Janus VR Joins High Fidelity in Founding the Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance

We at Janus VR are excited to be a founding partner in the Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance (VRBA) with High Fidelity. We believe in the disruptive power of decentralized platforms, and of the power of blockchain technology to provide bridges between previously disparate virtual worlds. Janus has always existed with the goal of bringing any immersive content onto our platform, including interoperating with other virtual worlds themselves - creating the open metaverse that exists in our collective imagination. The formation of the alliance and the interoperability between virtual worlds enabled by the VRBA represents a significant step toward the goal of a shared and open metaverse. As Chris Dixon writes: "Centralized platforms have been dominant for so long that many people have forgotten there is a better way to build internet services. Cryptonetworks are a powerful way to develop community-owned networks and provide a level playing field for 3rd-party developers, creators, and businesses. We saw the value of decentralized systems in the first era of the internet. Hopefully we’ll get to see it again in the next." Fundamentally, Janus builds a universe of virtual worlds from the decentralized platform of the web itself. The use of blockchain technology is the next logical step, as it provides a meaningful solution to an important problem: portability of identity between virtual worlds. Such portability enables many new capabilities, for example: avatars that provide a consistent appearance between worlds, or enabling transactions with cryptocurrencies or any other kind of digital asset, with transactions occurring in-world or even between-world. All of this data will exist within a decentralized, public, secure network that will itself allow open exploration and visualization (something we are very enthusiastic about working on). As Christopher Allen writes in "The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity", self-sovereign identity occurs in four phases: Centralized, Federated, User-Centric and Self-Sovereign. As the federation grows, so does the number of nodes in the network, bringing us closer to decentralization and the ultimate goal of self-sovereign identity. We hope to see many other companies and organizations join the VRBA and grow our federated network. References: JanusVR and High Fidelity Found Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance https://blog.highfidelity.com/janusvr-and-high-fidelity-found-virtual-reality-blockchain-alliance-3f894ee64ca7 Chris Dixon - Why Decentralization Matters https://medium.com/@cdixon/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f79f7638e Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v0.9 Data Model and Syntaxes for Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/ Decentralized Identity Foundation http://identity.foundation/ Decentralized Identity Foundation Universal Resolver https://github.com/decentralized-identity/universal-resolver High Fidelity is Architecting for VR Privacy with Self-Sovereign Identity Voices of VR Podcast – Episode #533 http://voicesofvr.com/533-high-fidelity-is-architecting-for-vr-privacy-with-self-sovereign-identity/ Decentralizing Identity in VR with Holonet & Self-Sovereign Identity Voices of VR Podcast – Episode #625 https://www.roadtovr.com/decentralizing-identity-in-vr-with-holonet-self-sovereign-identity/ The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity.html