Eros Investments, a leading global media, entertainment & technology portfolio of ventures and Xfinite investor, announced a strategic partnership with the Dubai World Trade Centre Authority (DWTCA) to operate under the world’s only specialist Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA).
Our flagship ‘watch-to-earn’ closed-loop platform, Mzzalo and NFT Marketplace, powered by XET will join a rigorously vetted shortlist of international participants in the VARA MVP programme, and build towards the mass market Virtual Asset Exchange (VAX) License.
As we build products that will bring content, commerce, and community together through crypto, a progressive regulatory regime headed by VARA is important to rapidly build and test technologies and concepts. We will operate within Dubai’s “test-adapt-scale” model to accelerate the development of a decentralised entertainment ecosystem. The license provides an innovation sandbox for us to test different models of democratising premium content, growing NFT adoption and communities, and enabling the creator economy in a sound and progressive regulatory environment.
As VARA engages with Eros Investments and Xfinite, we aim to use the partnership to help build
(1) A fair platform for independent NFT artists, legacy media production, and the creative industry to come together. This will mean that NFT artists can work with the industry to not just design and launch new movies and music but work under a sustainable model to access existing IP and create on top of it. This will be one of the first instances and frameworks for bringing composability to creative assets and content.
(2) A place for creative talent across the globe to come together to produce content that is both funded and co-created with the community with a readily available distribution network spread across millions of users.
(3) New models for content aggregators to collaborate and propagate Web 3.0 models of engagement such as Watch/Play and Earn.
(4) Normalise the playing field for content focussed startups in the web 3.0 space to build ventures that focus on quality and community.
This license will give the impetus to accelerate this trend by improving the product experience and incentivising millions of users to become XET holders and users. XET holders have grown by more than 3x in less than two months of its integration with our dApp Mzaalo.
The regulatory foundation given by the Government of Dubai gives us the necessary backdrop from which we can launch and experiment with new ways to take blockchain to the next billion with content and community at the very centre.
One of the final frontiers for the mass adoption of blockchain is through applications and platforms that disrupt not just finance but the way we create, tell and share stories. With this, we are laying the foundation to help bring the blockchain ethos to storytelling across mediums and borders.
Onward and upward!