Tech companies enter agreement for ‘Japan Metaverse Economic Zone’

Interest in the metaverse is accelerating at a global rate, with countries around the world joining the rush to get involved.

In Japan, a country often associated with its legacy technology sector, a group of well-known tech companies reached an agreement on February 27 to push for the creation of the "Japan Metaverse Economic Zone."

Along with the creation of Japan's Metaverse Economic Zone, the focus of the deal is to build an open metaverse infrastructure called "Ryugukoku", which will trigger the next wave of metaverse development.

This open metaverse infrastructure will help make interoperable tools available to users and developers across multiple platforms. It will also serve as a new social infrastructure for business digital transformation.

Under its terms, the companies that signed the agreement will integrate their "respective technologies and services" in an effort to create Ryugukoku. This includes gamification, fintech, and information and communication technologies.

The Japan Metaverse Economic Zone will be an ecosystem that will ultimately be the result of interoperability between the different metaverse services and platforms available to consumers in Japan. The agreement also mentions the future possibility of "providing this infrastructure to companies and government agencies outside of Japan."

Among the Japanese companies that have signed this agreement are Fujitsu Ltd., Mitsubishi Corporation and TBT Lab Inc., among others.

Related: Japan's largest mobile operator to establish Web3 consortium

Japanese regulators have been turning their attention to the country's fintech sector. On February 1, the prime minister of the country recognized decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a way to support the government's 'Cool Japan' strategy.

However, exploring DAOs as governance tools dates back to November 2022when Japan's Digital Agency launched its own DAO.

More recent, the Bank of Japan announced that it plans to launch its official central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot by May 2023.