Futureverse News - February 2025
Welcome to the February edition of Futureverse News – your trusted source for key updates and insights from across our ecosystem and beyond.
Welcome to the February edition of Futureverse News – your trusted source for key updates and insights from across our ecosystem and beyond. In this edition, we’ll take a closer look at how The Readyverse’s massive Shibuya City partnership is reimagining the way people engage with iconic locations around the world. We’re also unlocking insights straight from our leadership team, showcasing gameplay updates from The Third Kingdom, exploring how memes can drive engagement for brands, and more. Let’s dive into February’s highlights to see how we’re pushing boundaries and building on a significant last 12 months for our business and partners.
The heart of Tokyo, reimagined.
Shibuya Reloaded is an immersive digital experience unveiled during DIG Shibuya in Tokyo – a premier event celebrating Shibuya’s innovation and digital future. Teaming up with Shibuya City and Futureverse, The Readyverse team is developing an experience that redefines how people explore real-world destinations through metaverse integration.
During DIG Shibuya, we revealed the hero video and the website for the first time, and all attendees were invited to create a Shibuya.Pass – a digital passport giving holders early access to the experience and enabling them to be among the first to unlock a digital pet inspired by Hachiko, the faithful Akita who spent years waiting for his owner at Shibuya Station.
Shibuya.Pass uses Futureverse’s purpose-built onboarding solution, Pass, that provides a secure, customizable, and scalable way for developers and businesses to easily integrate digital authentication management into apps, games, and business services. The Pass platform is designed for scalability and offers customizable branding, allowing companies to tailor the experience to their needs. Secure and seamless sign-in makes it easy for customers to sign up using existing social accounts, email, and wallets and enjoy unprecedented access to games, experiences, tools, utilities, and rewards in the open metaverse.
In Shibuya Reloaded, a Shibuya.Pass unlocks exclusive access to an innovative collaboration that brings Tokyo’s iconic district into the expansive world of the Ready Player universe. The experience reimagines legendary landmarks, including the Shibuya Scramble Crossing, Shibuya Station, the Shibuya 109 building, and more, and captures the district’s vibrant culture for the metaverse. Launching in 2025, Shibuya Reloaded invites a global audience to explore Shibuya like never before.
Anyone who’s visited Tokyo in the physical world knows it pulses with energy around the clock, with its history and landmarks shaping its unique identity. Now, iconic spaces like Shibuya are being remastered for the digital age, and onboarding technology like Pass makes stepping into these new experiences easy.
Navigating the digital future: Insights from Futureverse’s CEO
Co-founder and CEO Aaron McDonald’s X account is a valuable resource for information about where the web3 industry is headed – and how Futureverse is shaping the next wave of games and experiences. This month, Aaron shared key insights on X exploring the power of Pass in enabling seamless onboarding, the future of The Third Kingdom game, and his view on the implications of the DeepSeek AI crash. Below, we've curated highlights from his posts to offer a glimpse into his perspective on reimagining player-driven experiences, unlocking new efficiencies in identity management, and examining the challenges of emerging technology. Be sure to follow @aaronmcdnz for ongoing thought leadership, behind the scenes Futureverse content, industry analysis, and more.
@aaronmcdnz
5 FEB 2025
Deepseek AI Crash
What happened with the DeepSeek AI crash in web3 reinforces my view that web3 markets are irrational. A new powerful open source model that competes with the best big tech models should have been Valhalla bullish for decentralized. Except the opposite happened.
8 FEB 2025
Shibuya Reloaded Pass
This is the first (of many) custom branded pass smart wallet domains. When combined with the new in chain attribution pallet on The Root Network, brands get powerful community onboarding and loyalty tools built right into the network.
17 FEB 2025
The Third Kingdom
We’re working on two things:
1. Changing some of the mechanics so less frequent play is required. Maybe once a day or once a week would be enough.
2. In Episode 2, we’ll be implementing some “automation” which will be slightly less effective than those who play more but give more time back to those who want it.
The Third Kingdom launched the Lost Archipelago Campaign
The latest milestone in Futureverse’s premier adventure strategy game launched in the form of a dynamic new feature called Team Challenges. Designed to foster collaboration and competition between Cerebra, Valora, and Lumera, this update empowers players to work together to uncover the Mycelium Archipelago while playing for Mycelium production bonuses – a critical advantage that increases the rate at which players harvest Mycelium in Episode 2, giving them a greater chance to unlock more rewards through strategic play.
The Mycelium Archipelago is divided into eight sectors: North, North-East, East, South-East, South, South-West, West, and North-West. Each week, teams take on a unique challenge to reveal a new sector – ranging from prestiging and resource harvesting to energy generation. The first team to complete their challenge secures a Mycelium production bonus for that sector.
So far, six challenges have been completed and seven sectors revealed, with Lumera securing four boosts, and Cerebra and Valora earning three each. Once all sectors are uncovered, the stage will be set for the next evolution of the game and plans to launch Episode 2 are in the works. In the upcoming Episode, Mycelium harvesting will be introduced, allowing players to place SurrealScapes on revealed sectors to unlock Mycelium harvesting missions.
With Team Challenges now in play, The Third Kingdom continues to push the boundaries of interactive strategy, offering deeper engagement and new opportunities for players to influence the world around them. As the game evolves, expect even more innovations that redefine competitive and cooperative play.
Memes mean business: Futureverse technology is taking branded content to the next level
In a world where attention is currency and relevance is everything, memes have evolved into a brand’s secret weapon for community engagement. Memes are a powerful marketing tool for businesses, and Futureverse is making it easier than ever to harness meme culture with custom AI-generated content, empowering communities to create and share on-brand, viral-ready memes.
ALTERED STATE’s Meme Generator is built using Futureverse’s powerful generative AI technology. It can produce a polished, ready-to-go post within a minute with no briefing or photoshop template required. The AI can be customized to bring any mascot or brand character to life, as demonstrated in our initial use case with Cool Cats, who invited their community to step into the world of Blue Cat through a branded content-making contraption known as Ardi’s Meme Machine. The Cool Cats Meme Generator was closely followed by a reskinned version for FLUF World, and a Goblin Meme Machine that acted as the ultimate weapon for the Futureverse community to unleash chaos in their newsfeeds.
The user experience is extremely simple – anyone can enter a text prompt or upload an image and see the AI transform it into a high-quality shareable social image. Memes may be funny business, but we take training seriously. Our AI is responsibly-trained on IP that we or our partners own, ensuring transparency, and respect for creators and communities.
More than just internet humor, memes have become a strategic asset for brand storytelling and engagement. By tapping into humor, relatability, and cultural moments, they can spread organically across social media, amplifying brand awareness with minimal investment. Compared to traditional ad campaigns, meme-driven content offers brands a high-impact, cost-effective way to reach and connect with audiences in today’s overcrowded social landscape. If you’re interested in training your very own Meme Machine either for your community or just as an internal tool for your project or IP, let’s talk about how we can make it happen.
You can try the meme generators for free and see how they work.
Blink and you missed it
Quests: Meme design and DEX mastery on show
Quest 017: The Meme’s weekly challenge called on the Futureverse community to craft unique memes using ALTERED STATE’s Meme Machine for the chance to win a Cool Cats Shadow Wolf. Quest 018: The Pool also launched in February, with participants adding $ROOT liquidity to the Native ROOT/XRP pool on Tradeverse or Dexter by mastering the basics of decentralized exchanges (DEX) and unlocking $ROOT Rewards along the way.
OP3N teased a new metro arena
OP3N, the next-gen game world inspired by and interwoven with the Ready Player One universe, dropped a sneak peek of a futuristic metro arena that will be available when the game launches. Players will chart a course through this breathtaking metropolis to score wins in the first genre-defining AAA metaverse gaming experience powered by interoperable technology.
The rise of intelligent digital assets
A newly published blog from The Root Network examines a solution that will allow AI and Blockchain tech to move us closer to a truly open and intelligent metaverse. The blog uncovers how the new Non-fungible Intelligence (NFI) pallet stores all of the intelligent metadata, allowing collection owners to make their collections NFI enabled. This will open up limitless opportunities as compatible tokens begin training and becoming smarter than ever before.
Plug and play: Jen makes AI music creation effortless
Jen, the high-fidelity, ethically-trained, AI-driven music platform, showed off how easy it is to create a track from a single text prompt. Whether you're inspired by a song in your heart or a melody in your mind, Jen helps you generate, iterate, and refine tracks, catapulting your creativity to new heights.
Futureverse in real life
The Root Network Refresher: Quarterly Ecosystem Update
In The Root Network’s recent Quarterly Update X Space hosted by co-founder of Token Relations, Jacquelyn Melinek, Aaron explained in detail how the network’s infrastructure is shaping the future of gaming by merging web2’s ease of use with web3’s powerful connectivity. He explained how The Root Network enables seamless cross-chain integration, making in-game assets like avatars, environments, and AI agents more dynamic and portable. The conversation highlighted how on-chain protocols like THINK and UBF empower developers to build freely while ensuring their content works effortlessly across networks. Designed specifically for gaming, The Root Network’s tightly integrated stack enhances user experiences, simplifies onboarding for brands and communities, and drives adoption by enabling true ownership through interoperability.
Futureverse is the core developer of The Root Network, which provides AI and metaverse technologies to enable interoperable, scalable apps, games, and experiences in the open metaverse.
Behind the mic
Our team was busy dropping knowledge across different platforms throughout February. Explore the latest podcast episodes and articles here:
- Shara Senderoff joined Portia Sabin on The Future of What podcast to chat all things Jen
- Thinking Out Loud weekly X Spaces with Leni Ayoub and the THINK team
- Leni joined WAGMIHub X Spaces exploring AI Agents on XRPL
Catch up on key insights from our latest Open Space on X. In this edition, Futureverse Head of Social, Krista Gambrel, led an engaging discussion with Aaron and members of our community covering progress around questing and rewards, Sylo, partnerships, and fielded live questions from the audience.
Ecosystem happenings
aigent.run launched on The Root Network
aigent.run, a decentralized platform from Gen3 Games that enables users to deploy AI agents, generate memecoins, and engage in frictionless trading, launched on The Root Network and XRPL. The Root Network provides the infrastructure for the platform which incorporates our Non-Fungible Intelligence (NFI) Pallet and the THINK Protocol, allowing AI agents to develop unique, mutable characteristics — such as their genome and Murmur Matrix — further expanding their unique capabilities over time. Dive into the latest blog to learn about the beginning of an exciting new era for decentralized AI within The Root Network and XRP ecosystems.
Sequence is now integrated with The Root Network
In a major development, The Root Network announced the integration of Sequence, the leading open-source development platform that powers blockchain ecosystems, games, and apps. This partnership marks a significant step toward building a more connected and user-friendly open metaverse, addressing key industry challenges such as usability, scalability, and interoperability. For developers, this integration provides access to a robust blockchain infrastructure that enables seamless connections between games and content. For players, it offers a smoother, more secure entry into the decentralized world.
Zerpmon released a new use case for the Material World protocol
Gen3 Games’ innovative and evolving digital trading card game, Zerpmon, is the next great use case of The Third Kingdom’s Material World protocol. Now, anyone who plays The Third Kingdom can use their resources from The Material World to unlock a range of rewards in Zerpmon. With their new Resource Conversion System going live in February, trading resources for Zerpmon, equipment, items, and staking points will boost passive gains. It’s exciting to see the progress Gen3 Games is making as they develop more utility, interoperability, and ways to play.
Thanks for joining us for the February edition of Futureverse News. We hope you feel more connected than ever to the pulse of what’s happening in our ecosystem. Our aim is to keep you in the loop on all the latest product announcements, thought leadership articles, and company updates. Stay tuned to our social channels for weekly wrap-ups covering the exciting developments shaping our virtual worlds. Until next time, remember, we’re not building the future. You are. 💫