Just as Facebook begins shuttering its doors on its metaverse division to focus on A.I., Asian conglomerate Alibaba is taking another swing at the metaverse. In a move that will cost the company millions, we may be all wrong about Meta in the first place.
The cloud division of Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba (BABA) built the launchpad for businesses to deploy metaverses on the Avalanche blockchain.
What’s So Special About Cloudverse?
Named Cloudverse, the launchpad is designed to provide an end-to-end platform for companies to customize and maintain their metaverse spaces to try and find new ways of engaging with their customers.
According to an emailed announcement on Thursday, Avalanche will provide the technology for building the metaverse spaces, while Alibaba Cloud will provide the computing and storage.
We may see a re-emergence of Avalanche and the tech underlying the metaverse.
The partnership is Alibaba’s second such tie-up with a blockchain network in less than a month, following its agreement with Mysten Labs, developer of the Sui Layer 1 blockchain, to provide node services for validators on the network’s test net.
Avalanche’s native token AVAX was little affected by the initial announcement of the news, rising less than 1% from $16.86 to $16.98 as of 15:20 UTC.
Why is Alibaba Investing in Avalanche?
Avalanche (AVAX) is one of the fastest-growing blockchains in the world. It’s designed to support developers building decentralized applications and looks to solve the blockchain trilemma: finding the perfect balance between scaling, decentralization, and security.
Avalanche (XVAX) uses a consensus protocol to provide low latency, high throughput, and industry-leading security and has become the third-largest blockchain with over 500 apps using Avalanche (AVAX) for their foundation.
Given its success, Avalanche (AVAX) has received over half a billion from several funding rounds, having raised over $350 million during its latest funding round in April 2022.
As of April 2023, Avalanche (AVAX) has a market cap of $5.86 billion, with one Avalanche (AVAX) token priced at $17.94. Having already shown its potential in 2023, some analysts believe that it could become one of the top-performing cryptocurrencies in 2023.
How do the Avalanche project and Alibaba meet in the middle?
The partnership will provide Alibaba’s clients with a launchpad, Cloudverse, to help businesses customize, launch and maintain their metaverse spaces on Avalanche’s blockchain.
There’s also a third partner, MUA DAO, which is the service layer that will help implement the integration and customization for metaverses, John Wu, president of Ava Labs, told TechCrunch. “For [Alibaba Cloud], their partners are asking to be a part of web3,” Wu said. “So we will be dedicating resources to make it easy for them to make their own SDKs on top of ours.”
Avalanche has subnets, short for “subnetworks,” which are a set of nodes (or validators) that can be built on top of the blockchain. Subnets are application-specific blockchains that can be customized to fit one’s needs on top of a blockchain.
Will Metaverses Explode Now?
This infrastructure will also help create customizable blockchain solutions through the Cloudverse. The ability to launch metaverses quickly and easily could open doors for enterprises that don’t have the time or resources to launch these platforms but want exposure to the space.
“You and I can create a metaverse right now. Within 15 minutes, the chain is up; within hours, the wallet is up, and the turnkey is up,” Emin Gün Sirer, the founder and CEO of Ava Labs, said. The technology has been made “very easy,” and all of the tools are open source.
