Netflix officially announces the acquisition of Ready Player Me, what is the prospect of this Metaverse identification platform supported by a16z?

Netflix recently announced the acquisition of the Metaverse identification platform Ready Player Me, which is supported by a16z. This deal is a key step for Netflix to enter the gaming sector, aiming to create a universal virtual avatar system across games for its subscription users.

According to information from the Ready Player Me website, its AI technology can automatically adjust virtual avatars to perfectly fit the artistic style and skeletal structure of different games.

The platform has received investments from giants such as a16z, Endeavor, Roblox, and Twitch, with a total funding of approximately $72 million.

01 acquisition panorama

The transaction announced in mid-December 2025 has not disclosed the specific amount. After the acquisition of Ready Player Me, its existing services will be gradually shut down before January 31, 2026, including its core online virtual avatar creation tool PlayerZero.

The company's four co-founders, including CEO Timmu Tõke and CTO Rainer Selvet, will lead about 20 team members to join Netflix as a whole, continuing the research and integration work related to technology.

02 Technical Integration

The core capability of Ready Player Me lies in its outstanding “cross-platform interoperability”. Its technology allows players to create a virtual avatar and enables it to seamlessly “travel” between various games and applications that use different game engines and have different artistic styles.

For Netflix, this technology perfectly aligns with its gaming strategic transformation. After reducing high-cost AAA game projects, Netflix is fully shifting towards more social interactive experiences, multiplayer games, and adaptations based on its own IP.

Netflix plans to utilize this technology to build a universal system that allows subscription users to carry their own “digital personas” and “fan attributes” across different game titles, enhancing the sense of immersion and belonging within the gaming ecosystem.

03 Market Linkage and Price Performance

The acquisition between traditional tech giants and star Web3 startups has quickly triggered a chain reaction in the crypto market. The most direct manifestation of this is the dramatic fluctuation in the price of the READY token, which shares the same name as the platform.

According to the data from the global mainstream cryptocurrency trading platform Gate, as of December 22, 2025, the latest market price of READY is $0.0119, which has dropped by nearly 9% in the last 24 hours.

The performance of token prices shows a high degree of synchronization with acquisition news, highlighting the immediate impact of major actions in the mainstream business world on the valuation of crypto assets.

04 Ecological Transformation and Future Outlook

This acquisition marks an important integration of Web2 and Web3 concepts. Netflix is interested in the technical capabilities of Ready Player Me to solve cross-platform digital identity interoperability, which essentially aligns with the core idea of Web3 advocating for users to own and control their own digital identities.

Although Ready Player Me's independent service is about to shut down, its technology and team will find broader application scenarios within Netflix's vast content ecosystem. This may indicate that a more accessible “lightweight” digital identity system driven by mainstream streaming platforms is taking shape.

This incident sends a signal for the entire crypto and gaming industry: mature internet giants are pragmatically absorbing verified technologies and product ideas from the Web3 space to serve their hundreds of millions of users.

05 Insights on Strategies for Traders

The intense reaction of the market provides traders with a window for observation and decision-making. Short-term price fluctuations are mainly driven by events and dominated by market sentiment. While traders focus on news, they should return to analyzing the long-term fundamentals and technical trends of the project.

Due to the significant volatility of the READY token price, using a strategy of building positions in batches and setting stop losses can help manage risk. For investors who are optimistic about the digital identification sector in the long term, this acquisition can be seen as a landmark event in the accelerated development of the industry, and strategic positioning should be conducted based on a thorough assessment of one's own risk tolerance.

Investors can easily access the real-time price, trading depth, and market capitalization changes of READY through mainstream trading platforms like Gate, as a reference for decision-making.

Future Prospects

The Ready Player Me platform will officially shut down its services at the end of January 2026, but its technological legacy will continue within the Netflix system.

The price of the READY token has drawn a steep upward line on the chart of the Gate platform, as the market reassesses its long-term value. The prices of vineyards adjacent to the Lafite Rothschild estate rise due to their fame, just as the value of the Metaverse identification protocol is being rediscovered due to the entry of tech giants.