Netherlands, Switzerland and Lithuania the world’s most ‘metaverse-ready’ nations

The Netherlands has ranked as the world’s most metaverse-ready nation, followed by Switzerland and Lithuania, U.K-based price comparison website Uswitch said in a study.

The survey measured the readiness for metaverse of different countries by comparing their fixed broadband speed, broadband service fees, size of blockchain financial services start-ups, hi-tech exports, as well as number of Google searches.

The Netherlands scored an overall 7.74 marks out of 10 to top the rankings, with a high median fixed broadband speed of 106.51Mbps. Uswitch said this made the Netherlands one of the closest countries to reaching the fundamentally required speeds for the metaverse.

Switzerland scored an overall 7.61 marks to become the second most metaverse-ready country in the study, featuring a massive 36.91 blockchain financial services startups per million people, which Uswitch said will be key players in the future of the metaverse.

Third-placed Lithuania scored an overall 7.39 marks with some of the cheapest broadband packages covered in the study. The country also has a decent number of 17.17 blockchain financial startups per million people.

Japan ranked 31st in the study, with a median fixed broadband speed of 131.86 Mbps and a comparatively low number of blockchain financial services startups, at 1 per million people. Its value of high-tech exports in 2021 was US$927 per capita, and the number of Google searches for metaverse per year was 1,273 per million people, which was notably low among the rankings.

The United States has the fastest average broadband speed, at 167.36 Mbps, according to the study. Cyprus had the highest number of blockchain startups working and had the highest number of Google searches on the metaverse per million population, with 34,082 searches.