Futureverse was then flying high. It had successfully, from the Cayman Islands, executed a complex merger deal with a claimed value of $530 million; raised US$54m from crypto venture capitalists friendly with the Trump presidency; issued a press release about a philanthropic partnership with Keanu Reeves; been anointed a tech unicorn by government agencies; and plots were afoot to secure rights for it to create – at long last – the metaverse from classic dystopian sci-fi novel Ready Player One.
But it would take only a couple of years before Futureverse seemed less a rocketship going to the moon than a roller-coaster going off the rails. Today all that remains is a smouldering crater.
The claimed billion-dollar business was bought by a shareholding creditor in an insolvency fire sale for US$4.35m ($7.5m). The liquidated husk records nine figures of accumulated losses and burnt shareholder capital, and still has $40m in outstanding debts with practically no assets available to repay them.
An associated venture capital fund, Born Ready Ventures, said to have been worth US$50m, is also now in liquidation after an ongoing dispute with Inland Revenue.
Futureverse appears to have been the largest business collapse in New Zealand last year by some margin, but unlike its trumpeted rise, it failed in stealth mode. Only now can the full story of Futureverse’s wild ride be properly told.
No Futureverse or Born Ready directors, managers or insolvency administrators agreed to be interviewed by the Herald or answer questions about its collapse.
Emails and messages sent through social media to New Zealand-based founders and directors McDonald and Daniel Gillespie – said to be the pair exercising day-to-day control as CEO and chief business officer, respectively – received no response.
Visits to residential addresses listed by the pair on the Companies Office also yielded no answers.
McDonald, the brother of BeingAI chief executive and founder David McDonald, was said to have sold his Remuera home late last year and now resides in Arrowtown. He did not respond to mobile phone calls or messages.
No one was home at Gillespie’s Birkenhead address when the Herald visited, and no response was received to messages left in his letterbox.
Emails and social media messages to Los Angeles-based venture capitalist Shara Senderoff, Futureverse’s co-founder and chief strategy officer who bills herself as an “Architect of Magic”, also went unanswered.
Futureverse co-founders Aaron McDonald and Shara Senderoff, in publicity images released on the raising of US$54m in 2023.
Emailed questions to Futureverse shareholder 50T Holdings, a New York crypto venture capital fund that held the general security agreement that triggered insolvency appointments in late 2025, also received no answer.
This story is instead built from corporate announcements, insolvency filings, and a rich vein of interviews company principals conducted with crypto and start-up-friendly podcasts and media outlets before what seems to be the most spectacular tech flameout in New Zealand history.
‘Discrepancies in the financial information’
During its ramp-up, and also while it was apparently free-falling downwards, Futureverse received millions in funding from government agencies. Significant public debts remain, with write-offs likely, and questions are being asked in Wellington.
Callaghan Innovation confirmed it had advanced $400,000 as a short-term research and development loan in 2020 to a Futureverse precursor that was absorbed into the merged entity. With interest, it said $432,173 remained outstanding.
Callaghan, in the process of being dissolved into the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, said its published write-up that described Futureverse as “the world’s first Māori-founded unicorn” relied on claims made in a 2023 interview it had conducted with McDonald.
New Zealand on Air confirmed Futureverse was one of the largest individual recipients of newly-established Game Development Sector Rebate funding.
In 2024, it received $3m, the maximum claimable, suggesting Futureverse was at this point spending at least $15m annually on game development. And in July 2025 another $2.3m was paid out.
But a few months after that last payment was made, Futureverse entered receivership and then liquidation and questions about its state of solvency started to be asked.
NZ on Air chief executive Cameron Harland said his agency appointed Deloitte to engage with administrators over concerns about disclosures made by Futureverse to prove solvency as part of the funding process.
“These concerns were raised as a result of discrepancies in the financial information provided as part of the application, and the financial status of the company six months later as disclosed to creditors,” he said.
Harland acknowledged, given the current state of affairs, that attempts to now claw back the funding would likely be futile: “We are advised a return of any funds to NZ On Air is unlikely.”
The zebra herd
The constituents of the Futureverse whole rolled up in 2023 were a mixture of non-fungible token (NFT) digital art producers and fintech payment start-ups.
Their prior public works included NFT bunnies (the Fluf rabbit avatars), ursines (the Party Bear collection) and automobiles, and the computer game Untamed Isles that made headlines in 2022 after raising more than $1m on Kickstarter for development but failed to launch.
As Senderoff put it in early 2025, after the roll-up had added yet more NFTs to its stockpile: “Everything we do is tell stories. We’re just sitting here right now telling a story. So you have to be able to make sure that your vision is clear. And so we, my co-founder Aaron and I, we merged 11 companies into Futureverse and became one company, and overnight we had 300 people. And so this was no small thing: Wow!”
Futureverse, an agglomeration of crypto and metaverse start-ups, launched in 2022 and boasted of a billion-dollar valuation – but three years later it was in liquidation.
Senderoff and McDonald were front-and-centre as Futureverse sketched out its ambitions, to underpin the future operations of a globe-spanning metaverse ecosystem.
Gillespie, chief business officer with a background in investment banking, maintained a lower profile than his co-founders, but McDonald described him as a grounding influence. “I have on my team Dan Gillespie, who joined me very early on, and is kind of ruthlessly operational and brings that more cautious optimism to the table,” he told Morgo.
Shortly after merging, Futureverse secured its first big capital endorsement when it announced raising US$54m in Series A funding led by 50T Holdings. A new shareholder, who would also back Born Ready, was California-based cryptocurrency firm Ripple Labs.
(Ripple has had regular run-ins with US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission, and also donated to Donald Trump’s second inauguration and his controversial White House ballroom project. The firm has also poured tens of millions of dollars into pro-crypto political campaigns.)
Futureverse’s highest-profile new project was announced in early 2024 as the “Readyverse”, a partnership with Ready Player One author Ernest Cline to bring the novel’s vision of an online metaverse to life. (The project did not launch before the company’s collapse and its website is now offline.)
But in the early days, Futureverse considered NFTs to be its foundational play, with Senderoff claiming in 2022 that the roll-up had “collectively, the largest number of NFTs held in the existence of the current NFT market”.
The NFT bubble earlier this decade led to this digital rabbit created by Futureverse changing hands for $12,250. The market subsequently crashed by 99.7%.
In hindsight, it appears Futureverse was flogging a dead zebra by doubling down on bubbles that had already, and catastrophically, deflated.
Demand for NFTs peaked in mid-2021 (Futureverse’s rabbit NFTs were then trading hands for tens of thousands of dollars apiece) but the market then collapsed faster than that for 15th-century Dutch tulips.
Metaverse fever peaked at the same time, led by Facebook’s rebranding as Meta with the social media giant pouring tens of billions of dollars into building out a virtual world it assumed its many users would want to live and work in.
But by early 2023, as Futureverse was just getting started, Mark Zuckerberg announced artificial intelligence, not the metaverse, was the actual future and redirected billions in capital accordingly.
(Futureverse was not the only local business caught up in this curious billion-dollar metaverse frenzy. Game developer Unity paid out $2.2b to buy Weta Digital in late 2021, intending to use the graphics technologies developed by the film-maker to flesh out its version of the metaverse. Less than two years later Unity backed out of the deal and wrote off the entire endeavour, leaving Miramar resident Sir Peter Jackson holding his original business and a billion in change.)
McDonald, at least, seems to have sensed the wind changing back in 2023 when he told Fortune that many of his investment targets for Born Ready were urging him not to even use the word “metaverse”.
“They’re not talking about it in the public domain because it’s not fashionable any more, but they’re certainly building strategies around it,” he said.
But from late 2024, as venture capital dried up but development continued burning cash, Futureverse began cannibalising itself. In December, Centrapay and its digital wallet app – one of the zebras merged a year earlier – was sold to BNZ. While the purchase price was not publicly disclosed, filings by BNZ and minority shareholders suggest this netted Futureverse $18m.
But from the outside, Futureverse was still receiving hype into 2025. Fast Company listed it as one of the world’s most innovative companies in March. An August update posted on LinkedIn by the company said it was continuing operations and “driving loyalty, creativity and cultural relevance at scale”.
That update also noted the company’s rabbit origin story had marked a significant milestone: “Fluf World, one of our original IPs, marked four years, proving digital IP can adapt and hold cultural value.”
According to crypto-tracker Coingecko, the price of Fluf World rabbits at that time had been dead cat bouncing on zero for over a year. The month the announcement was made, the market was 99.7% down from its peak in January 2022.
But, most significantly, in May 2025 major shareholder 50T Holdings took out a general security agreement over Futureverse, apparently either extending a fresh loan or converting part of its equity stake into debt. This would prove a Chekhov’s gun.
‘Almost comically complicated’
More recently, questions have also started being asked about Futureverse’s origin story, particularly the 2023 roll-up merger deal.
In April 2025, a few months before the enterprise collapsed, Land Information New Zealand (Linz) issued a curious retrospective approval for that deal. Futureverse was fined $40,000 for this late application, but also issued a stamp of approval stating the deal was worth “approximately $530,000,000″.
Linz’s Overseas Investment Office is required by law to vet business sales to foreign interests where transactions exceed $100m in value.
A request under the Official Information Act this year, seemingly from a creditor or investor, raised concerns over the “very large transaction value” recorded without evidence of cash changing hands.
The requester said they sought underlying information provided to Linz “for current legal and forensic analysis concerning ownership, funding source, and consideration structure in a material transaction”.
Linz’s assessment report reveals a transaction structure that an experienced market operator told the Herald seemed “almost comically complicated”.
The deal proceeded in five sequential steps and “involved parties across New Zealand, the United States, Britain and the Cayman Islands, and numerous legal advisers were involved,” Linz documents state.
The ultimate owner of Futureverse was revealed to be Cayman Islands-registered NetX Partners, which in turn was said to be owned by McDonald, Gillespie and US-based director John Joyce.
McDonald and Gillespie were listed as those exercising day-to-day control over the enterprise.
The merger seems to have been entirely paid for by the issue of Futureverse shares, with apparently no cash changing hands. And despite the transaction being conducted two years prior, Linz said in its late 2024 considerations that applicants were “currently being audited, and statements are not yet finalised”.
A spokesperson for Linz said it took no responsibility for verifying transaction values. “This information is collected from applicants for statistical purposes,” the spokesperson said.
‘I was gobsmacked’
The end came quickly, at the end of September 2025. First, citing a potential investor abandoning due diligence and realising no fresh capital was coming to bail out the enterprise, Futurverse directors appointed voluntary administrators Grant Thornton on the morning of September 30.
Minutes later, 50T Holdings – citing $5.9m owed under a general security agreement – appointed Calibre Partners as receivers in a bid to buy out business assets before seemingly inevitable liquidation torched contracts and partnerships and further diminished what little value remained.
A High Court order was secured in October to push the voluntary administration watershed meeting back a month to ensure the sale process concluded before insolvency was formally declared.
The voluntary administrators’ first report had Futureverse, according to its own management accounts, $22.1m underwater in September and facing a $3.3m working capital deficit. Accumulated losses totalled $137.5m.
Directors told Calibre Partners the business failed because of delays in partner launches, legacy debt inherited from the merger, and a collapse of the venture capital pool for crypto and metaverse projects.
Directors also claimed it was overly ambitious in plans to “change the content creation and distribution in the metaverse across multiple domains”.
50T Holdings funded the receivership to the tune of $1.9m, and scooped out what remained of the Futureverse business for US$4.35m, in a cashless settlement set off against debt owed.
From its formation in 2022, Futureverse operated out of this building off Auckland’s Karangahape Rd. Last year receivers took over the offices and auctioned off the office furniture. Photo / Google Street View
Residual assets – office furniture, a “Nvidia Super Computer System” and other miscellaneous items – went to mortgagee sale and netted a further $390,000, not even enough to cover receivership fees.
McGrath Nichol, appointed as liquidators and serving as almost spectators while 50T recovered what it could, crystallised the losses to come in its second report: given nothing is likely to remain after receivership, a deficit of $40.3m was flagged for remaining creditors.
One senior legal figure, who found himself on the fringes of Futureverse, was shocked by its sudden rise and fall.
“I was gobsmacked it could go from something that large, to nothing, so quickly,” he told the Herald.
The lawyer said he’d acquired a Fluf bunny during the period and kept possession as a reminder of those wild times. Looking at the digital rabbit “keeps you humble”, he said.
Enter Inland Revenue
Born Ready Ventures, launched in 2022 alongside the convoluted merger, was directed and largely owned by McDonald, Gillespie and Senderoff. The fund claimed to have US$50m available to support companies operating in the Futureverse ecosystem.
It has also recently entered liquidation, and seems to have been brought down by the collapse of Futureverse and a dispute with New Zealand tax authorities.
According to the Companies Office, the only local investment it had made was the taking of a 3% stake in Dan Carter-linked NFT venture Glorious.
In July, shareholders appointed Grant Thornton as liquidators, who said while there were no quantified creditors and accounts listed $15m in investment assets, the bulk of potential recoveries were a “significant investment” into a related party.
“It appears that a majority, if not all, of the company’s investment into Futureverse will not be recovered,” the report said.
The final straw for Born Ready, it seemed, was a tax dispute that the company was no longer able to afford to fight.
“The company also has a contingent income tax liability in relation to funding received for investments. The company received advice that this would not be subject to income tax; however, this has been challenged by the Inland Revenue. The company has exhausted its funds defending its position,” liquidators said in their first report.
Liquidators have also found themselves holding $1324 worth of “digital assets”, although this comes with a caveat: “The company holds a minor holding of cryptocurrency and NFTs. We will realise these assets, but given the volatile nature of these assets, we are unable to comment on their recoverability.”
‘Almost all of the industry has gone under’
In 2022, as Futureverse was being cobbled together and prepared for launch, the founders’ visions extended beyond commercial and technological triumph to include A-list philanthropy.
A mid-2022 announcement claimed Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves and his partner, artist Alexandra Grant, had agreed to become advisers to the Futureverse Foundation to fund five to 10 projects a year to “empower the next generation of artists through the use of blockchain technology and web3”.
But charity filings tell a story of unfilled ambitions. The Futureverse Foundation was registered as a New Zealand charity in October 2022, and dissolved three years later. During its brief existence, it reported no income and no expenditure.
Foundation trustee Brook Howard-Smith, whose NFT business led to him owning 3% of Futureverse’s holding company after the merger, was keen to stress to the Herald he was neither an office holder nor employee at Futureverse and only assisted its charitable efforts as a volunteer.
Paperwork proved challenging, he said, prompting a more informal approach.
“Setting up a compliant charitable entity in the US proved far more complex and slow than we anticipated… Early on and while that structure was being worked through, we chose to give directly rather than wait,” he said.
Howard-Smith pointed to $1m donated to Auckland City Mission in January 2022 from the proceeds of NFT rabbits produced through a Snoop Dogg partnership as the largest evidence of this freewheeling charity. (The Auckland charity for the homeless confirmed to the Herald the receipt of this cash.)
He said Senderoff and other Futurverse figures took over management of the charity once it got formed and off the ground in the United States.
Following the trail to California renders deja vu. A Futureverse Foundation was registered there in November 2023, with documents listing Senderoff as treasurer and Howard-Smith as a director.
In December 2025, this foundation also filed for dissolution. The only income recorded during its existence was US$35,000 in seed funding, and its only expense outside of a few hundred dollars spent on an accounting software subscription was US$2783 to cover establishment legal fees.
(Questions from the Herald to Grant’s publicist about whether her and Reeves’ involvement in the project amounted to anything more than a press release went unanswered.)
Keanu Reeves was said to have entered a philanthropic partnership with Futureverse, but the company’s charitable foundations in New Zealand and California closed last year with zero activity reported.
Howard-Smith said he had no insider insights as to why Futureverse collapsed, but said the entire metaverse project had hit the wall.
“From the outside it felt like they were really ambitious, trying to solve some big challenges. But the industry collapsed … Web3 collapsed, I imagine almost all of the industry has gone under,” he said.
University of Auckland professor Alex Sims said she hadn’t followed Futureverse closely, but said its sector – crypto and the metaverse together – had come undone over the past few years and there were always risks in trying to invest in emerging technologies.
“I guess the trouble is, when you’re chasing the next big thing, that it’s a gamble,” she said.
‘Deep down the rabbit hole’
Since receivers and liquidators took over Futureverse’s offices on Auckland’s South St, the company’s principals have largely kept their heads down.
McDonald, who had earned an Edmund Hillary Fellowship and won EY’s technology entrepreneur of the year in 2019 with Futureverse precursor Centrality, is said to have moved from Auckland to Arrowtown.
He was well aware of the gnarly territory he was getting into with the metaverse, telling Morgo in 2023: “When you’re going through those emerging technology phases, there’s a lot of information out there, and a lot of it’s wrong, and a lot of it’s misinformation, and so building in that context is not the easiest thing to do,” he said.
“Don’t try this at home, kids.”
The lower-profile Gillespie quickly moved into a role as group manager for Canadian software firm Vencora.
Forbes “30 under 30” honouree Senderoff, by contrast, has rolled out at least one high-profile project since the collapse.
In December she announced the release of The Age of Disclosure, a film she executive produced and describes as a “documentary revealing an 80-year global cover-up of non-human intelligent life and a secret war among major nations to reverse-engineer advanced technology of non-human origin”.
(The New York Times was largely dismissive of the film, with its reviewer saying “anyone who sits through its nearly two hours of unprovable claims is a chump”.)
Senderoff, who in 2022 told the Observer she ran investment opportunities past New Orleans energy healer Fatima Mbodj, outlined her interest in the paranormal: “From an early age, I’ve been captivated by and deep down the rabbit hole of consciousness, quantum physics, relational intelligence, human potential, and the inner architecture that shapes our experience of reality.”
Last year she scrubbed mention of Futureverse and Born Ready Ventures from the biography on her personal website.
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism – including twice being named Reporter of the Year – and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting for business newspapers and national magazines.
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