Why Now

The timing for attribution infrastructure isn't arbitrary. Four trends create a narrow window:

Virtual World Economy at Scale: Roblox (111.8M DAU), Fortnite (110M+ MAU), and Minecraft (180M+ monthly) represent 400M+ people already living in virtual worlds. These platforms paid creators $4.6B+ in 2024, but capture 75% of value and offer zero portability. The economy exists. The infrastructure is broken.

Spatial Hardware as Upgrade Path: Skeptics point to early hardware volumes as evidence of a niche market. This misreads the data. Apple's Vision Pro (600K+ units) and Meta's devices (20M+) aren't creating demand. They're upgrading existing behavior for a massive, pre-habituated user base. We don't need to teach users to value spatial interaction. Hundreds of millions already navigate 3D worlds daily on mobile screens. This is why the XR market projects to $1.069T by 2030 (33.5% CAGR). As usage flows between mobile (entry), desktop (creation), and spatial devices (immersive experience), cross-platform attribution becomes essential. Currently, no infrastructure tracks this flow.

Creator Economy Professionalization: The creator economy has graduated from hobbyist gig to industrial sector, but its tooling is stuck in 2015. 50M+ independent creators generated $250B in 2024, projected to nearly triple to $721B by 2030 (19.3% CAGR). As creation professionalizes, the current "sharecropping" model becomes unsustainable. To scale from $250B to $721B, creators require what every mature industry has: proven ownership rights and portability. They need infrastructure that lets them move work from a game engine to a web browser to AR glasses without losing their IP.

Generative to Agentic AI: We're witnessing a shift in AI utility that current 3D engines cannot handle. We've moved from generative AI (creating assets) to agentic AI (performing complex, goal-oriented tasks autonomously). Existing engines like Unity and Unreal have opaque state management, making agentic creation difficult. anitya is the first no-code 3D platform fully readable and interactable by AI agents, and the first to solve attribution for AI-assisted work.

These forces converge into a single imperative: creators need infrastructure that lets them orchestrate AI while proving their contribution. The platforms that solve this first will become standard. The first mover likely wins permanently, just as TCP/IP won for internet communication.