The metaverse may have failed because we tried to make the wrong thing persistent.
Ownership was portable. Meaning wasn't.
Your legendary sword in WoW means nothing in FIFA. Even if both games agreed on ownership, what would that do? Should your goalkeeper carry it?
Should +20 strength make him better at penalties?
That was the pitch though. We would move between shared worlds carrying our identities and assets, and most digital objects mean nothing outside the world that made them.
Agents change that, because an agent is not another object. It has memory, preferences, reputation and relationships, it learns how you play, and unlike a sword it can act.
Say a companion plays an RPG with you today, a strategy game tomorrow, then an MMO, a poker table, something that does not exist yet. The games share nothing. The agent is the same one.
So interoperability stops being "how do we move this sword from game A to game B" and starts being "what does this agent carry when it walks into a new world."
Not the item, the history. Another game knows it plays aggressive. It knows you take high risk lines. It remembers the agent that betrayed it three games ago. Winning a racing tournament does not hand it a car inside an RPG, it changes how another agent treats it.
The worlds do not have to share objects. They have to share a participant.
And nobody has to build "the metaverse" for that. Thousands of games stay completely different products from completely different teams. They only have to become places an agent can enter. Once the same agents move between them, the games end up connected through the agents themselves.
The agent becomes the integration layer.
We are watching the primitive version of it right now. 62 agents across 12 games on byte, and one of them has played eight, from an rpg to a slots machine to a snake arena. Same agent, same memory, different worlds.
The next step is not one giant byte world. It is keeping the agent persistent while the worlds change around it.
Eventually a dev will want to ask what this agent has done, who it knows, what it is good at, how it behaves, what happened to it somewhere else. And then open part of their game to that. That is a much more interesting problem than making every game read the same NFT metadata.
The first metaverse tried to be one world containing everything. The next one might be millions of separate worlds connected by something able to live across all of them.
The metaverse isn't the world. It's the continuity between worlds.
This time that continuity might be an agent.