Futureverse Announces Metaverse Supergroup

Futureverse has made a major statement of intent, having today revealed a merger of eight companies with the goal of setting the scene for an ‘open metaverse experience.’

The landmark merger means that Futureverse’s metaverse ecosystem now comprises over 300 full-time employees in 16 countries. The entities making up this metaverse ‘supergroup’ include AI protocol Altered State Machine, crypto payments firm Centrapay, digital ID developer Centrapass, creative studio Non-Fungible Labs, payment protocol Immersve, animation studio Shadows Interactive, and gaming studio Altered Phoenix.

By pooling a multitude of different disciplines and ideas into one collaborative ecosystem, Futureverse intends to ‘create the foundation for an open and scalable metaverse infrastructure with world-class content and a highly engaged community.’

Metaverse: A Possibility, Not a Place

A two-minute trailer accompanied the announcement, shedding some light on what Futureverse hopes to achieve over the coming years. The core message was that the metaverse is ‘not a place but a possibility,’ suggesting Futureverse will be a broad church rather than a walled garden.

“For the past five years we’ve been developing the tools and infrastructure to co-create the future with our communities,” says Futureverse Co-Founder Aaron McDonald. “We’re enabling companies and creators to deliver the open metaverse experience that they want for their audience.

“We don’t see the metaverse as one super app controlled by a single company. Futureverse is your seamless portal in and out of all apps in the metaverse; with you comes your passport, friends, communications, finances and content.”

“We believe that the future is a collective vision,” added co-founder Shara Senderoff. “The future is the only truly decentralized idea. Futureverse proposes a more virtuous model for the internet both in values and technology, designed to shape what’s to come and who controls it, together.”

Futureverse leverages The Root Network, a public decentralized blockchain network specially built for metaverse and gaming applications. EVM runs within the Network, which uses Substrate at its core and supports NFT royalty enforcement and NFT-to-NFT swaps, among other metaverse-friendly applications.

You only have to watch the aforementioned trailer to know that Futureverse will be focused heavily on storytelling to bring its vision to life, though elements such as identity, AI and payments pave the way for a joined-together ecosystem that makes good on the promise of a metaverse open to all.

The Futureverse whitepaper makes plain the founders’ passion for content: “All great content properties are built on great stories. Many of the Web3 Metaverse approaches jump straight to creating a world which in almost all cases leads to an empty unused wasteland. The correct way to go about scaling content in Web3 is to follow the path: Stories and Lore > Characters > Content > Small Spaces > Activities > Large Spaces > Game.”

As for Shara Senderoff, who was once named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in the Consumer Tech category, she doesn’t have time for naysayers who scoff at another bold metaverse promise. “It’s entirely possible that a technology company is built on virtuous values… Watch us do it.”

We’ll hold her to that.