The metaverse is a shared virtual 3D space that combines immersive experiences with applications in gaming, social interactions, commerce, and more. It is rapidly becoming a reality, driven by advances in virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other emerging technologies. Among these, blockchain technology enables secure and decentralized ownership as well as seamless interoperability of virtual assets. Non-fungible tokens ensure verifiable ownership and fraud prevention, while smart contracts facilitate automated peer-to-peer transactions. Blockchain’s security and transparency promote trust and innovation, laying the foundation for a connected and user-driven metaverse ecosystem. In this paper, we explore the role of blockchain technology as a key enabler for the metaverse, providing solutions for decentralization, governance through decentralized autonomous organizations, interoperable mechanisms, digital asset ownership, traceability, auditing, and identity management. We present the key difference between traditional virtual worlds and the metaverse, and why blockchain is preferred over other decentralized technologies for the metaverse. We comprehensively review recent advances in metaverse system architectures, focusing on state-of-the-art solutions and lessons learned. We compare the existing literature based on key parameters; namely, contributions, advantages, limitations, and applications. We present key challenges, including deepfake threats, identity theft and brand infringement risks, mental health risks, digital safety and gambling risks, virtual world laws and regulations, and privacy and data security concerns. We outline future recommendations for enabling a sustainable and user-friendly metaverse ecosystem.

Mobile devices have become an indispensable component of Internet of Things (IoT). However, these devices have resource constraints in processing capabilities, battery power, and storage space, thus hindering the execution of computation-intensive applications that often require broad bandwidth, stringent response time, long-battery life, and heavy-computing power. Mobile cloud computing and mobile edge computing (MEC) are emerging technologies that can meet the aforementioned requirements using offloading algorithms. In this article, we analyze the effect of platform-dependent native applications on computational offloading in edge networks and propose a lightweight process migration-based computational offloading framework. The proposed framework does not require application binaries at edge servers and thus seamlessly migrates native applications. The proposed framework is evaluated using an experimental testbed. Numerical results reveal that the proposed framework saves almost 44% of the execution time and 84% of the energy consumption. Hence, the proposed framework shows profound potential for resource-intensive IoT application processing in MEC.