On Disparity and Diversity of Artists in the Metaverse: Half the Wealth Owned by 1.5%

It seems like the metaverse is a very fair alternative to our universe where artists from all diversity and origins are making a living.

However, looking at the numbers, it is anything but that!

Six months ago, I have looked at the emerging platform of “hic et nunc” on the tezos blockchain and at the distribution of sales that were taking place since the beginning of the platform.

Following is a tweet that was ignored by the community although it raised a very concerning issue concerning the disparity between artists that were on the same network.

Less than 100 of 1400 artists have made between 400 and 17000 tezos in sales whereas 1300 artists have made less than 400. One tezos is the equivalent of 4–8 USD.

If we look closely at the log-y plot and compute the area under the curve we realize that the 1368th artist of all 1389 artists is where the area is divided into two. What that means is that 21 artists were making as much as 1368 artists. That means that the 21/1389 = 1.51% of artists owned half the capital. How fair is that?

One of the biggest promoters of such injustice was a featured gallery called “TheFEN” that hand-picked top-selling artists to further promote them. Now that “hic et nunc” is no longer centralized, the FEN has lost its monopoly after much harm to the ecosystem of artists and art collectors. I hope that the curators of this gallery will bring back fairness to the artists they have not selected.

In terms of diversity, it is hard to study the artists’ origins and genders based on their profile pages. However, this remains a topic of huge interest in hopes that the metaverse will do diversity in terms of gender and ethnic origins all kinds of justice.

This is a sensitive topic that many will continue to ignore until the metaverse becomes more unjust than the universe. Don’t let this happen. Spread the word.