As a major map company leading Japan’s map industry, GeoTechnologies is pleased to announce that it has entered a capital and business alliance with TECOTEC Inc. (headquartered in the Minato District of Tokyo, Representative Director Hiroshi Tsurisaki; hereinafter “TECOTEC”), a company working on creating state-of-the-art technologies to serve as social infrastructure for the increasingly digital society, to enhance our NFT and blockchain technologies.

Emergence of the metaverse

As a major map company, GeoTechnologies has been striving to create new value by combining people flow data and state-of-the-art technologies. One of our initiatives is the use of NFTs containing location information in the metaverse.

The “metaverse” has become a hot topice recently, but it is still exists sealed inside virtual space, with its mainstream being limited to games and pseudo-experiences in virtual reality. However, we believe it will bring about the kind of synergy that will fundamentally solve various social problems when it connects to and becomes one with the real world, allowing travel between virtual and real worlds, instead of just staying in virtual space. The key to connect the real and metaverse worlds is the location information we have.

Today, thanks to the Internet being widely accessible, shopping is just a matter of placing an order and having it delivered to your home. Work can also be done remotely, but this is because things and information are moving in our place. Movement is a continuous change in location. Movement is involved in every facet of our lives, and some value will arise from this. For instance, our M2E app TRIMA is already used by 10 million people, enabling us to turn people’s movement logs into big data, and combining this data with maps will help improve social issues and predict the near future. It is indeed a tool that turns movement into value. And where value is born, a payment system is needed.

Digital payments can be made in the real world, in the metaverse, or by connecting both. It also makes payment processing much easier. But in the future, payment may not involve just money, especially in the metaverse. One possible means of payment is through assets that have been converted into NFTs. For instance, the TRIMA app mentioned earlier gives users miles for the distance they travelled, which users can exchange for cash, points, and product vouchers. It is also possible to change this system so that payments can be made with NFT assets.

We, GeoTechnologies, launched map icon NFTs in July 2022, which integrate location information with NFTs. Right now, NFT assets are still considered to be something of a hobby for a limited circle of people but originally, the concept is to enable anyone to own digital content with value which can be passed on to future generations. For instance, let’s say there is some area you want to support. It is not easy to own the area in the real world, but it is possible with NFTs that contain location information.

We believe that NFTs with location information can connect the real world with the metaverse and create movement with value. Wherever value changes hands, a payment occurs, and this moves the economy forward. We can then reroute part of that moving economy to the area we want to support, to be used in ways such as protecting the area’s tangible and intangible cultural properties, or to support the regional economy.