Freeverse and the LAOS Foundation are unveiling LAOS, a new universal Layer-1 blockchain dedicated to interoperable digital assets.
In a groundbreaking collaboration, Barcelona, Spain-based Freeverse, a Web3 technology startup, and the foundation have introduced LAOS to revolutionize digital asset ownership and tokenization across various blockchains.
Positioned as a solution to surmount persistent challenges such as high gas fees, limited throughput, and congestion peaks in prominent blockchains, LAOS emerges as a transformative platform for enhanced usability and interoperability in the digital asset landscape.
The current blockchain environment grapples with scalability issues, impacting users and developers, and forcing them away from established ecosystems. LAOS emerges as a potential resolution to these hurdles, offering bridgeless connectivity. This feature allows users and developers to operate within their preferred mature ecosystems while decentralizing asset properties within the LAOS framework.
Addressing the limitations of existing solutions, Alun Evans, CEO at Freeverse, highlighted LAOS’ capability to handle up to one million transactions per second within Polkadot, maintaining full Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility and decentralization. The platform’s design assures users and developers of scalability without sacrificing decentralization.
“Today, we are announcing a vision for an interoperable future for digital assets,” said Evans, in a statement. “Whether it’s for tokenizing real-world assets or creating assets for a game or virtual world, LAOS is positioned to meet the market’s evolving needs.”
LAOS’ potential extends beyond scalability; it aligns with the burgeoning demand for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization and gaming. The platform’s architecture enables the dynamic representation of RWAs on-chain, ensuring accuracy and timeliness of data.
Additionally, in gaming, LAOS empowers millions of assets to be minted, traded across blockchains, and customized by gamers, promising asset value based on utility rather than speculative nature.
While the official launch of LAOS on Polkadot is scheduled for spring 2024, a beta version is currently operational in Polkadot’s ‘canary’ environment, Kusama. Users can immediately mint assets at marginal costs on Ethereum or Polygon.
Freeverse was founded by Toni Mateos, co-creator of the technology behind Dolby Atmos. The company’s investors include earlybird venture capital and Target Global, along with prominent figures like international footballer Mario Götze and Travelperk CEO Avi Meir.
Established in Zug, Switzerland, in August 2023, the LAOS Foundation is a non-profit organization driving decentralized ecosystems and fostering leading-edge technologies in the realm of digital ownership. It aims to spearhead an era where digital assets seamlessly integrate into mainstream use, ensuring compliance with legislation and robust evolution across various blockchains.
In an email to GamesBeat, Evans said the LAOS Foundation is a not-for-profit organization which is legally independent from Freeverse. In these initial stages, the foundation board is composed of the Freeverse founders, though the goal is to openly and transparently move the foundation to a decentralized management structure, as the LAOS network grows, and its utility token becomes more distributed.
Freeverse does not own any part of the foundation. At the launch of the chain and utility token, Freeverse existing investors will receive a quantity of tokens, as described in the token paper.
Freeverse itself has 26 employees.
We are 26 employees at the moment. Asked about the significance of the announcement and support for a new blockchain, Evans said, “We are on the cusp of a world where many, many items will become tokenized on the blockchain in some way. Real-world assets, such as invoices, certificates, royalties, real-estate, financial instruments, etc. are now being moved on-chain. New legislation such as the EU Digital Product Passport, will only further drive tokenization.”
He added, “And in the virtual and gaming world, user-generated content has become an expected feature of all games and virtual worlds, and generative AI is creating massive amounts of new content every minute. Blockchain technology is an ideal solution to generate immutable proof of who created an asset, how it has been used, and who currently owns it.”
And he said, “All these use-cases require something that doesn’t yet exist: a way to mint assets on-chain at a throughput and low-cost unheard of before, a way to stay connected seamlessly to the most mature blockchain ecosystems, such as Ethereum, and a way to extend the metadata associated with any asset, in a decentralized and permissionless way. All this will be possible with LAOS.”
He said the company sees LAOS less as ‘just another blockchain’, and more as a way to create and manage digital assets in partnership with all chains.
As for making digital assets interoperable, Evans said, “LAOS allows anybody to [without permission] link any additional metadata they want to any asset – even one that already exists. Imagine, for example, you were making a new game, and wanted to permit all the owners of a famous existing asset collection (e.g. bored apes) to use these assets in your new game.”
With LAOS, you can associate new metadata to this asset, or any asset in any chain. For example, you could associate a new image, or 3D model, or some stats that would be useful for the game (e.g. “Strength: 10; Speed: 15” etc.). Then the owner of that asset can choose to accept that that metadata be associated with the original asset and use it in the game with that data.
“So it essentially permits extending the on-chain metadata of any asset, so it can be used in any game. It is inspired by the decentralized identity concept, to the extent that we have been referring to it as ‘Decentralized Asset Identity.’ Though I think ‘Decentralized Asset Metadata Extension’ is more descriptive,” he said.