IMVU: Making the coin of the realm for the metaverse

IMVU has been a relatively quiet and unnoticed company in the online gaming and social media worlds. But the company did something recently that could benefit the whole industry: It received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to enable payments in its virtual world through a blockchain-based cryptocurrency dubbed VCoin.

With its ruling in November 2020, the SEC enabled IMVU to allow users to buy and sell goods with VCoin and also to cash out and convert it to Ethereum, a well-known cryptocurrency, or into U.S. dollars. The so-called “no-action letter” from the SEC lays the groundwork for other companies to do the same thing, and that’s one of foundations of the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. IMVU will be talking about this development at our GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse event on January 27-28. IMVU will launch its VCoin cryptocurrency soon for its own users.