Freeverse.io raises $10.5M for NFT assets that can change over time

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Freeverse.io has raised $10.5 mil­lion for blockchain-based assets that can change and evolve over time, enabling a new kind of dig­i­tal ownership.

Barcelona, Spain-based Free­v­erse said it is cre­at­ing “liv­ing assets” based on non-fun­gi­ble tokens (NFTs), which so far use the blockchain to authen­ti­cate unique dig­i­tal items. The com­pa­ny is tar­get­ing game devel­op­ers and brands, such as those inter­est­ed in cre­at­ing vir­tu­al avatars and dig­i­tal ver­sions of their products.

Early­bird Ven­ture Cap­i­tal and Tar­get Glob­al led the fund­ing for Free­v­erse. Freeverse.io’s tech allows NFTs to be mon­e­tized and evolve based on how they are used. That’s not very intu­itive, as NFTs are based on the trans­par­ent and secure dig­i­tal ledger of the blockchain, and so they’re sup­posed to be immutable.

In that sense, they’re ide­al for dig­i­tal col­lectibles, which is the rea­son that NFT sales hit any­where from $15 bil­lion (Nonfungible.com) to $25 bil­lion (Dap­pRadar) in 2021. That mar­ket hap­pened because of blockchain-cer­ti­fied dig­i­tal own­er­ship that NFTs made possible. 

Freeverse.io will use the invest­ment to fund a strong go-to-mar­ket push, as well as to con­tin­ue the devel­op­ment of the prod­uct and core technology. 

Freeverse.io aims to bring new life to NFTs.

“Liv­ing assets rep­re­sent the way for­ward for dig­i­tal own­er­ship in the meta­verse and beyond”, said Freeverse.io CEO Alun Evans, in a state­ment. “The fact that Liv­ing Assets are val­ued more by how they are used, as opposed to sim­ple spec­u­la­tion, means that they enable a fair­er and more sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­el for both com­pa­nies and con­sumers. As such, we expect our approach to become a core com­po­nent with­in the emerg­ing web 3 sector.”

Freeverse.io said its core prod­uct is a plat­form that allows com­pa­nies (such as brands, game devel­op­ers, or oth­er con­tent cre­ators) to add a cru­cial new lay­er to their prod­ucts: the abil­i­ty of NFTs to change and evolve based on how they are used by their own­ers. As a result, how the NFT is used has a greater effect on its val­ue than mere­ly its rar­i­ty or scarcity.

One of the main crit­i­cisms of the dig­i­tal col­lectibles boom is that the mar­ket val­ue relies pure­ly on spec­u­la­tion – with con­sumers buy­ing “rare” dig­i­tal assets with the sole inten­tion of sell­ing them while hop­ing for a prof­it. Freeverse’s prod­uct and tech­nol­o­gy offers a way out of this sit­u­a­tion, by allow­ing NFT prop­er­ties to change and evolve.

The com­pa­ny said that, with Freeverse.io, the meta­verse will be pop­u­lat­ed with assets that cap­ture the val­ue pro­vid­ed by their own­ers’ effort and tal­ent using them, instead of just scarci­ty and speculation.

How it works

Freeverse.io said it has devel­oped a “fraud-proof Lay­er-2-based tech­nol­o­gy,” capa­ble of being deployed on the main blockchain net­works (for instance Ethereum, Polka­dot, TRON). The com­pa­ny has made it easy to imple­ment by third par­ties in their appli­ca­tions, and per­mit trad­ing in fiat (such as U.S. dol­lars) too, with­out hav­ing to resort to a cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchange.

The com­pa­ny said that evolv­ing assets requires a new, trans­par­ent, agree­ment between cre­ators and users: the cre­ator con­tin­ues to give full own­er­ship of the asset to the user, who can trade it freely as with any sta­t­ic NFT. How­ev­er, the abil­i­ty to evolve the asset’s state (like turn­ing an ax into a “leg­endary” ax) is retained by the asset cre­ator and can be acti­vat­ed by mul­ti­ple trig­gers: its use in a game, the out­come of decen­tral­ized autonomous orga­ni­za­tions (DAOs, which can gov­ern NFT projects) or oth­er smart con­tracts, or even in response to real-world events.

In each case, with liv­ing assets, the com­pa­ny said it address­es a key issue of stan­dard NFTs: the state of every asset at every point of time is cer­ti­fi­able on-chain, not via exter­nal links to pri­vate servers that can arbi­trar­i­ly cor­rupt this agreement. 

For exam­ple, a buy­er can acquire a weapon with­in World of War­craft if, and only if, it has prop­er­ties cer­ti­fied by Bliz­zard (the cre­ator). Free­v­erse will fol­low up with more imple­men­ta­tion­al details in the future. 

“We are eager to help the indus­try explore the cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties that are unleashed with Liv­ing Assets. We strong­ly believe that the cur­rent NFT boom is but the tip of a huge ice­berg,” the com­pa­ny said.

With Freeverse.io’s web appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ing inter­face (API), cre­ators (ex: game devel­op­ers) can cre­ate end­less quan­ti­ties of NFTs and change the assets’ prop­er­ties at any time, plug­ging into any blockchain to pro­vide on-chain cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the changes, said Evans in an email to GamesBeat.

Freeverse.io aims to cre­ate NFTs that cre­ators can change.

The cre­ator con­tin­ues to give full own­er­ship of the asset to the play­er, who can trade it freely (as with any sta­t­ic NFT). How­ev­er, the abil­i­ty to evolve the NFT (change its prop­er­ties) is retained by the cre­ator, giv­ing them the abil­i­ty to set the rules for how the NFT will evolve. The rules can focus on use in a game, how it ages, the out­come of smart con­tracts, and in response to real-world events, Evans said.

This evo­lu­tion (from sta­t­ic NFTs to evolv­ing NFTs) is key to turn­ing the pas­sive expe­ri­ence of sim­ply “own­ing a dig­i­tal col­lectible” into active engage­ment. It can lead to greater user reten­tion, as users are encour­aged to return to the orig­i­nal cre­ator of their dig­i­tal assets to play, inter­act with, share, and trade them to increase their val­ue. Users could then even col­lect recur­ring rev­enue each time an item changes, improves, or is sold over its life­time, Evans said.

With liv­ing assets, the own­ers’ actions mat­ter, as they return to the cre­at­ing appli­ca­tion to engage with the NFT, to fol­low the real-life per­son or object it rep­re­sents, and to play with it. Users do this because they know that their engage­ment direct­ly affects their assets’ char­ac­ter­is­tics (and, by nat­ur­al exten­sion, val­ue). NFTs become active and engag­ing, instead of pas­sive and immutable.

Items could evolve based on embed­ded game mechan­ics, or how they age; or it could be a cre­ator-authored evo­lu­tion, or based on a real-life feed. You can think of vir­tu­al design­er cloth­ing or pets that you have to wash or groom every day so that it retains qual­i­ty and val­ue (kind of like Tam­agotchi pets) or a famous musician’s vir­tu­al gui­tar evolv­ing based on which con­certs and events it was brought to; or an asset that increas­es lev­el when reach­ing a num­ber of retweets. 

The com­pa­ny said that it has envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies in place that mean these liv­ing assets don’t use a lot of com­put­ing pow­er and so they don’t harm the environment.

A new set of tools

Freeverse.io’s vision for liv­ing assets.

The liv­ing assets will enable a new set of tools for evolv­ing NFTs based on user actions, real-world events, mea­sur­able data, and unlim­it­ed assets. It is up to the cre­ator of the NFTs to choose the right com­bi­na­tion that best suits their purposes. 

As always, design­ing the right eco­nom­ic forces requires a mix­ture of art and sci­ence, the com­pa­ny said. Employ­ing the user actions tool per­mits users to trans­form their effort and skill into mar­ket value.

The com­pa­ny said you can imag­ine a mul­ti­play­er, sports-man­ag­er sim­u­la­tion game, where every play­er on every team is a liv­ing asset, and can be trad­ed them freely on an open mar­ket­place. By com­pet­ing with oth­er users, and train­ing their play­ers, gamers can “lev­el up” their liv­ing assets, mak­ing them more effec­tive in the game, and thus much more val­ued by oth­er gamers. 

The mar­ket mim­ics real life: it has net buy­ers, net sell­ers, and every­thing in between; all the asset prop­er­ties are trans­par­ent and cer­ti­fi­able on the blockchain. The same con­cepts could extend to role-play­ing game mechan­ics, man­age­ment games, or even new­er-style merge or craft­ing games.

Anoth­er exam­ple comes from Tam­agotchi pets. This showed us the val­ue of own­ing and inter­act­ing with a vir­tu­al item — and cre­at­ed a reten­tion mechan­ic that worked extreme­ly well, the com­pa­ny said.

Auto­mat­ed data track­ing adds even fur­ther poten­tial to the idea through a mea­sure­ment tool. You can imag­ine a liv­ing asset that changes based on any exter­nal data that can be mea­sured or auto­mat­i­cal­ly tracked. A liv­ing asset could be auto­mat­i­cal­ly linked to a cer­tain hash­tag on Twit­ter. The num­ber of tweets fea­tur­ing the hash­tag could auto­mat­i­cal­ly change the asset’s appear­ance, its abil­i­ty to access a fea­ture in a vir­tu­al world, or its “pow­er” in a game.

A liv­ing asset asso­ci­at­ed with a real-world char­ac­ter could be linked to (and change based on) the num­ber of shares of an Insta­gram sto­ry fea­tur­ing that char­ac­ter it is asso­ci­at­ed with. And the com­pa­ny said a liv­ing asset could be linked to the amount of traf­fic to a spe­cif­ic web­site, area with­in a vir­tu­al world, or even the num­ber of Google search­es for a spe­cif­ic phrase.

Unlimited assets

Freeverse.io could enable new game economies.

Free­v­erse said one of the ways that Duke Nukem 3D rev­o­lu­tion­ized shoot-em-up games in the mid-90s, was with destruc­tible assets. Gamers sud­den­ly entered an era where they start­ed tak­ing for grant­ed that every sin­gle game object should be interactive.

The com­pa­ny said a sim­i­lar change in mind­set is pos­si­ble with liv­ing assets, thanks to the Layer‑2 tech behind them, which per­mits the reg­is­tra­tion and evo­lu­tion of mas­sive amounts of assets at vir­tu­al­ly no cost.

NFTs are cur­rent­ly asso­ci­at­ed with “expen­sive,” with large sums being paid for “select­ed” NFTs mak­ing the head­lines, the com­pa­ny said. 

You can con­sid­er a sit­u­a­tion where every asset in a game can be assigned to users for free. Such assets start at zero mar­ket val­ue, but with care­ful use of the user actions tool (described above) users who spend time and effort in the game will improve their liv­ing assets, so that the mar­ket val­ue is ful­ly deter­mined by actions, send­ing user-reten­tion upward. 

As a result, the com­pa­ny said we end up with NFTs with mar­ket val­ues rang­ing from zero to what­ev­er the game pop­u­lar­i­ty allows, and core val­ues asso­ci­at­ed with “reten­tion, effort, skill and fairness.”

And the com­pa­ny said that the old­er build­ing blocks of NFT 1.0 still apply — if every bul­let in the game is an NFT, what would be the price for the win­ning bul­let in a Counter-Strike: Glob­al Offen­sive Championship?

At the core of Freeverse’s idea is the evo­lu­tion enabled by Liv­ing Assets is key to turn­ing the pas­sive expe­ri­ence of sim­ply “own­ing a dig­i­tal col­lectible” into active engage­ment. And this, in turn, leads to greater user reten­tion, as liv­ing asset own­ers are encour­aged to return to the orig­i­nal cre­ator of their dig­i­tal assets; to play, inter­act with, get informed about, share, and trade them.

Freeverse.io uses a nov­el Layer‑2 tech­nol­o­gy that can be plugged into almost any blockchain, the com­pa­ny said. Cur­rent­ly, Free­v­erse is live on Poly­gon but it will be deployed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly on oth­er chains in the near future. 

Freeverse.io believes liv­ing assets will pow­er the metaverse.

The com­pa­ny as 16 employ­ees. Over time, the com­pa­ny believes that its tech can pow­er meta­verse economies.

“While 2021 may have been ‘the year of the NFT’, NFTs that can be changed by their own­ers, such as Freeverse’s Liv­ing Assets pro­vide a more sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­el for the sec­tor, as their mar­ket val­ue is not decid­ed by arti­fi­cial con­cepts of scarci­ty,” said Chris­t­ian Nagel, part­ner at Early­bird, in a statement. 

Along­side Early­bird and Tar­get, exist­ing investors Adara Ven­tures and 4Founders Cap­i­tal, as well as glob­al dig­i­tal media giant, One­Foot­ball, are join­ing the round. Notable angels include inter­na­tion­al foot­ball star Mario Götze, Trav­elperk CEO Avi Meir, One­Foot­ball CEO Lucas von Cranach, and Maex Ament, cofounder of Tau­lia and Centrifuge.

“The infra­struc­ture the Free­v­erse team has built address­es the lim­i­ta­tions that NFTs have today, includ­ing the abil­i­ty for brands to pro­tect their brand equi­ty. They’ve come up with a con­trar­i­an approach to oth­er pure­ly decen­tral­ized plays – but one that we believe is nec­es­sary for mass adop­tion of NFTs”, said Lina Chong, invest­ment direc­tor at Tar­get Glob­al, in a statement.

Freeverse’s found­ing team has tech and start­up vet­er­ans includ­ing Toni Mateos, co-cre­ator of the tech­nol­o­gy behind Dol­by Atmos (via Immosound, the start­up acquired by the audio giant in 2012). Join­ing him in the found­ing team are Evans, Alessan­dro Sinis­calchi and Fer­ran Estalella.

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