A new fund wants to be on the ground floor of financing the metaverse

Future. A new exchange traded fund (ETF) called Roundhill Ball Metaverse is focusing solely on the companies that are on the forefront of building tools used to support the metaverse — a digital universe of connected virtual worlds that exists alongside the physical one. By focusing on every technical aspect that is needed to bring the complex concept to life, Roundhill could help build a digital ecosystem that has its own culture, economy, and laws that are not bound by physical limitations.

Virtual world, real money
A new ETF is pushing in the chips on being at the center of the metaverse economy.

• The Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF debuted yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
• The fund focuses on seven categories for investment needed to support the devlopment of the metaverse:
  • Computing
  • Networking
  • Virtual platforms
  • Interchange standards
  • Payments
  • Content, Assets, and Identity Services
  • Hardware
• Roundhill already has equity holdings in major companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Roblox, Nvidia, and Tencent.
• The ETF started trading yesterday at $15, and is already trending upward.

Roundhill said that it will closely track Matthew Ball’s Ball Metaverse Index, which describes itself as “the definitive listing and ranking of the companies that are building the next version of the Internet.”

One world at a time
So, for the uninitiated, what the heck is the metaverse? Roundhill describes it as:

• “A quasi-successor state of the Internet, just as the mobile Internet has built upon and expanded the hardline Internet of the 1990s and 2000s.”
• “The Metaverse will be comprised of countless persistent virtual worlds that interoperate with one another, as well as the physical world.”
• It will “generate a robust economy that spans labor and leisure, while transforming long-standing industries and markets such as finance and banking, retail and education, health and fitness, sex work, and more.”

Several companies are already on the precipice of building worlds that can share in this vision, including Fortnite from Epic Games, Minecraft, and startups such as Crucible.