Linden Lab Payment Spinoff Tilia Gets Strategic Investment from Finance Giant J.P. Morgan

What if after everything, Second Life is largely remembered in the business world as creating a payment processor for the metaverse platforms of tomorrow? Because that may become a thing:

Tilia LLC, the all-in-one payments platform, today announced it has secured a strategic investment from J.P. Morgan Payments. Tilia’s solution, built for game, virtual world and mobile application developers handles payment processing, in-game transactions, as well as payouts to creators by converting in-world tokens to fiat currency including USD, which serves as the backbone of any functioning virtual economy...

Tilia’s virtual payment system easily and securely converts in-game tokens and currency into fiat currency.  Built from the ground up to power Second Life and its creator-based economy, Tilia was developed over several years to build its unique capabilities. Tilia has secured the required money transmitter licenses in the U.S. to support payouts, allowing for secure transactions on a large scale. 

Finance giants like J.P. Morgan make strategic investments like this on the expectation they'll be accessing a larger market down the road, i.e. burgeoning metaverse platforms with less experience than Linden Lab handling international payments/virtual currency.

On the other hand, Tilia has been a standalone company since 2019 and only counts Second Life and below-the-radar metaverse platform Upland as its major consumer-facing clients. (Despite a partnership with Unity in early 2022.) But with JP Morgan as a backer, I'd expect other customers to come along soon.

Hat tip: Damien Fate

Comments

[Luther Weymann]

The last sentence of the October 18, 2022, Forbes article says that Tilia transactions provided Linden Labs with $86M in net revenue after payouts last year.

[Wagner James Au]

Good catch!

[sirhc desantis]

So its not yet time for canned food and shotguns yet:) Fun to see the usual suspects on the Official Forum doing their 'sky is falling' thing