Focused on Catalyzing the Movement for an Open Metaverse, Valued at $100M
ZUG, Switzerland, Nov. 17, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Following its formation in Zug Switzerland, the Open Meta Association announced that in June of 2021 it raised $4.5 million at a $100 million valuation in a token presale to create Open Meta DAO, which will serve as an organizing body for the growth of an open metaverse built on web3 infrastructure, owned and controlled by the community.
The Open Meta Association was established by Ryan Gill, Founder and CEO of Crucible, a web3 company that designs and creates software to enable game developers to build within the pen metaverse. Its core technology is Emergence SDK, a sovereign portable digital identity for players in blockchain-based gaming which will launch in 2022 on Unity and Unreal Engine. Crucible sits in the Innovation Lab with AAA publisher Ubisoft and is an alum of Outlier Ventures’ Base Camp accelerator.
The Open Meta Association views the emergent metaverse as a public utility that everyone can use and upon which anyone can build and most importantly, derive value. The Open Meta Association will accelerate the growth and adoption of the metaverse through a community-driven DAO, the Open Meta DAO, which is a decentralized autonomous organization that aims to replace traditional corporate gatekeepers and their captive ecosystems by enabling the community of like-minded individuals to directly participate in the upside from their own efforts. The Open Meta DAO will serve as an outlet for its initial 50+ founding members. These members represent different protocols and networks, and together they will use the Open Meta DAO to invest more holistically in blockchain-agnostic initiatives that support the metaverse, both in gaming and the growth of the ecosystem at large.
The Open Meta Association will formally mint the Open Meta DAO in January of 2022 with the distribution of its governance token (“DAO Tokens”) to the founding members from its June presale.
Founding participants in the Open Meta DAO include Animoca Brands, Outlier Ventures, Enjin, Polygon executives Sandeep Nailwal and Shreyansh Singh, Dapper Labs, Wilder World founder David Waslen, Spartan Group, South East Asia-based KardiaChain, Yield Guild Games founder Gabby Dizon, Asia-based LD Capital, Boson Protocol, and NFT collector and investor Sillytuna, among others.
In 2022, Open Meta DAO will host a public sale of its DAO Tokens, creating a treasury to provide transparent grants for community projects that facilitate an Open Metaverse. The DAO will use these funds to support the projects and founders building the metaverse, at first focusing on those in the gaming industry developing on-ramps for play-to-earn and on-chain game development.
Open Meta DAO will launch with a DAO portal, a platform to facilitate DAO activity, processes, and proposals for members to vote on DAO initiatives. Governance for the Open Meta DAO will be community-driven and explore new practices — both tactical and philosophical — as well as the challenges and opportunities around digital sovereignty, design, new business models, mental health, emotional intelligence and the wider social, economic, and technological implications of web3 adoption. The DAO portal will facilitate community-driven proposals and will leverage a voting system with mechanisms for reputation and rewards, taking into account the sentiment of the DAO as a whole, as well as each individual vote to ensure consensus in the collective throughout the voting process.
Ryan Gill, Managing Director of Open Meta DAO said of the launch, “We believe the metaverse will touch nearly every person on Earth over the next decade and will be worth trillions. It will reshape the way people make their livelihood and it will be a powerful tool for social mobility. If done correctly, it can be life-changing for billions of people around the world, but it must be built openly to its achieve true vision. In response to the Facebook announcement, there are a growing number of disjointed efforts around this shared open vision in a scramble to make a stand. It’s creating syncopation in the effort. We built the Open Meta DAO and chose founding membership on a vector for long term success, and as a movement to align and unify different communities and technologies — ultimately creating a path to necessary collaborative action. We exist to be a rising tide for the entire ecosystem.”
Yat Siu, executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, added, “At Animoca Brands we have made it our mission to support an open metaverse, ranging from our in-house projects to the many companies that we acquire or invest in. We are strong believers in the incredible potential of Web3 and games that are based on open economies and real digital property rights. Joining the Open Meta DAO is another key step in our strategy to support and contribute to open and community-driven initiatives that will make the metaverse a reality.”
Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs, stated, “With the launch of Dapper Collectives, we’re focused on building and releasing open source tools to help mainstream communities engage in decentralized ownership and governance on Flow. Joining the Open Meta DAO as a founding member is another amazing step towards adoption across the ecosystem and we are amped to be creating the future together.”
Gabby Dizon, CEO of Yield Guid Games said, “The success of play-to-earn relies heavily on an open economy for gaming, we have a strong case study in the Philippines for the benefits this can have for players and we’re excited to be joining Ryan in establishing the Open Meta DAO to apply these new models all over the world. This is an exciting time in history, but it is extremely important that we get these next few years right. A DAO is the perfect way to hand more decision making power to the communities of people who will participate in play to earn games, guilds and what comes next in the Open Metaverse.”
Jamie Burke, CEO of Outlier Ventures added, “Since Ryan and Crucible went through our accelerator in early 2020, we have been collaborating on a shared vision for the open metaverse, based on web3 tech and principles, as a shared operating system. That starts with Crucible’s mission for universal cross-gaming-engine SSI (Self Sovereign Identity) but is going to involve a huge amount of interoperability and collaboration across ecosystems, so it’s great to have Flow, Polygon and Enjin out of the gate to represent multiple blockchains.”
Open Meta was established in Zug, Switzerland June 2021, next door to the most prominent web3 ecosystems such as Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana and another several billion-dollar blockchain protocols foundations.
For more information, please visit openmetadao.com
