Entropria Universe gets a banking lincense

MindArk, the editor of Entropia Universe just got a bank license in Sweden to enable them to provide real banking services around their virtual currency the PED (10PED = 1USD).
Last year 400M USD were exchanged in Entropia Universe and thus it’s interesting to see how a real banking system will perform in this virtual world enabling users to deposit their money to have it insured up to 60kUSD and earning benefits from it. A couple years ago such a system developed in Second Life out of individual initiatives and some of those went nuts with improbable interest rates and no real warranty at all for the customers.
Nevertheless this first experiment is certainly a milestone in the evolution of virtual worlds and if you’re interested in that theme you should definetly read “Halting state” by Charles Stross which pictures a robbery on a virtual bank held by a start-up focusing on providing banking services to virtual worlds. Pretty nice business model – would love to start one of those!