Back in the mid-to-late 2010’s, Crucible founder and Chief Executive Officer Ryan Gill was on a journey of discovery—a journey powered by the belief that the future of the Internet was going to be built more and more by game developers.

Driven by the belief in an open metaverse, Gill set out to better understand tech trends and how all of the seemingly disparate technology at the time would coalesce into something we hadn’t seen before.

“I spent a lot of time in the fields of innovation, talking with people like Philip Rosedale and understanding how the industry of gaming had evolved, how game economies had evolved—what worked and what didn’t work,” Gill said to me in a recent interview. “I was able to see spatial computing and AI coming in the future by matching patterns and extrapolating into what I thought was coming.

Part of what was coming was Crucible, the company Gill founded at the end of 2018 with the goal of creating tools, marketplaces and interfaces to facilitate his vision of an open metaverse. Shortly after its inception, Crucible developed Emergence with the Open Meta Association, launching the Emergence Software Development Kit (SDK) for game developers working in gaming and 3-D world building, which has now been downloaded over 55,000 times.

“What we’ve done is develop an SDK specifically for Unreal Engine and Unity,” Gill said. “The SDK has been built through the brand Emergence, which is basically bundled web3—MetaMask, WalletConnect—packaged into a developer kit so that game developers can be armed with web3 tools and pass them onto the players.”

With the Emergence SDK, Crucible has earned the trust from Futureverse and Lamina1 as its exclusive core partners and their developer ecosystems. This summer, Emergence will launch the Emergence Marketplace, focusing on interoperable assets with high utility that will bridge the gap between players, creators, developers and collectors.

The Marketplace will also provide utility and rewards to its members with the goal of fostering inclusivity and accessibility for anyone who plays, develops or creates for the open future.

“The gaming industry has established a solid, sustainable business model with 3-D assets, though almost none of them are on-chain,” Gill said. “We’ve seen innovation over the past few years in nonfungible token (NFT) marketplaces but they haven’t made much progress with 3-D. With Emergence, we’re bridging that gap by building a fully native 3-D marketplace that’s also on-chain.”

Players will be able to use what they purchase across games and worlds. with the Marketplace allowing them to own, transport, share, create, trade, and sell their assets, giving players unprecedented control over their digital assets and avatars.

Gill believes the businesses startups of the future will eventually adopt a fully digital supply chain, direct to the end user and customer that is an avatar.

“It’s something the gaming industry has done very well,” Gill said. “It’s built a multi-billion dollar industry on digital products sold to avatars, for the use of avatars.”

The Shopify of the direct-to-avatar era

And as more and more brands, startups and other companies begin to look at the direct-to-avatar approach, the more it may become popularized.

“Creating the Ebay of avatars is a $1 trillion business,” Justin W. Hochberg, CEO of Virtual Brand Group, said to me over email. “To build one, there needs to be a combination of three things: Capital, a network effect of customers, and tremendously good luck.”

While it remains to be seen if Crucible—through Emergence—can become the go-to marketplace for direct-to-avatar 3-D digital assets, the company is optimistic its reputation as the “best in class” web3 gaming SDK will translate to a “best in class” marketplace. 

“In some ways, Emergence can be seen as the Shopify of the direct-to-avatar era,” Gill said. “We want to do the same thing—allow creators and developers of all kinds to push business and distribution of all kinds to avatars. The avatars can be all over the world, in different environments, and we’ll have the interoperability to freely move through those different environments.”