High Fidelity Announces the Ability to Convert High Fidelity Coin (HFC) into U.S. Dollars

“I’m taking a break from blogging…yeah, riiight…” O.K., after this one final blogpost, I am taking a break until September 1st! I mean it this time!!! 😉

It may come as a surprise to some people that you couldn’t do this already, but High Fidelity has just announced that they will now offer users the ability to convert High Fidelity Coin (HFC, High Fidelity’s in-world currency) into U.S. dollars. Up until now, people who sold items on the High Fidelity Marketplace had to keep their earnings within the system, which was a big drawback to content creators who wanted to earn real-world currency.

Philip Rosedale writes on the High Fidelity blog:

This opens the possibility for people to earn real money creating and selling virtual goods and services within High Fidelity. We see this as a vital step in the emergence of a thriving High Fidelity economy: the flywheel of innovation and creativity in any marketplace starts when creators have positive incentives to contribute to the growing body of content for sale. In time, we hope creators will be able to support themselves by selling items in the Marketplace, charging for the experiences they create, and offering useful in-world services to other creators and performers.

We believe the High Fidelity marketplace will develop into a rich and varied ecosystem supporting a broad range of digital experiences. For instance, a user might buy an outfit for their avatar then spend an hour on a guided tour of Korea, before meeting up with friends in a nightclub. Along the way, the clothes designer, tour docent, club owner, lighting technician, and DJ will all be rewarded for their effort, and be able to turn their HFC into U.S. dollars.

Starting this week, we’re taking our first steps to create that ecosystem. Now’s the time to get started creating in High Fidelity.

To prime the pump, High Fidelity is going to be offering incentives for creators:

We’re also excited to launch our High Fidelity Development Fund today, where members of our community can take on projects to extend the High Fidelity platform. There are dozens of features we’re planning to add, and we’re looking to developers in our community to sign up to create them. Of course, we’re planning to pay them for their hard work — in HFC, which they can convert to legal tender.

Here’s how we see this working: we’ve already set up a public group on Telegram which developers can use to contact us about these projects. We plan to regularly post new opportunities to the channel for people to select and bid for. The aim here is to reward our most dedicated members, to accelerate feature rollout, and to inject more activity into the economy, which in turn will benefit everyone.

In this first wave of the Fund, we’re committing 1,000,000 HFC [US$10,000] to fund developers. Use the Telegram channel to bid on initiatives, propose new projects, and suggest new features for the platform. Sign up here to learn more.

Compared to the over 14,000 items already available for sale in the Sansar Store, there are not nearly as many items for sale in the High Fidelity Marketplace, so taking these steps makes sense to grow the High Fidelity platform.

In order to convert your HFC to USD, you will need to provide High Fidelity with your real-world name, address and email as part of the process. You will also need a PayPal account. The actual conversion process does sound rather cumbersome:

Trades will initially be handled manually by our staff using the following process:

• High Fidelity will publish a calendar through which users can book trading appointments.
• After High Fidelity staff accept and confirm the time slot they will whitelist the user to visit the Trading Room domain to make their trade. The user will be whitelisted based on their provided High Fidelity account name.
• High Fidelity staff will take receipt of HFC from the trading user. Payments will be made using PayPal and paid to the email account specified via the appointment booking form. Time to payment receipt will be based on PayPal rules and guidelines. Payments will be made from finance@highfidelity.com.

There is a minimum transfer of 5,000 HFC per transaction. This service is still in beta: and we reserve the right to stop and start or change daily limits or refuse transactions at any time.

Note that you cannot yet buy HFC with real-world currency, although Philip promises that will come soon.

In addition, the company has announced a few new ways to get 3D objects into High Fidelity:

We expect the content put up for sale in the High Fidelity Marketplace to come from a variety of sources. The Marketplace provides a way for users to sell their content with the confidence that their intellectual property will be protected.

Creators who have assets already developed, or who prefer to use go-to applications like SketchUp or Google Poly, can now import them into High Fidelity. We’re officially launching support for these applications and others alongside our trading services now that the entire workflow from creation to monetization is in place.

Check out the High Fidelity documentation on how to add content to the Marketplace.

You can upload FBX and OBJ files to the Marketplace for sale.

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