How Wilder World Aims to Integrate the Metaverse, NFTs and Social Media
NFTs have been the most hyped commodities in crypto of late, but the most innovative projects are just beginning to emerge. After the endless ‘exclusive NFT drops’ and bubble-tempting auctions, there is now a sense that an era of deep exploration and jaw-dropping innovation is underway.
One project taking NFTs to a new level is Wilder World. Community-owned and entirely decentralized, Wilder World is a budding NFT market that merges valuable in-game 3D assets with the crypto world, creating an immersive metaverse like no other. Wilder World’s native social platform for Augmented and Virtual Reality unites artists, collectors, traders and gamers - on a massive scale.
Ground Zero in Wilder World
Conceived as a metaverse powered completely by NFTs and built on Zero.Space, Wilder World has been rapidly expanding along with the surging interest in NFTs and DeFi as well as the increased popularization of Virtual Reality. We are only a year away from when Apple’s highly touted AR headset is scheduled to hit the markets, with a sleeker pair of AR glasses coming soon after.
If NFTs are to continue their momentum, they’ll need greater liquidity and utility than they currently have. With this in mind, Wilder World has created a diverse ecosystem that they hope will transform the NFT economy. It allows artists to profit from their work while giving gamers the ability to buy avatars and collectibles that they can use within the metaverse or trade on the open market.
Created by a founding team that includes celebrated NFT artist, Frank Wilder, Wilder World isn’t just an immersive metaverse and NFT ecosystem. It’s also a place where users can host events like virtual meetings and conferences, and where they can own and monetize tracts of land a la another virtual game world, Decentraland.
The social media aspect, meanwhile, comes from a decentralized, purpose-built network vertically integrated into the platform. Dubbed “The Artist Guild”, the social network for Wilder’s community brings together artists and gamers who can share messages and videos or showcase novel NFTs.
Another integration is the Mint FactOry, which connects digital artists with luminaries from the entertainment industry. The idea being that influential figures can leverage their celebrity and tap into the artistic talents of a Wilder World artist to design, mint and drop exclusive NFTs. Over 250 of today’s top 3D artists have already onboarded, with thousands of works due to roll out when the metaverse launches later this year.
From Art Galleries to Augmented Reality
Wilder World has evolved at breathtaking speed in the last 12 months: it originally started life as a crowdsourced AR-based art gallery, which compelled smartphone users to collect 3D artworks in the real world. Ostensibly, paintings and other pieces of art would be geo-mapped and users could wield their phone cameras to find and collect them, just like Pokémon Go.
It’s fair to say today’s vision is far more elaborate. In addition to a rich in-game metaverse (Wilder World 3D) and their integrated social platform, Wilder World also features a liquid NFT market, where 3D art-based NFTs become fractionalized, liquid assets. The NFTs are then tradeable in the crypto and DeFi realms, sealing the fate for the democratization of art. Before the end of the year, the Wilders plan to launch NFT yield pools, enabling users to earn a return on their staked assets.
Speaking of crypto-assets, Wilder World features two tokens: $WILD is a governance token used to incentivize network growth, and $LOOT is an ETH-backed dynamic token required for all transactions and able to scale liquidity through the use of a bonding curve. In particular, LOOT tokens are needed to mint NFTs. A DAO-controlled treasury governed by WILD token-holders, meanwhile, is in charge of the issuance of virtual land within the metaverse.
It’s not difficult to imagine Wilder World and projects like it taking off during the exciting next phase of NFTs. The global gaming industry is expected to reach $295 billion over the next five years, with gamers already spending over $100 million on purchases in the pre-VR era. Expect that figure to soar when Augmented Reality makes virtual worlds irresistible.
If art-based NFTs can, in some instances, command eight-figure price tags, coveted photorealistic metaverse collectibles (vehicles, accessories, buildings) which users can interact within an immersive gaming environment are likely to sell like hotcakes.
Artists, creators and collectors are currently being invited to ‘apply’ to Wilder World via the platform’s website, with over 15,000 interested parties currently in the books. Devotees of Second Life and The Sims probably don’t need to be convinced. For everyone else, Wilder World will have to show that it’s more than a nifty concept at the juxtaposition of crypto, AR and social media.
