Animal-Themed Metaverse Arkverse Prepares to Launch

Arkverse, which bills itself as a metaverse created “by animals, for animals,” is getting ready to set sail.

“Arkverse is more than just a play-to-earn metaverse,” the South Korea-based platform said in a news release Friday (Jan. 21).

“Notably, it extends into developing the world’s premiere virtual ecosystem. Users may immerse themselves in an exciting open world of creatures. In addition, they can learn about many environmental challenges. The initiative plans to empower people by contributing to animal rights organizations.”

Arkverse says its goal is to create an ecosystem that lets users explore, design and share content related to animals in an interactive open world that contains play-to-earn games that lets users earn real money.

The platform plans to launch a series of ARK NFTs — the first batch consisting of 2,022 tigers — starting Feb. 1. NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are the coin of the realm for the metaverse. These tokens are digital assets that can hold any type of media, such as pictures, videos and data. And in addition to storing the media, the tokens are traceable on the blockchain, providing proof of provenance.

Read more: Facebook, Instagram Jump Into NFTs, a Springboard to the Metaverse

Arkverse’s announcement comes at the end of a week that saw quite a bit of metaverse-related news. As we reported Thursday (Jan. 20), Meta’s two main social networks, Facebook and Instagram, have begun working on a project that would make it easy and cost-effective for users to mint, trade and display NFTs.

In doing so, Meta is both jumping into the lucrative corner of the crypto market – NFTs are a $44.2 billion business – and also taking a crucial first step at achieving CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s goal of becoming a Metaverse powerhouse.

See also: Microsoft’s Activision Bid to Draw Scrutiny Across Regulatory Agencies and on Capitol Hill

This week also saw Microsoft make a bid to purchase the video game company Activision for as much as $69 billion, a historic deal and Microsoft’s biggest purchase ever, which is widely viewed as the software giant’s bet on the burgeoning metaverse.