The Internet is constantly changing and developing, and web news is even sometimes perceived as science fiction. On top of that, a surprise for many may be that dating services are quickly becoming the pathfinders for industry disruptive trends today.

How is the online dating industry changing today? Why are dating apps and chat roulettes the leaders in terms of the speed of implementation of new functionality? And how much will the online dating industry change in the near future? This is what we want to talk about today, and we’re sure it’ll be interesting!

Tinder will launch its own metaverse and create an internal virtual currency

Rumors that Tinder plans to launch its own metaverse began to circulate in early 2021. The more time passed, the more information we found out. Now we know quite a lot about the future metaverse:

• Its official name is — the Tinderverse.
• It will be possible to enter the metaverse using virtual or augmented reality.
• In the Tinderverse, users will not only be able to meet and communicate, but also go to virtual concerts, walk along digital streets and parks, hold work meetings, and much more.

The company’s CEO Renate Nyborg announced active work on the Tinderverse during the Reuters Next conference. We also know that the internal currency of the service is already being tested, so its appearance is only a matter of time.

The important thing to understand here is that if the Tinderverse “pops”, we’ll surely see a real explosion in the popularity of the metaverse. Match Group, which owns Tinder, will then 100% create new metaverses for its other services, and third-party companies will catch up as well.

We dare to assume that such a classic format as video chat roulette will also undergo a lot of changes and become part of the metaverse, but it’s too early to guess. We’ll return to the topic of video chat roulettes a little later.

Decentraland: an already functional virtual world created on the blockchain

While Mark Zuckerberg, Renate Nyborg, and others are only now sharing their plans to create metaverses, the Decentraland developers have already released a finished product — the Decentraland virtual world, built on blockchain technology and supporting NFTs.

At first glance, Decentraland resembles an online game with cartoon graphics. But in reality, everything is much more interesting. Here you can already communicate with other users, attend lectures, open your own stores, buy and sell, explore the world, create completely new objects in it and, in a literal sense, exist.

The key feature of Decentraland is NFTs. Tokens allow you to buy “land” in the virtual space to build anything — a store, an office, a cinema, an art gallery, and much more.

Decentraland already looks like a real breakthrough in the world of the metaverse. But this is a very young project that is in the development stage. It’s hard to even imagine what prospects will open up in it and in other metaverses when technology takes another leap forward.

Chat roulette: on-trend again, even more than before!

If you were an active internet user in the early 2000s, then you probably remember 2009, when the random web chat sites Omegle and Chatroulette appeared. At that moment, there was just nothing like them on the web, and by 2010 these sites measured their users in millions.

Not so long after, due to the mediocre moderation of Omegle and Chatroulette, lack of filters for searching for interesting people and the rather controversial policies of the developers, the audience of these sites began to gradually decrease. At the same time, alternative chat roulettes began to appear — Chatrandom, OmeTV, Bazoocam, Chathub, Monkey, coomeet.com/chatroulette, Camsurf, which already offered users search filters, better moderation and excellent video quality. Unsurprisingly, the Omegle and Chatroulette audiences quickly migrated to new platforms.

Until the beginning of 2020, the number of users of video chat roulettes grew rather slowly. Surprisingly, this situation was radically changed by the coronavirus pandemic around the world. Having lost the opportunity to meet and communicate offline, users flooded onto the Internet. And given that not everyone enjoys the classic dating site and app format, they chose an alternative — chat roulettes.

As a result, in just a year, many sites increased their audience by two or three times. This in turn made it possible to more actively implement new features and develop alongside competitors. As a result, video chat roulette sites are again at the peak of their popularity, and they clearly do not plan to hand over these positions.

New players in the online dating market: unexpected projects

An interesting story happened in Singapore. A girl named Vernis Yap was an avid user of dating apps, but she did not achieve the results she hoped for in her personal life. She went on 50 dates and each time it turned out that the person did not suit her at all. At this point Vernis Yap, realizing that the algorithms of popular applications did not work in her case, decided to create her own service, and named it Lovenn.

No swipes or anything else! At Lovenn, all users must answer a series of 20 questions, after which the system will search for the best matches and select the best dating candidates. And it’s worth noting that Lovenn works really well.

This example proves that even nowadays it’s possible to launch a project that will be better than the competitors and will immediately attract many new users. This doesn’t even require colossal budgets. Sometimes a great idea and an original approach are the main keys to success.

We believe that in the coming months and years, hundreds of original online dating services will appear on the Internet, and they’ll be radically different from everything we are used to. This will be a great trend because new technologies and new approaches are always moving the industry forward. And we all really need this in our current world reality.

The result: there’s a whole lot of interesting ahead!

2021 turned out to be very rich in innovations and even revolutionary changes in the field of online dating in general. Before that, we could see how the industry stagnated and failed to offer users anything new. But now, it seems, everything has finally changed.

Tinder began to fundamentally change the way people think about online dating. Video chat roulettes, which many seemed to have forgotten altogether, suddenly gained immense popularity and look like keeping it. And new dating services appear almost every day. Some of them really amaze with their innovative ideas and solutions.

We are convinced that 2022, 2023 and further ahead will bring us many more changes. Perhaps those of which we do not even know now. After all, you must admit that a couple of years ago no one had heard anything about the metaverses. And today they are not just a buzzword but a reality. We’re sure that more than one mini-revolution in the dating industry awaits us on the road ahead. We’re looking forward to it!