TRN Docs

The story of The Root Network, 2016–2026 ​

Researched October 2026 from news reports, the NZ Companies Office and Gazette, archived company blogs, the node's code history, X posts and the transcripts of more than 70 YouTube videos. Every claim below has a source at the bottom of the page. Where sources disagree, we say so.

The short version ​

A New Zealand founder, Aaron McDonald, started a blockchain company called Centrality in 2016. It raised a lot of money in the 2018 crypto boom. In 2021 his team made a hit NFT project, FLUF World, and an AI-character project, Altered State Machine. In 2022 those companies and others were merged into one big company, Futureverse, and it announced a new blockchain built alongside Ripple's XRP Ledger: The Root Network.

For two years Futureverse made big announcements: FIFA, Ready Player One, Reebok, Warner Bros, a US$54 million investment. But very few people used the products, and the ROOT token lost almost all its value.

In September 2025 Futureverse ran out of money. Its lender put it into receivership and bought what was left. A group called TRN Labs took custody of the network, made big plans, then went quiet in early 2026. A small team, Gen3, kept the lights on until they too stepped back in August 2026.

The chain itself never stopped. Its validators kept producing blocks. Now a handful of community members are trying to get everything working again.

Part 1: Centrality, 2016–2021 ​

How it started. Aaron McDonald spent about 15 to 20 years in telecoms and IT before turning to blockchain. In mid-2016 he and others started Centrality in Auckland as a "venture studio": one company that starts and runs lots of small blockchain start-ups. The company register shows Centrality Limited incorporated on 14 July 2016, with McDonald as a director from day one. Co-founders named in early press were Jerry Yuan, Mark Povey, Rob Rogers and Roger Smith. They started in a small rented room.

The token sale. In October 2017 a pre-sale raised about US$15 million. In January 2018, at the height of the crypto boom, Centrality sold its CENNZ token. The company said it sold out in under six minutes, with US$262 million pledged against a US$100 million cap. Most sources put the main sale at about US$80 million. The NZ Herald reported about 100 staff.

The peak and the doubts. In April 2018 CENNZ hit its all-time high, about US$0.54. That month a Newshub columnist questioned the company's claimed NZ$690 million value, which counted every token, not just the ones in circulation. By 2019 the token had lost most of its value. In July 2019 Centrality denied rumours of mass redundancies. A month later McDonald put its last valuation at "a bit over $100 million".

The ventures. Centrality backed many small companies. Some of them, like Sylo (a messaging app and wallet), Centrapay (payments; in 2020 its tech let 2,000 Coca-Cola vending machines take bitcoin) and CentraPass (digital identity), later became part of Futureverse. McDonald liked to say he wanted "a herd of zebras", not one unicorn.

CENNZnet. Centrality built its own blockchain, CENNZnet, on Substrate, the same toolkit as Polkadot. It went live in 2020, with staking from early 2021. In June 2021 McDonald promised the network's control would be handed to the community within about six months.

Part 2: FLUF World, ASM and the roll-up, 2021–2022 ​

FLUF World. In August 2021 a Centrality-linked company, Non-Fungible Labs, released FLUF World: 10,000 animated 3D rabbit NFTs. They sold out in about 40 minutes, and the project did about US$42 million of sales in its first five weeks. More collections followed: Party Bears, Thingies, Burrows and others.

Altered State Machine (ASM). In October 2021 McDonald's ASM project sold 10,000 boxes of AI football players ("brains" in NFT "bodies"). Big crypto investors joined a reported US$11 million round.

The roll-up. McDonald later said that in 2021 a growth investor, linked to Dan Tapiero's 10T fund, suggested merging his companies into one. It took about a year and a half. In December 2022 Futureverse was announced as a merger of eight companies: Altered State Machine, Non-Fungible Labs, Sylo, Centrapay, CentraPass, Immersve, Shadows Interactive and Altered Phoenix. Three more were added later, making 11. It claimed over 300 staff in 16 countries. The co-founders were McDonald, Shara Senderoff (a US music-tech investor), Marco Brondani (the technical lead) and Daniel Gillespie.

Legally, the old company carried on. Centrality Limited was renamed Futureverse Corporation Limited on 15 December 2022. A government filing later valued the merger at about NZ$530 million.

Part 3: The Root Network is born, 2022–2023 ​

Announced with Ripple. On 17 June 2022 Ripple and FLUF World announced The Root Network. It would be a new blockchain built alongside Ripple's XRP Ledger, using XRP to pay fees, with bridges to the XRP Ledger and to Ethereum. McDonald called it "the culmination of 5 years" of work. He chose the XRP Ledger, he said, for its 1.3 million active wallets: lots of real users and few competing apps. Ripple's president, Monica Long, later joined the Futureverse board.

Built from CENNZnet. The Root Network was made by copying and reworking CENNZnet's code. CENNZ holders were offered a one-off swap into the new token, at first called "Mycelium" and later renamed ROOT. The node's first code was written in August 2022 and the mainnet was set up around the end of September 2022.

No token sale. Futureverse said it would never sell ROOT. Instead people earned it by doing things: quests, challenges and a "Future Score". McDonald said this was to stay on the right side of securities law.

Staking and the Vortex (August 2023). Staking went live with 21 validators, all run by the team. Fees went into a pot called the Vortex and were paid out as VTX tokens every 90 days, on top of a bootstrap reward of 10% of all ROOT over five years.

Part 4: The big years, 2023–2024 ​

The money. In July 2023 Futureverse raised US$54 million, led by 10T Holdings with Ripple taking part. Axios later reported a US$700 million pre-money valuation. The co-founders also launched a US$50 million fund, Born Ready, and an accelerator with Outlier Ventures.

The headlines. Over the next 18 months Futureverse announced:

  • FIFA AI League: an AI football game. Futureverse said it had about 500,000 downloads by late 2023 and at its peak made about 5% of all XRP Ledger traffic.
  • JEN: an AI music generator, trained on Alibaba's cloud.
  • Reebok Impact: design-your-own sneakers inside Instagram.
  • Readyverse Studios (January 2024): with Ready Player One author Ernest Cline and producer Dan Farah, and an exclusive Warner Bros. Discovery deal for the Ready Player One web3 rights. Its flagship game was Open, a battle royale.
  • Partnerships with Animoca Brands (a US$5 million equity swap), Cool Cats, NVIDIA, Crucible, Catalyze Research in Korea, Ripple Custody, and talks it said it was having with "every major studio".

On the chain:

  • ROOT listed on KuCoin, Bybit, Bitget and Gate in November 2023, with a brief listing spike.
  • The first Vortex payout that month went to 371 stakers.
  • DEXes and the explorer: the first DEXes (Dexter, Moai) arrived in December 2023, and the Rootscan explorer in February 2024.
  • Outside validators: seats opened to 42 in February 2024.
  • Upgrades: the chain had a big technical upgrade in mid-2024, and two-way bridging with the XRP Ledger in September 2024.
  • Activity claims: in December 2024 McDonald claimed about US$13 billion had moved across the network in its first year.

The questions. Even then, some things didn't add up:

  • In November 2023 an XRPL developer asked publicly how the bridge could pay out more XRP than had been bridged in. McDonald said everything was backed 1:1 and promised a report. We could not find it.
  • Community hosts on YouTube kept pointing out that most announced products couldn't be used yet. The FIFA game's leaderboard, they said, had the same few dozen players. Futureverse collections were missing from NFT sales charts.
  • In May 2024 McDonald asked the community for patience. He said the company suffered from a "conglomerate discount".

Aside: what's a "conglomerate discount"?

It's a finance term. Investors often value a company made of many different businesses at less than those businesses would be worth on their own. A sprawling company is hard to understand and hard to compare with anything else, and it's hard to tell which parts are actually working.

Futureverse was 11 merged companies doing AI, games, music, a blockchain, payments, identity, fashion and film all at once. McDonald's argument was that people didn't know what to make of it, so they undervalued it. In time, he said, the pieces would prove themselves.

The community's argument was simpler: most of what had been announced couldn't be used yet.

People who worked inside Futureverse at the time say both were right. The company really was too spread out for anyone to value. And the community really couldn't use most of what it had been promised.

Part 5: The cracks, 2024 to mid-2025 ​

The token. ROOT peaked at about 13 US cents in March 2024. By mid-2025 it was under half a cent, down about 97%. A brief rally in June 2025 didn't last.

Promises that slipped. A selection, with when each was promised:

PromisedWhenWhat happened
CENNZnet handed to the community "within six months"June 2021Superseded by The Root Network
ROOT and staking "this month"May 2023Staking came in August 2023
Code open-sourced after auditsMay 2023A public copy appeared only in November 2025, after the receivership
Readyverse "launching in 2024"January 2024Public early access in August 2025, with most experiences "coming soon"
"Another dozen large global sports brands" in a few monthsJune 2024Not found
1 million daily active users "this time next year"June 2024The record was 801 daily active addresses (June 2025)
Open: a playtest in 2024 and a full launch in 2025October 2024Still "coming soon" when the company collapsed
Decentralised governance in 2025January 2025"Close to completion" in October 2025; never finished

Staff. Headcount went from "300 plus" (December 2022) to about 250 after a cut of roughly 20% in 2023, and about 200 by April 2025.

Signs of strain. In January 2025 a new, independent group called TRN Labs was announced to bring builders to the network. In April 2025 Futureverse bought the NFT company Candy Digital. On 10 May 2025 Futureverse gave its lender, 50T Holdings (part of Dan Tapiero's 50T group, the same group that led the 2023 round), security over the company. That deed is what the lender later used to appoint receivers. The last post on the official Root Network blog was on 4 September 2025.

Part 6: The fall, September–December 2025 ​

30 September 2025. Futureverse announced a "restructuring". In fact two things happened on the same day:

  • the directors put the company into administration, with McGrathNicol as administrators;
  • the lender, 50T Holdings, appointed receivers from Calibre Partners.

61 staff and 18 contractors lost their jobs that day.

What the founders said. McDonald wrote that the founders had "worked without pay and invested our own savings". He also said: "In hindsight, that plan was too ambitious." He blamed:

  • partner launches that were delayed;
  • customer revenue that didn't come;
  • debts inherited from the merged companies;
  • a weak market for raising money.

What the network said. The Root Network's account said the chain would "remain independent of the Futureverse receivership process". The code was open source, it said, and decisions about the network's token pools would be "under the administration of TRN Labs". McDonald said TRN Labs would handle "any treasury management functions until governance is completed".

The hospital pass. Shen, co-founder of the XRPL game studio Gen3, wrote: "With little warning, we were informed that everything will change and either we step up or it's all gone." Gen3 stepped up:

  • Validators: they launched about 15 of their own validators across three continents.
  • Bridge: they got the stuck XRPL bridge working again (17–21 October). They then rebuilt the bridge relaying on their own setup, "Bifrost".
  • Explorer: they took over the Rootscan explorer.
  • No Futureverse help: by the end of 2025 Shen said Gen3 had run all the core infrastructure "without any Futureverse involvement".

TRN Labs' new chapter. On 7 October 2025 TRN Labs published "A New Chapter":

  • TRN was "no longer the project of a single company".
  • It would be run by the community.
  • A "Root Network 2.0" whitepaper followed in November, promising new token rules by year-end and governance from early 2026.
  • No person from TRN Labs was ever publicly named.

The sale. On 13 November 2025 the receivers sold the Futureverse business to its lender, 50T Holdings, for US$4.35 million (about NZ$7.5 million). The price was set off against the debt, so no cash changed hands. The receivers said they did not expect any money for ordinary creditors. On 16 December 2025 creditors voted to liquidate the company.

Part 7: Custody and silence, 2026 ​

January. Futureverse's old systems shut down one by one. The Rootscan domain was handed to Gen3, and Gen3 restored bridging between The Root Network and Ethereum on Bifrost.

3 February. The Root Network's official account posted "January on The Root Network". It was the last post from the official account, and the last sign of life from TRN Labs. The promised token rules and governance never arrived. No reason was ever given.

March to May. Exchanges began dropping ROOT, starting with Coins.ph in March. In May the token hit its lowest price ever, a tiny fraction of a cent.

June to August: things come apart. Over about six weeks, the public chains show the network's bridges losing what held them together:

  • 28 June: the XRP behind the bridge leaves. The bridge's "door" account on the XRP Ledger (rPotpackAV39ysG1cyprYDa6ambUAPtKHk) holds the real XRP backing every XRP on The Root Network. It paid out 421,000 XRP in three payments within four minutes. The first carried the memo "Recovery test", and each was approved by 7 of the door's 8 signers.
  • Late July: the Ethereum bridge stops being updated. Every day the network produces a new list of its validators for the Ethereum side of the bridge, and someone has to send it there. The last one Ethereum received was in late July. Nothing has been sent since.
  • 3 August: the rest of the XRP goes. The door paid out a further 6,835 XRP, again marked "Recovery test", which left it at its 39.6 XRP minimum. About 424,800 XRP is still in circulation on The Root Network. It still works for fees and trading inside the network, but it can't be bridged back out. Who arranged the payments has not been made public.
  • 12 August: Gen3 steps back. Shen announced that Gen3 would stop building retail products and step back. Much of the supporting infrastructure, such as the explorer and the staking site, went offline.
  • 20 August: the investigation. The NZ Herald published an investigation into Futureverse's collapse. It reported debts of about NZ$40 million, NZ$137 million of accumulated losses, and taxpayer-funded grants that are unlikely to be repaid. (These figures come from a single report and have not been independently checked.) The same month, Giottus delisted ROOT.

By October.

  • Sites offline: therootnetwork.com, Rootscan and the Futureverse sites were offline.
  • No reward payouts: the Vortex, the 90-day reward payout, hadn't run since 2025. Fees have been piling up uncollected.
  • A shrinking validator set: only 9 validators were still producing blocks, and 5 of those were the original Futureverse nodes.

Part 8: The rescue, now ​

Through all of this the chain never stopped. Its validators kept producing and finalising blocks, as validators do when nobody is in charge.

In October 2026 a group of community members began a rescue. So far they have:

  • Wallet sites: rebuilt the wallet, staking, DEX and explorer sites, all running in the browser with no server holding anyone's keys;
  • Public RPC: set up a new public connection point for wallets, rpc.trn.codeology.co.nz, after the original one went dark;
  • A validator: run one, root-1, from a home in New Zealand;
  • The quiet jobs: documented what Futureverse's servers used to do quietly, which nobody does now. That means bootnodes, bridge relaying, the Vortex payout and history recording.

See What the network still needs, and run a validator yourself.

Who's who ​

Person or groupRole
Aaron McDonaldFounder and CEO of Centrality, then co-founder and CEO of Futureverse
Shara SenderoffCo-founder of Futureverse and Readyverse Studios; earlier co-founded the investor Raised In Space
Marco BrondaniCo-founder and CTO of Futureverse; built the chain's technology
Daniel GillespieCo-founder and director of Futureverse
Roger Smith, Jerry Yuan, Mark Povey, Rob RogersNamed in early press as Centrality's co-founders
Alex SmeeleRan Non-Fungible Labs (FLUF World), later Futureverse's community lead
Monica LongRipple president; on the Futureverse board
Dan Tapiero / 10T and 50TLed the 2023 investment; 50T Holdings later lent to Futureverse, appointed receivers and bought the business
Calibre PartnersReceivers (Brendon Gibson, Neale Jackson, Daniel Stoneman)
McGrathNicolAdministrators, then liquidators (Andrew Grenfell, Kare Johnstone)
TRN LabsAnnounced January 2025; took custody of the network's treasury in September 2025; silent since February 2026. Its people were never named
Gen3 (Shen, Mark Ibanez)XRPL game builders who ran the network's core infrastructure from October 2025 to mid-2026

Numbers at a glance ​

Centrality token sale (2018)about US$80–100 million, plus about US$15 million pre-sale
FLUF World first five weeks (2021)about US$42 million of sales
Companies merged into Futureverse8 at launch, 11 in total
Futureverse funding (2023)US$54 million Series A
Staff300+ (2022) → about 250 (2023) → about 200 (2025) → 61 laid off at receivership
ROOT pricelisting spike about US$0.47 (Nov 2023); peak about US$0.13 (Mar 2024); under US$0.002 (Sep 2025)
Sale of the business (Nov 2025)US$4.35 million, to the lender

Where the sources disagree ​

  • How much Centrality raised in 2018: US$80 million, NZ$100 million+, or "US$100 million in six minutes", depending on the source and on whether the pre-sale is counted.
  • When the merger happened: sources give 15, 16, 17 or 23 December 2022. McDonald himself has also said early 2023.
  • How many companies merged: 8 at the announcement. Later, everyone says 11. We could not find which three were added.
  • When The Root Network launched: the code shows mainnet set up around the end of September 2022. Exchanges give February or July 2023, and McDonald said in June 2024 that it was "nine months" old. These probably count different things: the chain, the token claim and the public launch.
  • ROOT's all-time high: CoinMarketCap's US$0.47 is a one-minute listing spike. CoinGecko's US$0.13 (March 2024) is the real peak.
  • The 2026 NZ Herald figures were read through a summary. Check them against the article before quoting.

Sources ​

Company and government records

News

On-chain records (anyone can check these)

  • The XRP Ledger bridge door account and its payments: https://livenet.xrpl.org/accounts/rPotpackAV39ysG1cyprYDa6ambUAPtKHk (transactions 3284BCB7…, 65F80933…, 451DEB19… and 9E52DBAC…)
  • XRP in circulation on The Root Network: totalSupply() of the XRP token contract 0xCCCCCcCC00000002000000000000000000000000, read on 15 Oct 2026
  • The validator set and Vortex rounds: The Root Network's own state (session.validators, vortexDistribution), read on 15 Oct 2026

Posts on X

Video (talks and interviews; auto-transcripts were read for this page)

Curated independently. Source-attributed reference for The Root Network. Not affiliated with Futureverse / TRN Labs.

Content licenses follow upstream sources — see Sources.