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By Guardian Market, SLR CFO Does anyone here remember the WSE? Remember LukeConnell Vandeverre, the self-assured CEO of that first multi-company stock exchange in Second Life? It’ll strain your virtual memory to do so, since the WSE has all but disappeared in recent months and the metaverse has a short attention span. On January 6, 2008, the World Stock Exchange posted this announcement stating that it was going to upgrade to a new edition of their webpage – WSE 4.0. The article reports, “…we expect the new website design, layout, functionality and services should be completed within 45 days.” That would have put launch date by February 20th. Instead, at the time of this writing the WSE has been closed for 175 days, and shows no signs of life. A splash screen which greets visitors says only that WSE 4.0 is coming, and that the “Launch Date [is] CO.MI.NG” Presumably the odd grammar is a cute way of saying that they’ll put those dates in the graphic soon. The screen has been up for at least a month, without change.
I would love to give additional statistics on when WSE’s last announcement was, how many companies have left the WSE due to this prolonged closure, etc., but when I tried to log in and check records, I was greeted with the friendly message, “Research is closed during the upgrade process.” The closure itself brought about some controversy. Lindsay Druart claimed at the time of closure that Vandeverre had advanced warning of the interest ban that was about to be handed down from Linden Labs. As nearly half a year has passed since the closing date, I would have hoped that Vandeverre would be posting updates, reports, showing previews, etc. However, this is not happening. While Vandeverre is still in world (or so I hear – being in North America while he is in Australia, we don’t usually have the same schedule), the WSE website is nearly dead. Only a few faithful companies do their financials, and the rest are either silent or leaving. Oh, and in all of this, HCB (Hope Capital Bonds) have defaulted not just once, but three times on their periodic interest payments. Again, the research section is closed, but from my records the payments should have occurred at December 2nd, February 2nd and May 2nd. I renew my credit rating of D on Hope Capital. So what is an investor to do? I think most WSE investors have mentally, if not financially, written of their WSE account balances. The cynic in me says that this is a mistake – that investors should only press harder the longer the outage lasts, but I know that won’t happen. If money came into the WSE because of attention, then is this silence and non-activity a way of slowly letting that money leave the metaverse? Only Vandeverre’s LindeX records will answer that question, and I doubt we’ll ever have access to those. I encourage the WSE staff, especially Vandeverre, to make an announcement as soon as practical. You have certainly had time to prepare your comments, and investors deserve to be treated better. I encourage WSE accountholders to question Vandeverre about the standings of the site, a timeline for going live, and possible remuneration for the excessive delays, which will surely only result in depressed portfolio values if the site does ever resume. As for my thoughts, I doubt the WSE will ever open again. Going this long with no signs of life, my guess is that Vandeverre has gotten involved with other projects, either in the Metaverse or outside it, and the WSE will slowly fade away into the bits and bytes of the internet.
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