Hyperfy - AI Metaverse Narrative? What You Need to Know
$AI16Z Airdrop, AI Agent Metaverse, & More
AI Agents continue to hog mindshare, with Web2 LLM and semiconductor companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, and others predicting huge leaps for AI’s impact in 2025. Agents in particular are now becoming a hot-button word among Silicon Valley investors and builders, with some forecasting their entrance into the workforce and other domains. Other areas of AI, including the physical robotics sector, have seen less progress compared to LLMs, and this is especially true in crypto.
It’s worth remembering that some of the biggest narratives of the previous bull market did not exist or did not begin to gain popularity until relatively late in the final innings of 2021. The most glaring examples are NFTs and the gaming narrative, which really took off while the rest of the market slumped during the summer of 2021. Both of these narratives tied into a greater notion of the ‘metaverse’, coinciding with Facebook’s transition to ‘Meta’. It’s now been several years since this narrative was at its peak, with little to show for it. Games like Decentraland boast measly DAU counts.
But we may now be at a point in the cycle where the right ingredients for a metaverse revival might be coming into place. And just like cycles past, leveraging strong communities is a key component in potentially getting new concepts to take off. In today’s edition, we’ll be discussing Hyperfy, a metaverse-esque project that recently conducted a large airdrop for top $AI16Z holders, garnering significant attention on socials.
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Background on Hyperfy
At first glance, one might think Hyperfy is some sort of Hyperliquid memecoin or AI launchpad.
Hyperfy is not hyper-realistic or incredibly immersive, serving as a world-builder instead where users can harness their creativity in an environment that promotes social interactions of all kinds. It’s attractive attributes are
Accessibility - Hyperfy can simply be accessed via web browser on any device (mobile included). VR is also supported.
World Building - Users can build worlds together in real-time, using 3D models and assets from various marketplaces. Local image, audio, and video files can simply be drag-and-dropped into Worlds. Crypto is also supported; users can import NFTs that they own from their wallet.
Umami Finance - Make your crypto make more crypto, that makes more crypto…
Whether it’s Minecraft or Roblox, user-generated content (UGC) is a significant component that has proven successful. This is the main point of emphasis for Hyperfy, making it easy for users and communities to develop their own dynamic Worlds without any technical know-how or complex processes.
Hyperfy launched its native token yesterday, already reaching a valuation of ~$164M. When it comes to the distribution of the $HYPER token, a significant amount of supply went to the top ~1,000 holders of $AI16Z, those who hold 100K tokens or more at the time of the snapshot. This isn’t a random threshold, but wallets that hold this amount are formally dubbed ‘ai16z partners’ and can get a certain role in the ai16z discord. This role actually extends to more holders, with the ‘basic’ tier of the role mandating wallets to hold 10K tokens, with the ‘elite’ threshold for holders being 100K tokens.
There has even been an NFT collection created that has reached a floor price of ~8 SOL today dubbed AI16Z partners, allowing partners to put a face to the title and express themselves. This has actually become one of the top-traded collections on all of Solana.
All this to say that there are incredibly strong network effects present within AI16Z, impressive for a project that is less than a few months old. The price of $ai16z going up obviously helps, but it’s clear that a significant amount of mindshare is invested in the development and adoption o thef AI16Z/ELIZA framework.
Now, back to Hyperfy; it’s important to remember why Hyperfy opted to airdrop a substantial amount of tokens to $AI16Z holders. The team behind Hyperfy has a long-standing relationship with the AI16Z team. But more importantly, Hyperfy is an explicitly supported partner project, integrated with the ELIZA framework. Users will be able to deploy and interact with their ELIZA AI Agents within Hyperfy. Integrations like this, while seemingly whimsical, do add to the attributes of ELIZA compared to other frameworks.
The overarching AI agents meta can provide the fuel that these metaverse, world-builder projects need to sustain themselves. As highlighted above, even the leading metaverse projects of the last cycle have almost no users. Now, projects can play into this somewhat as a feature, emphasizing that agents be a focal point of the experience. It’s worth remembering that Virtuals itself has a gaming background, later pivoting into Agentic AI to capture the avatar livestreaming demographic as well as allow for custom agents to be used in games.
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