Animoca Brands Launches DAO to Develop Metaverse Standards: Here's How Its Different From MSF

Hong Kong-based Web 3 giant Animoca Brands has launched a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) called the Open Metaverse Alliance for Web 3 (OMA3), which aims to ensure virtual land, digital assets, ideas and services are highly interoperable between platforms and transparent to all communities. OMA3, which is meant to operate like a consortium, already has a number of member sign-ons including Animoca's subsidiary The Sandbox, as well as, other popular metaverse gaming platforms such as Decantraland, Splinterlands, Cryptovoxels, Dapper Labs, and Alien Worlds.

In addition to the Web 3 projects already affiliated with Animoca Brands, the alliance includes DAO framework developer Wivity, virtual reality and games developer Space, and blockchain game company Upland.

"We believe in a metaverse without restraining walls, where individual platforms are interconnected and fully interoperable," OMA3 said in a blog post.

"The standards we create are guided by the goals of true ownership and real-time interoperability," the group adds.

OMA3 says it will build the alliance's infrastructure to ensure the metaverse operates as a unified system where digital assets, identities, and data are permissionless and controlled by users, not platforms.

The group also asserts that users will own their assets and will be able to freely transfer them to any OMA3 world without the individual platform's permission.

According to OMA3, this new decentralised autonomous organisation, better known as a DAO, will operate as a consortium, guided by inclusivity, transparency, and Web 3 principles.

The companies' announcement of the new Blockchain-based organisation comes just after the announcement of another Metaverse “alliance' known as the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF). This group's founders are Microsoft, Meta (formerly Facebook), Alibaba, and Sony.

The MSF has around 650 members so far and its mission states that "the potential of the metaverse will be best realised if it is built on a foundation of open standards" and provides a venue for cooperation between standard organisations and companies to foster the development of interoperability standards for an open and inclusive metaverse.