Quick take:
- Leading Web3 platforms have teamed up to launch the Open Metaverse Alliance (OMA3).
- Animoca Brands, The Sandbox, Decentraland and Dapper Labs are among those pushing to overcome interoperability challenges of the industry.
- The alliance will focus on transparency, inclusiveness, decentralization and democratization.
The world’s leading Web3 companies have pooled together to form the Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3 (OMA3). Animoca Brands and its subsidiary The Sandbox are joined by Decentraland, Dapper Labs, MetaMetaverse, Space, Superworld, Upland, Voxels and Wivity.
The companies have a common goal of overcoming the challenges of interoperability in the industry. The alliance will focus on four primary principles including transparency, inclusiveness, decentralization and democratization.
While Yat Siu and his company Animoca Brands have popularized the idea of the open metaverse, the concept is not new. In fact, as far back as 2004, Hugh Perkins and Jorge Lima had already founded the Open Source Metaverse Project (OSMP), a multi-participant shared virtual world online platform.
The difference between now and back then is of course— the OSMP platform was not built on Web3. Thus it couldn’t be decentralised. But the project was clearly launched to advance metaverse projects at the time, which included Second Life (recently relaunched as a Web3 project), Active Worlds and There.
The platform was built on an open-source engine that enabled the creation of immersive 3D worlds that could be interconnected to form one single metaverse.
Fast forward 18 years down the line, and the Open Metaverse Alliance is working on standards that will help facilitate collaboration between various stakeholders of Web3 and other industries.
OMA3 will leverage the governance mechanisms of a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) to ensure the system is transparent and community-centric.
The alliance has drawn a list of vital topics to be addressed by the DAO, including “standards for nonfungible tokens (NFTs), protocols, transferable identity, portals between virtual worlds, mapping and indexing.”
One of the biggest challenges the NFT industry is facing is the influx of Ponzi schemes that claim to be the next big NFT project. Setting clear standards for launching a project will help stem the spam and scam that has shrouded the industry since it started trending in early 2021.
The alliance members have also indicated they will join the recently launched Metaverse Standards Forum, which features leading technology companies including Meta, Microsoft, Epic Games, Adobe and Nvidia, among others.
Commenting on the formation of OMA3, The Sandbox co-founder Sebastian Borget said: “We want your Avatar can be more than just virtual representation, and also carries your reputation as anyone can see on-chain which NFTs you hold, earned, created or bought, the full history of transactions and as well hopefully the progression/actions you have contributed to throughout time.”
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