Saturday in Second Life, Atlas Virtual Capital (AVC) announced the formation of a Grid Exploration Fund. This fund is intended to raise L$ 500,000 to help AVC “enter the virtual worlds via Central Grid's new virtual grid to establish AVC as a pioneer in this new community.”

Central Grid is one of many efforts to use open source grids. It will be based on OpenSim, but unlike some of the other emerging OpenSim based grids, it is intending to fully support inworld currency. Efforts will be made to connect with currency exchanges so Linden Dollars will be exchangeable with CentralGrid dollars, or whatever they end up being called there.

There are many interesting issues that this brings up. Will new grids, like CentralGrid drive down the price of land in Second Life. Philip Linden has noted that it costs money to run the servers for each region and the price of the servers, while continuing to fall as technology becomes faster and less expensive, will provide a base price below which tier prices cannot fall. That said, there is likely to be continued pressure for lower priced land and CentralGrid land is likely to be cheaper than land on the Second Life Main Grid. Variables that will affect these prices are likely to include traffic to various regions, reliability of the regions, and trustworthiness of the currency in the grid.

This is an area where I believe Linden Lab hopes to keep an edge. Linden Lab authentication and Linden Lab dollars, they hope will remain the authentication method and currency of choice. However, the recent issues in banking raise a lot of issues.

As I noted in my brief analysis of macroeconomic forces in Second Life, stock markets, banks and related financial institutions are playing a growing role in the Second Life economy. There is a lot of distrust of many of the financial institutions that exist solely in Second Life. Yet when Second Life Investors Bank had problems with Linden Lab about some fraudulent funds that had been deposited in the bank, much of the ire turned against Linden Lab.

It seemed as if Linden Lab was quick to freeze assets or remove funds, but slow to investigate or refund assets taken. Will CentralGrid manage to be more responsive to the needs of inworld based businesses while at the same time protecting against fraudulent activity? This will also be interesting to watch.

In early September, I wrote that it feels like 1994 all over again as new companies discover the importance of setting up their own websites and other new companies emerge to support them. CentralGrid is the next logical step in this direction. It is great to see them tackling issues of inworld and interworld currencies. It is great to see AVC climbing on board and other financial groups talking about what their involvement should be. It should be an exciting ride.