Topia, the leading platform for creating social experiences with decentralized spatial chat inside fully customizable virtual worlds, announced feature launches and key new investment. Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures join Topia investors Alexis Ohanians’ Seven Seven Six and Bonfire Ventures. As an industry first, Topia has expanded its creator ecosystem with the launch of their verified NFT system. With this system, ERC-721 NFT owners can verify and place their on-chain assets inside Topia worlds and collaboratively create NFT galleries. Topia’s peer-to-peer webrtc streams are decentralized, allowing secure end-to-end encrypted browser-based chat. In addition to the new verified NFT system, Topia also introduced member profiles, enabling unique usernames and greater relationship building within Topia worlds.With the new gallery feature, NFTs can be displayed publicly in a Topia world where friends, family, colleagues, and the general public can be invited to view and discuss them. Topia is maintaining a publicly available verified NFT gallery in topia.io/nft and holding a public launch event with a series of talks on December 14 in topia.io/pixel.“The emergence of NFTs represents a major milestone for Web3, decentralized technology, and the interoperable creator economy. Until now, it has been challenging to showcase NFTs in real-time social experiences online. We wanted to replicate the ability to socialize around art, as you would in our home, at a gallery, or museum,” said Topia CEO and co-founder Daniel Liebeskind. “Decentralized databases are great for creators, who get to add assets to a shared public backend and leave it up to platforms like Topia to build interoperable frontends that increase the value of their creations. Since founding Topia two years ago, we’ve been on a mission to empower the creation of social experiences for real-time connection and play. Verified NFTs and owner profiles represent our commitment to the growing interoperable metaverse and enable Topia world builders to create hybrid on-chain, off-chain social experiences that showcase NFTs and are accessible to everyone.”How Verified NFTs work in Topia — A new menu option allows Topia users to connect Ethereum accounts to their Topia account. All of the user’s ERC-721 NFTs will be populated into their asset library and can be placed within Topia’s worlds. Similar to original art in the physical world, an NFT can only exist in one place at a time across the entire Topia universe. Hovering over a placed NFT will reveal a “verified NFT” badge that confirms its on-chain identity and its owner’s Topia profile. Placed NFTs can also be added to a user’s profile to highlight worlds.About Topia Since launching in April of 2020, Topia has grown to see hundreds of user-hosted events every week. Topia’s scalable architecture can handle events ranging from a few friends to thousands of concurrent guests coming together. The free-to-use platform has co-hosted virtual Burning Man twice and attracted a diverse range of users from families, students, and schools, to companies, music and arts festivals, and Fortune 500 companies. Large companies and confluencers have been hiring agencies to build out branded Topia worlds for their employees and fans to foster creativity and collaboration. topia.io
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