Animoca Brands and others form Open Metaverse Alliance

Hong Kong blockchain company Animoca Brands and 12 other Web3 firms have jointly launched a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) aimed at achieving fully interoperable platforms in the metaverse.

The Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3 (OMA3) will operate as a consortium, guided by inclusivity, transparency and decentralisation principles, according to its announcement on July 21. 

Apart from Animoca Brands, other companies joining the alliance include The Sandbox, NFT game Upland, competitive card game Splinterlands, virtual world platform Decentraland and blockchain developer Dapper Labs.

“The standards we create are guided by the goals of true ownership and real-time interoperability,” OMA3 said. “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.”

“Users will immutably own these assets and transfer them to any OMA3 virtual worlds freely, without needing the platform’s permission,” it added.

The founding of OMA3 came after more than 30 large corporations, including Meta, Microsoft, Alibaba and Sony, announced forming an organisation called the Metaverse Standards Forum in June. The forum stated that its goal was to foster coordination and cooperation among hundreds of companies aspiring to build the metaverse.

Earlier this month, Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu told a Web3 summit held in Japan that “data is the world’s most valuable resource” and that a truly open metaverse should have a permissionless structure where users, instead of large corporations, own their data and can decide what they can do with it.