Web3 brands join forces to create ‘Open Metaverse Alliance’
The ‘consortium DAO’ – comprised of some of the leading web3 brands, including The Sandbox and Decentraland – will aim to foster inclusiveness, transparency, decentralization and interoperability in the metaverse.
Interoperability has been an intractable problem for the burgeoning web3 community / Adobe Stock
Several prominent blockchain-based companies have collaboratively launched the Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3 (OMA3), an organization designed to steer the evolution of the metaverse in a direction that aligns with some of the core principles of web3 – namely inclusiveness, transparency, decentralization and interoperability.
Interoperability – the ability of multiple blockchains to coexist, cooperate and share information seamlessly with one another – has long been a thorn in the side of the nascent web3 industry. It’s as of yet an unrealized ideal – a goal that blockchain companies aspire to, but that has thus far proved elusive mainly due to the huge computing requirements involved.
Many web3 brands envision an interoperable metaverse in which virtual assets and avatars can move fluidly between platforms while retaining their unique characteristics. The alternative, at its extreme, would be a balkanized metaverse filled with walled gardens – a virtual future resembling the web2 ecosystem of today.
The OMA3 is devoted to avoiding such a future. “We believe in a metaverse without restraining walls, where individual platforms are interconnected and fully interoperable,” the organization said on its website. “We will build infrastructure to ensure the metaverse operates as a unified system where digital assets (such as NFTs), identities and data are permissionless and interoperable for all and controlled by users, not platforms.”
Structured as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) “that operates like a consortium,” the OMA3 membership list reads like a who’s who of web3, including household names Dapper Labs, Decentraland, The Sandbox, Upland and Animoca Brands.
The organization also extended an invitation to all like-minded blockchain-based companies to join it in its efforts “to realize this goal of an open metaverse,” and said it will be making further announcements during this weekend’s Global NFT Summit in London.
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