Voxelus, a leading virtual reality world builder and marketplace, today announced that it is going to offer an opportunity to holders of Voxels cryptocurrency to convert it into an equity stake in Voxelus.

According to the official announcement, the company will offer up to a 33.3 percent equity stake in Voxelus, Inc., in exchange for the 15 percent of Voxel (VOX) cryptocurrency that is currently issued and outstanding on the market.  

“We believe firmly in the future of our VR token, the Voxel, but we wanted to give those who share our vision another way to participate in the success of the company. We have decided to provide this one-time option for Voxels holders to convert their coins into equity in the company,” said Martin Repetto, Voxelus CEO.  “This should increase the scarcity of the outstanding Voxels as demand rises in the marketplace. It also allows anyone to take advantage of the opportunity to own equity in a promising VR platform at an attractive valuation.” 

Voxelus will provide an online form and wallet address to exchange Voxels for equity on a basis of 33.33 percent of the company for the outstanding 31.5 million voxels or any fraction therein. Holders will be under no obligation to trade in their Voxels, as they will continue to trade actively on Bittrex, Poloniex, Shapeshift and other exchanges globally, and they will still remain the only method of purchasing VR assets, games and worlds on the Voxelus marketplace.

The equity stake in Voxelus will be in common stock in Voxelus, Inc., a Delaware corporation with business development and marketing in Los Angeles and technical operations in Argentina. Since there is no preferred stock issued, all persons participating will be on an even playing field with the founders, early investors and employees, the company said.

“We will use these funds to build upon our early leadership in the VR content sector,” said Repetto. “We have a number of new technical initiatives that will further enhance our already stellar user interface, as well as branded content deals, teed up to be announced in the coming weeks and months. We will also announce an exciting new functionality to the Voxelus software platform on shortly.”

The exchange will begin in Q1 2017 with a specific date to be announced. The program will run for a month and will be at a fixed rate of 1.058 percent of the company for every 1,000,000 voxels, regardless of the price of voxels that day. Those voxels re-acquired by Voxelus will be used for its next round of funding at the rate of no more than 1,000,000 voxels per month, which represents less than one-half of one percent of all outstanding voxels (6 percent per year).

Launched in 2015, Voxelus was co-founded by Repetto, Maximo Radice and Halsey Minor, founder of CNET, a NASDAQ 100 company prior to its sale to CBS, and co-founder of Salesforce.com, GrandCentral (now Google Voice), Open DNS, NBCi, Rhapsody and Uphold.