CYPHER

Today, we are introducing CYPHER INC., a new U.S. Treasury vehicle designed to support the growth of core assets within the ZERO and Wilder World ecosystem.

The mission of CYPHER is simple: ignite the creator within.

CYPHER will fund the development of tools that empower creators at the intersection of crypto, AI, and XR. We believe these technologies are on the verge of converging—radically transforming how we communicate, collaborate, and create. Our primary focus will be on building decentralized systems, protocols, and consumer applications that empower creators while staying true to the cypherpunk ethos: privacy, decentralization, and sovereignty.

For over a decade, our team has been building technologies at the cutting edge of onchain governance, distributed systems, digital assets, and virtual worlds. We believe these systems can be a force for good—shaping a future that is more exciting, open, and empowering for all.

CYPHER will continue to strengthen and expand our ecosystem projects by serving as a unified funding vehicle that interfaces directly with global capital markets. By moving beyond the confines of crypto markets, we gain a long-term strategic advantage—unlocking new funding avenues that will accelerate our mission.

Core Projects

Today, we are launching cypher.net—the public link between our core projects. It serves as a hub that contextualizes and showcases the breadth and depth of what we’ve been building. Many of these components were first outlined in our Simulation OS roadmap (February 2024) and further expanded in the more recent Vision Paper.

The vision of CYPHER is bold: to free one billion creators.

Our goal is to empower individuals to earn sustainable income by creating virtual content—whether digital art, code, memes, games, characters, 3D assets, or stories. This creative economy will primarily thrive within ZERO—our onchain messenger and social media app—and Wilder World—our photorealistic metaverse. All content will be open, permissionless, and interoperable across chains and the open web, while remaining fully owned by its original creator.

CYPHER is the unification of nine core projects—developed over the past decade—that are essential to realizing our vision. Each is at a different stage of development and commercial readiness, but all play a critical role in building the creator-first future we envision.

Each project will continue to operate as its own self-governed, decentralized ecosystem—while also being vertically integrated into a single superstack.

ZINE will remain the official news source for all CYPHER ecosystem projects, featuring regular updates, dev logs, strategic briefs, and announcements.

Visit the websites of each project:

Why CYPHER?

“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” Eric Hughes

Our goal is to use the tools and technologies of our time to help society transition from consumers to creators—a world where people have the tools, incentives, and distribution to bring ideas to life. A world where people work on what they love not because they must, but because they want to. That’s the future we’re heading toward, and we couldn’t be more excited to help shape it.

CYPHER is inspired by the original cypherpunk movement, which began in the late 1980s and gained momentum with the “Cypherpunks” electronic mailing list in 1992. Cypherpunks champion decentralization, personal autonomy, and freedom from centralized authority. Bitcoin and modern cryptocurrencies emerged from this movement and embody its ideals of decentralized, censorship-resistant systems.

Remembering the cypherpunk ethos has never been more important. Technologies like AI, cryptocurrencies, and the metaverse offer the potential for near-limitless prosperity, but they also pose significant societal risks. Without careful stewardship—protecting privacy and ensuring fair value distribution—the difference is between a protopian future and a dystopian one.

Capital Raise

In partnership with Republic, CYPHER INC. will launch an initial $21 million capital raise in late Q3 or early Q4 of this year, providing the first round of funding for the company.

The offering will leverage securities exemptions under Reg A, Reg S, and Reg CF to enable maximum participation from both U.S. and international investors, including accredited and non-accredited participants. Traditionally, opportunities like this are reserved for large institutional investors and venture firms. Our aim is to make it as accessible, open, and global as possible, ensuring broad community participation.

The equity investment will be structured as a capped convertible SAFE note. All initial proceeds will be used to acquire eligible ecosystem assets, including but not limited to: WILD, MEOW, Official Wilder World Collections, Wilder World Land, strategic ZNS World Domains and future ecosystem tokens. Future capital may also be allocated to BTC, ETH, and other hard assets that serve as long-term stores of value, to strengthen the CYPHER balance sheet.

Depending on market conditions, additional rounds—structured similarly—will be launched shortly after the first close, with the goal of raising more than $100 million by mid-2026.

Future TGEs & Ecosystem Airdrops

As CYPHER projects mature and scale, each will be tokenized through its own Token Generation Event (TGE). We are in no rush to tokenize prematurely—our five-year horizon prioritizes achieving strong usage and clear product–market fit before launching tokens. The success of our existing deployed assets will always remain our primary focus.

To bootstrap the ecosystem, approximately 30% of total WILD and MEOW will be transferred from Wilder World’s foundation and affiliated entities to the CYPHER INC. balance sheet. WILD and MEOW stakers, along with power users of ZERO and Wilder World, will be able to farm CATNIP—an onchain rewards token that will be used to calculate future airdrop allocations—directly within the ZERO app. Rewards will be further enhanced through ‘Force Multipliers’ that amplify certain activities based on historical ecosystem support, loyalty, and engagement.

In addition to existing treasury tokens, CYPHER will also secure a founding allocation from each new project’s TGE, targeted at 15%–25% of total token supply, depending on the specific tokenomics of each project.

Z Chain

The first major airdrop will be Z—the cryptocurrency that powers the Z Chain Layer 1 blockchain.

You might ask: Why do we need another blockchain?

There are three key reasons:

Sovereignty: We believe CYPHER, along with ZERO and Wilder World, has the potential to create massive societal impact. An idea of this magnitude deserves its own dedicated blockchain—one where our community has full control over security, governance, and economic policy.
Value: As open, permissionless interoperability between chains becomes the norm, significant value capture will shift from the chain and infrastructure layers to the application layer. We believe consumer apps with mass-market appeal are undervalued relative to most blockchains today. This move ensures we can play at the highest level and that our ecosystem will be valued fairly relative to other major chains.
Speed: The onchain metaverse and next-generation social networking tools we are building require near-instant execution and finality with unlimited scale. Most existing blockchain architectures were not built for the high-throughput demands of these use-cases.

Let’s take a step back for a moment and look at where we are in the technology adoption cycle.

We believe crypto value capture will follow a trajectory similar to the computing and internet revolutions: from microprocessors, to PC manufacturers, to operating systems, and ultimately to internet companies. As markets mature, defensible network effects and consumer brand recognition become the main drivers of value. Today, a long list of blockchains dominate crypto market caps largely because very few consumer applications have achieved meaningful scale. The smart money has no idea what will succeed, so they hedge by buying “picks and shovels”. As consumer crypto begins to succeed, however, we are already seeing examples where application-level fee revenue is beginning to significantly outpace infrastructure—early examples include Hyperliquid, Phantom Wallet, and Pump.fun/Bonk. We believe this trend will continue, and vertically integrated ecosystems with mass appeal will rapidly outcompete broadly focused chains with minimal (real) activity and high market caps.

To future-proof their ecosystems, many chains have taken a “spray-and-pray” approach, funding countless small projects with limited success. Our strategy is different: instead of betting on hundreds of loosely connected initiatives that confuse users, we believe a small number of deeply integrated projects—targeting the largest global markets—can outperform existing chains on every metric (e.g., TVL, transaction volume, fee revenue). This approach is harder because it requires building more and achieving PMF with consumers in mind, but in the end, it is larger, more sustainable, and creates stronger network effects.

With the years of development, focus, and capital behind our existing products and protocols, we believe Z Chain can quickly become one of the world’s most popular blockchains by daily transaction volume. Over the past 18 months, Z Chain has completed six testnets, with its first shard now live in production. The Z Chain whitepaper—detailing its novel architecture and approach—will be released prior to the launch of the Z token. Onchain protocols and application logic are steadily migrating to Z Chain. We expect activity to accelerate with the Super Early Access launch of Wilder World later this month and the public opening of ZERO later this year.

Z Chain and its associated core protocols are being developed in close collaboration with the exceptional teams at Polygon Research, Gateway, Nethermind, and ZERO Tech—some of the best zero-knowledge experts, blockchain engineers and auditors in the industry. It has been a privilege to bring this system to life with them. Z Chain will be natively connected to Polygon’s AggLayer as it continues to develop, which will enable fast cross-chain finality and interoperability with nearly every blockchain on the market.

For additional perspective on Z, see Bart Hillerich’s recently released Z Thesis X Article.

Market Thesis: Virtual World Assets (VWAs) x AI Displacement

Real World Assets (RWAs) have become one of the hottest narratives in crypto. Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimates the tokenized RWA market could reach $16 trillion by 2030, representing 10% of global GDP. Already, more than $1 billion in U.S. Treasuries have moved onchain—a figure that could soon rival the $250 billion stablecoin market. Tokenization is not a niche trend—it represents a fundamental transformation of global asset markets.

Beyond the explosive growth in RWAs, we believe Virtual World Assets (VWAs) have the potential to become an even larger market. VWAs include tokenized AI-generated content, digital art, avatars, skins, domains, games, software agents, in-game items, digital identities and more.

But why?

Bits move faster than atoms: VWAs are created, distributed, and traded at internet speed, with no physical custody, logistics, or intermediaries. They move faster and innovate more quickly.
Digital life is dominant: People now spend more waking hours in digital spaces than in the physical world. As attention shifts, so will value.
Infinite design space: RWAs are constrained by regulation and physical limits; VWAs can be permissionless, composable, and programmable, opening entirely new markets.
Mass-scale creators: Generative AI and no-code tools allow anyone to create, fueling an explosion in supply, diversity, and experimentation.

VWAs are especially relevant in the context of the AI revolution. Many companies are racing to build AI models and tools, but few are asking deeper questions about how the world will look after AGI. Goldman Sachs estimates that up to 300 million jobs could be automated by AI within the next decade—a number that may prove conservative if AGI arrives sooner.

Just as humanity transitioned from physical labor in the agricultural and industrial eras to mental labor in the information age, we believe the AI age will usher in a new era of creative labor—where AI and robotics handle most physical and cognitive work, while humans focus on creativity.

As AI democratizes both digital and physical production, creativity—not expertise—will become our most valuable currency. This creative economy will exist primarily in the digital realm and has the potential to rival—and even surpass—the real world economy. Despite people spending more than 40% of our waking hours online, the digital economy today accounts for only 15% of global GDP. Tokenization and VWAs will hyper accelerate this share of GDP, with AI fueling mass-scale content creation and blockchains handling monetization, verification and attribution.

Coherent Insights projects the global creator is expected to grow to $848.13 billion by 2032. We believe the VWA market can grow far beyond that, ultimately becoming one of the largest and most dynamic sectors of the global economy.

Product Thesis

The mission of CYPHER is simple: ignite the creator within.

In practical terms, that means helping people leave the job they hate to focus on creating the things they love.

Here are the main problems we see:

Limited access to capital: It’s difficult to fund creators directly and share in their upside.
Fragmentation: Creator tools, AI platforms, and distribution channels are highly fragmented.
Platforms own everything: Creators rarely have true ownership or provenance over their work.

CYPHER solves these challenges by enabling creators to easily produce and monetize content while retaining full ownership of their work. We have a strategic advantage in that we've spent years building both a social network and Metaverse platform, which is built with completely different principles than legacy companies. We believe the future of creator monetization will be anchored in a new generation of multi-modal social media, enabling participation in the development of products, content, games and the Metaverse.

Today, social media is largely limited to text, images, and video. The democratization of creative tools and software development will unlock entirely new modalities of content and creativity—such as mini-apps, 3D assets, music, digital art, and more.

Our recent Wiami.fun announcement for Wilder World is a step in this direction—bringing the wildly popular concept of meme tokens and video game skins into a new era, where anyone can create and tokenize in-game items using the power of blockchain and AI.

In the coming weeks, creators on ZERO will be able to launch token-gated communities to bootstrap their ideas, as well as tokenize the digital content they create.

All of this will live natively on Z Chain.

Across all projects, CYPHER is building the tools, network, distribution, and L1 blockchain to help creators ignite the creator within, as we enter an entirely new digital frontier.

What’s next?

We could not be more excited about CYPHER and the upcoming launches of Wilder World and ZERO.

Follow us on X and subscribe to our ZINE for official updates on the launch of the CYPHER offering, as well as future airdrops on ZERO.

We believe these technologies have the power to transform society for the better. Every great idea has its time—and our time is now.

From ZERO to Infinity,

n3o

Disclaimer
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy, or a recommendation of any security or investment product. Nothing contained in this communication should be construed as investment, legal, tax, or financial advice. Any references to past performance are not indicative of future results. You should consult your own investment, legal, tax, and/or financial advisors before making any investment decisions. The securities laws of the United States and other jurisdictions impose strict requirements on the offer and sale of securities, and participation in any investment opportunity may be restricted to qualified investors.