I think you are forgetting the most influential potential use of the avatars in the Metaverse: the facilitation of Open Society. Anyone who has used Crystalknows realises how much a system can know about a person's preferences, living context and much more.

It's only a tiny step to automatically feed that into the www.acceptify.at app that uses the extremely efficient and smart systemic consensus model of governance (which is a huge upgrade from majority rule).

Hello, fair and inclusive new world of direct representation. So I guess you could perhaps find some funding from this angle for an open, commons owned, metaverse.