Back In The Game: Ripple Joins $54 Million Funding Round For Metaverse Startup

July 19, 2023

Ripple has been mostly preoccupied with its lawsuit with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, with a partially favorable ruling from Judge Analisa Torres last week stating that XRP tokens sold on the secondary market are not securities, the crypto firm has turned its attention to other things. This time around, Ripple has dipped its toes into the metaverse sector, joining a massive funding round for Futureverse.

Ripple Joins $54 Million Funding Round For Futureverse

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Futureverse, a metaverse startup, had raised a total of $54 million. The company completed the Series A funding round, although at an undisclosed valuation. But the interesting part of the raise was the parties involved.

The raise was led by 10T Holdings, a crypto investment firm. However, the funding round seems to have managed to draw the attention of Ripple Labs as well. The raise is also significant in the fact that it took place at a time when crypto-related companies are seeing a decline in funding.

Interestingly, the Futureverse startup is a combination of other startups. According to the Bloomberg report, Futureverse is actually a combination of 11 startups that span across different industries. These include metaverse, gaming, and artificial intelligence (AI), among others.

Nevertheless, most of Futureverse’s products so far seem to be combining metaverse, gaming, and AI. The startup currently has a football (soccer) game that can be played on mobile called ‘AI League’ that has also been licensed by FIFA. Its next gamin product is said to be a boxing game leveraging the power of AI.

A Return Fueled By Positive Sentiment

Ripple has regained its foothold in the crypto industry following the court’s ruling against the SEC last week. With this, both the company and its native token, XRP, have experienced renewed vigor in the market. One example is Ripple looking to leverage real-world assets which it expects to reach a $30 trillion market cap in the next decade.

Following the ruling as well, the price of XRP jumped by over 60%, bringing the digital asset to its highest level since December 2021. Since then, XRP has continued on a bullish streak, surpassing Bitcoin in terms of average weekly volume, and emerging as one of the top performers in the space.

Presently, the price of XRP is sitting at $0.791, representing a 4.92% increase in the last 24 hours. On the 7-day chart, the cryptocurrency is seeing gains of 67% and is now the 4th-largest cryptocurrency with its market cap resting at $41.5 billion.