Mark Zuckerberg is rubbing his hands while watching the Solana trenches, after a token launched on Pump.fun got degens talking about the metaverse again.

Verse World, a virtual reality metaverse game, released a token on Monday—which surged to a $112.8 million market capitalization within hours, before retracing to $54 million, according to DEX Screener.

The token was launched via Solana’s Pump.fun launchpad. According to Verse World’s official X account, 45% of the token supply has been bought up for community rewards, 15% is allocated to the team and advisors, and 14% is for the project’s treasury.

The project’s pseudonymous founder, Micka Verse, said in the Verse World Discord that the community tokens will be linearly unlocked over five years. Team and advisors will be unlocked with a one-year cliff and a one-year vesting period, he said. The treasury will be community-voted.

Back to the metaverse?

The Verse World token launch has come as a surprise to much of the industry, given that hype around the metaverse has declined from its 2021 highs. 

The metaverse reached fever pitch in 2021, driven in part by pandemic-era isolation. At its peak, Facebook renamed its parent company as Meta in a bid to dominate the space—while dozens of crypto metaverse platforms promised to take users into a decentralized, persistent virtual world. Decentraland’s MANA token peaked at a market cap of $6.9 billion, and The Sandbox similarly touched $6.8 billion.

But the hype quickly died down, with both Decentraland and The Sandbox’s tokens now down 95% from their all-time highs. Meta’s metaverse division, meanwhile, has recorded approximately $70 billion in losses.

It appears that Verse World attracted most of its hype in 2022, with several videos of influencers testing the product going viral—including the likes of content creators SteveWillDoIt and Gary “Gary Vee” Vaynerchuk.

By 2024, the game was ready for a public launch branded as “the world’s most hyper-realistic VR metaverse.” 

Verse World released two Solana NFT collections in 2022, which granted access to in-game “Bel Air style mansion(s).” The New York NFTs are down 57% to $1,050 from their 2024 all-time high of $2,493, whereas the Los Angeles collection is down 95% from $1,538 to $70.90, according to Tensor Trade.

The game’s Discord has slowed down in activity, with just two posts in the announcement channel this year, both in January. It also appears that the social feed and giveaway channels were discontinued in 2024.

Internet capital markets

Verse World’s token launch ties into the emerging concept of internet capital markets, which refers to creating crypto tokens as a means to fund or market their projects. 

The trend first appeared in 2024, with the launch of Vine Coin by the old-school video app’s co-founder Rus Yusupov. Now in 2025, countless products have launched with tokens attached, although some traders have slated the trend for promoting “vibe coded bullshit” rather than legitimate projects. 

With its VERSE token surging, Verse World has launched an in-game campaign that tasks players with finding a series of relics and complete trials for some tokens. With traders now downloading the game, it’s only a matter of time before the market decides it is worth the hype.