Chinese tech giant Baidu could take six years to completely build a metaverse as part of the ‘XiRang’ project.
Vice president of the company Ma Jie told CNBC.
Baidu started working on the ‘XiRang’ project late last year. On December 27, the company plans to host an annual developer conference on its metaverse app, XiRang. The company said it will be China’s first-ever metaverse conference.
According to Ma Jie, the company’s metaverse can currently accommodate about 100,000 users at a time. He stressed that Baidu is committed to creating an open-source platform – for metaverse developers.
The company revealed the ‘XiRang’ app to reporters last Tuesday. CNBC reports that the platform is really far from perfect. In particular, the virtual space is slow to load, and user avatars behave too unrealistic.
Jie stated that XiRang does not support cryptocurrencies and other digital assets like NFT. However, according to him, the platform is based on technology “similar to blockchain”.
Previously, the Chinese authorities called the NFT and the metaverse potential Ponzi schemes.
You must note a critical point that there is no doubt that China is banning cryptocurrencies and all of their activities like mining, trading, etc, but China is not at all banning or stopping blockchain. China became the first country in the world that finalize Digital Yuan, completing all the testing phases. This year alone, the 17 highest-level government departments in China announced nearly 180 blockchain innovation projects, most of which are local governments and state-owned enterprises. They apply blockchain technology and have nothing to do with cryptocurrency.