One of the hottest virtual assets is now – you guessed it – virtual land.
Brian Quarmby reports at Cointelegraph that over $100 million worth of metaverse land sold last week, according to a study by DappRadar.
DappRadar estimates 6000 traders were involved in this gold rush, in which the Decentraland platform accounted for $15.53 million in sales.
In discussing the impetus for the new rush toward virtual real estate, some feel that Facebook is pretty influential.
“Facebook in their attempt to usurp the narrative of the metaverse caused a chain reaction of other companies not in Web 3.0 (such as Microsoft) to also announce their metaverse strategies and created mass interest and awareness,” Sandbox/Animoca Brands chairman and co-founder Yat Siu said, as quoted in Quarmbys piece. “While not everyone understands what digital property rights really mean, enough of them are interested in this now, and this has created more net awareness. The Sandbox has captured the narrative of a real metaverse — one where you can really own a piece of it, and this is also reflected somewhat in the token price.”
Other analysis also notes the speculative nature of the metaverse move-in, as in this input from an anonymous piece at Graana:
“The metaverse is a hyperbolic elucidation of virtual social reality, emerging as the hotspot for real-estate investments worth multi-million dollars in virtual land — even if the investors don’t see themselves living in these virtual spaces.”
Crypto investors, take note – all of this metaverse land activity was accomplished through platforms running on Ethereum blockchains. Although Ethereum has been the most established smart contract handler to date, other rivals are emerging such as Bitcoin SV and several altcoins that offer the ability to put data on the blockchain. Factor all of that into your crypto strategy, and if you’ve been centered on NFTs, think about how the metaverse will become a big part of this emerging market.
