Linden Lab recently made an announcement on their blog that their wholly-owned subsidiary, Tilia Pay, will be handling all U.S. dollar transactions in Second Life, starting May 26th, 2020. This is comply with newer, much more stringent American laws regarding economies in games and virtual worlds, to prevent potential fraud and money laundering.
Linden Lab has invested quite a lot in the past few years to upgrade their financial systems to meet these new regulations, and they decided to make the savvy move to sell their well-developed virtual economy services to other platforms.
It is no surprise that former Linden Lab platform Sansar (now owned by Wookey) is one of Tilia’s customers. But it is somewhat of a surprise to me that among those new customers is a blockchain-based mobile property trading game called Upland, which I had never heard of before. Here’s a brief Vimeo promotional video:
Now I think it is interesting that a game that describes itself as “a property trading game paired with a decentralized economy” would decide to use Tilia instead of trying to create and monitor its in-game economy. Linden Lab might well be on to something here! I can foresee a time when other social VR platforms, virtual worlds, and games might also make the decision to outsource the management of their virtual economies in this way.
This is a peak moment not just for Tilia, but for blockchain and crypto as well. A non-LL company opting to use Tilia tells me that digital ownership is moving beyond a niche concept and into the mainstream public awareness. Tilia is about to rub shoulders with crypto wallets. “If” the Lab does this right, they stand to gain some major clout in the blockchain community with FinCEN backing them.