Was the Metaverse stillborn, as one might have inferred from some of the headlines about the desert of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg's new creature?
Not necessarily, especially since some of the Metaverse, which has been active for some time now mostly in the world of gaming, is quite popular, even if it does not exactly correspond to the complexity of that futuristic online world we all have in our heads.
What happens in the Metaverse cannot (nor should it) be antagonistic to what happens in the real world. And this principle must be verified first and foremost in the respect of the rules underlying the coexistence of users, who belong to articulated organisations, governed by rules, regulations, customs and habits that move from the regional perimeter of individual sovereign states, however obliged - more and more often - to give way to a supranational regulation, the only one capable of intercepting the complexity of the digital globalisation we have been experiencing in recent decades.
Hence the practical fallout of the problem, namely how to regulate, or rather, how to capture what happens in the Metaverse with the (existing) rules of the 'old world'? This is obviously a very broad perimeter, just think of all that the anti-money laundering (AML) directives entail when applied to the new virtual reality, a panorama further complicated by the frenetic development of Artificial Intelligence now capable of monitoring transactions (such as Google Cloud's AI AML).
One of the main knots to be untangled in order to open up (real) operations in the Metaverse is the form and manner of concluding smart contracts, the contracts that are adopted here and that are the real driving force of the volume. Their structure is explored in depth, on which all communication and thus all forms of interaction that animate this new space rest, in an attempt to understand their capacity to incorporate rules that are not self-generated by the code, but which the code must be capable of incorporating, giving them full implementation.
We believe that it will be the Metaverse or, rather, what happens in the space of the Metaverse that will have to 'adapt' to the existing Law.
The motto "Code is Law" is now little more than a suggestion; but will a new motto, "Rule is in the Code", be able to support an orderly development and harmonisation of the Metaverse with physical reality? The answer may lie in the not too distant future.

Cover: Riccardo Rapone, a.k.a. Beetroot, Future, bas-relief engraved with drill on canvas, 50 x 50 cm (https://nft.beetrootart.it).