IMVU: Making the coin of the realm for the metaverse
IMVU has been a relatively quiet and unnoticed company in the online gaming and social media worlds. But the company did something recently that could benefit the whole industry: It received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to enable payments in its virtual world through a blockchain-based cryptocurrency dubbed VCoin.
With its ruling in November 2020, the SEC enabled IMVU to allow users to buy and sell goods with VCoin and also to cash out and convert it to Ethereum, a well-known cryptocurrency, or into U.S. dollars.
Having something like VCoin is important because the metaverse isn’t expected to be a single world operated by a single company. It will likely be a collection of virtual worlds, all interconnected in a way that makes travel between the worlds easy and seamless. If you buy something in a virtual world from a company or from another user, you want to be able to trust that transaction and take the object to another world. If you sell an item, you want to be able to get paid and then cash out. And from the viewpoint of companies, creating a marketplace where users can supply the digital items could be far easier than one company’s own developers trying to populate a metaverse full of digital items.
Like other virtual worlds like Second Life, over the past 16 years IMVU has built a flourishing economy, with a marketplace driven by creators.
With IMVU, any Ethereum wallet will be able to hold VCoin.
“That’s what we’re leveraging,” Tsui said. “Most gaming companies wouldn’t go out and secure all those licenses because it’s not their core business. Secondly, if IMVU were ever to go out of business, you could still have the Ethereum.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/28/imvu-making-the-coin-of-the-realm-for-the-metaverse/?fbclid=IwAR3WVoaVWdKpxsDHWBIj3WGpldxQKgd_Vc9P469K3Lzu4caz2TBUqh_FKb0