Tech companies enter agreement for 'Japan Metaverse Economic Zone'

Interest in the metaverse is accelerating at a global rate, with countries all over the world joining in the rush to get involved.

In Japan, a country often associated with its legacy technology sector, a group of well-known tech companies entered into an agreement on Feb. 27 to forward the creation of the “Japan Metaverse Economic Zone.”

Along with creating the Japan Metaverse Economic Zone, the agreement’s focus is on building an open metaverse infrastructure called “Ryugukoku,” which will spark the next wave of metaverse development.

This open metaverse infrastructure will help create interoperable tools available for users and developers across various platforms. It will also serve as a new social infrastructure for enterprise digital transformation.

According to its terms, companies who have signed the agreement will integrate their “respective technologies and services” in an effort to create Ryugukoku. This includes gamification, fintech, and information and communication technologies.

The Japan Metaverse Economic Zone will be an ecosystem that will ultimately be a result of the interoperability between different metaverse services and platforms available to consumers in Japan. The agreement also mentions the future possibility of “providing this infrastructure to companies and government agencies outside of Japan.”

Japanese companies who have entered into this agreement include Fujitsu Ltd., Mitsubishi Corporation and TBT Lab Inc., among a handful of others.

Japanese regulators have been shifting their attention to the country’s financial technology sector. On Feb. 1, the country’s prime minister recognized decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) as a way to support the government’s ‘Cool Japan’ strategy.

However, the exploration of DAOs as governance tools goes back to November 2022, when Japan’s Digital Agency launched its own DAO.

Most recently, the Bank of Japan announced that it plans to launch its official central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot before May 2023.