Metaverse has recently attracted paramount attention due to its potential for
future Internet. However, to fully realize such potential, Metaverse
applications have to overcome various challenges such as massive resource
demands, interoperability among applications, and security and privacy
concerns. In this paper, we propose MetaChain, a novel blockchain-based
framework to address emerging challenges for the development of Metaverse
applications. In particular, by utilizing the smart contract mechanism,
MetaChain can effectively manage and automate complex interactions among the
Metaverse Service Provider (MSP) and the Metaverse users (MUs). In addition, to
allow the MSP to efficiently allocate its resources for Metaverse applications
and MUs' demands, we design a novel sharding scheme to improve the underlying
blockchain's scalability. Moreover, to leverage MUs' resources as well as to
attract more MUs to support Metaverse operations, we develop an incentive
mechanism using the Stackelberg game theory that rewards MUs' contributions to
the Metaverse. Through numerical experiments, we clearly show the impacts of
the MUs' behaviors and how the incentive mechanism can attract more MUs and
resources to the Metaverse.

本文提出了 MetaChain，这是一个基于区块链的框架，旨在通过利用智能合约机制、设计分片机制以提高扩展性和开发激励机制来解决 Metaverse 应用面临的挑战。通过数字实验，展示了开发激励机制对引导更多用户和资源，促进 Metaverse 的运营的作用。