed to connect virtual spaces. This infrastructure might be developed in a centralized way by a large company, which raises risks of market dominance. Alternatively, the metaverse could be built using decentralized, open architecture — a vision Zuckerberg purportedly holds. This will require hardware and software to be interoperable, which means companies will need to share common standards and to construct end-user licenses that allow for this interoperability.

Then there is the question of currency. A fully developed metaverse will have a functioning economy where users can buy, sell and earn a living in digital or fiat currencies. Already, metaverse projects like the game platform Axie Infinity are using cryptocurrency, but this means exposing metaverse participants to the volatility inherent in these speculative tokens. It might also involve a possible exchange fee between crypto and fiat – the fintech company Revolut, charges up to 2.5% for that service, example. Alternatively, companies like Facebook may produce their own digital currency, but this raises questions of whether these companies will act as depository institutions and what that means in terms of currency liquidity.

The metaverse will also challenge traditional notions of ownership, especially when it comes to moving virtual goods across virtual ecosystems. NFTs, which are meant to represent the ownership of digital or physical assets stored on a blockchain, could provide a solution to ownership in that regard, ensuring brands protect their virtual products from counterfeit, and metaverse participants know when they’ve purchased an original Gucci jacket for their avatar.

Intellectual property law will also have to evolve to address ownership in the metaverse, including when and how to enforce copyright infringement and who is eligible to patent, though much might be decided in the courts for countries that use litigation to establish functional boundaries on behavior and to resolve disputes. A recent ruling in the U.S. for example has now established that an AI cannot be named as an inventor on a patent, which implicates a metaverse where artificially intelligent avatars construct environments alongside human ones.

Finally, the metaverse will pose great risks to the privacy of its participants, as the technology used to build it will likely collect large swaths of data—including new types of biometrics and physiological data—that existing data protection laws do not account for. Regulators may choose to extend existing ways of dealing with data protection to this brave new world, from requiring companies to obtain consent from multiverse participants, to specifying how they may collect, retain, transfer and disclose data, to limiting what data can be collected or even what it may be used for, especially in the context of advertising.

What is certain is that building the metaverse will be costly. Facebook alone is investing $10bn in 2022, with $7bn or more in projected losses, and to increase investments over the next decade. Yet a recently created metaverse-focused exchange traded fund from Roundhill Investments is comprised of 41 companies with a median market capitalization of $70.9bn, suggesting the money is there.

The pay-offs may be substantial: Nvidia’s CEO, for instance, predicts the metaverse could ultimately outpace the current global GDP of over $80trn. Ensuring this unique growth opportunity is equally shared will require connecting the 3.7bn people that are still offline. This will come at the cost of $428bn over the next decade. A hefty sum worth spending if one is to create a truly global metaverse.