COLONIA NOVA -- To a packed audience of more than 80 in an auditorium in Colonia Nova, LukeConnell Vandeverre, Chairman of Hope Capital and the CEO of the World Stock Exchange, announced that SL's first stock exchange would merge with WSE.
Shaun Altman, who had created SL's first stock market, the Metaverse Stock Exchange, with one stock on it, Cyberland, was appointed the WSE's chief technology officer.

The Metaverse Stock Exchange will halt operations soon, and Cyberland stock will move over to the WSE. The exchange had 775 members. The WSE has 327.

Altman said Cyberland would pay 10 percent of its profits as a dividend.
The WSE is expected to relaunch in ten days.

Vandeverre spoke in real time audo from a script to an audience that included media, shareholders and curious passers-by. After describing the WSE as a platform to raise capital from investors who aim to build their wealth through capital growth and dividends, Vandeverre then explained the problems that had brought down the one month-old WSE.

"We've had five experienced programmers review and edit the system in order to repair the system and each time it has not been successful."

During the repairs over the last two weeks, Vandeverre had been chatting with Altman about how they could work together to "create a Stock Exchange that would have a significant positive impact on the entire Second Life economy."

Altman is a programmer versed in several coding languages. Vandeverre said the two would add Altman's "enhanced security system while retaining many of the previous features such as at market and at limit orders, an IPO submission process and market depth."

"The first thing I'm going to do is throw the existing web application out the window," Altman said, which elicited laughter from the audience.

Altman said he would replace the old application with a complete rewrite using what he described as "the best Web development framework around," Ruby on Rails.