The metaverse is getting hotter. Not hot, like a delicious meal or a Finnish sauna. This mostly fictional, virtual world is getting hot like a real estate market. Because lately, it is one.
If you have enough money and courage, you can now buy up digital tracts of land in the metaverse. Of course, there isn’t just one metaverse. Much like a website is part of the larger World Wide Web, there are countless companies, including Meta (née Facebook), building their own virtual realms where they hope people will soon gather as their digital avatars to play games, buy things, and interact with ads. The emerging real estate market for these three-dimensional spaces in virtual reality — including everything from virtual concert venues and shopping malls to houses and monuments — anticipates a future in which digital property owners can work with brands that want a presence in the various iterations of the metaverse.
One of the first companies to get into the digital real estate business is Metaverse Group, which operates a virtual world called Decentraland. Last week, Metaverse Group’s parent company, Token.com, announced that a “116 parcel estate in the heart of the Fashion Street district within Decentraland” sold for the equivalent of about $2.5 million — a record! The new owner of this estate near Fashion Street could presumably profit if Louis Vuitton wants to open a store there: They could effectively be the brand’s virtual landlord.
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This Decentraland deal did not, strictly speaking, involve real money. The digital estate sold for 618,000 mana, a type of cryptocurrency used in Decentraland. When you say it out loud, “mana” actually sounds a lot like the first couple syllables of “Monopoly money.”
“Imagine if you came to New York when it was farmland, and you had the option to get a block of SoHo,” Metaverse Group co-founder Michael Gord recently told the New York Times. “If someone wants to buy a block of real estate in SoHo today, it’s priceless, it’s not on the market. That same experience is going to happen in the metaverse.”
All this probably sounds a bit mind-bending. Who would pay real money for the rights to a piece of a virtual world that doesn’t entirely exist yet and will never exist in the real world? Well, if you’ve been paying any attention to the NFT craze or the cryptocurrency boom in recent years, plenty of people are pouring millions of dollars into digital assets with the expectation that others might be willing to pay even more for them in the future. This metaverse land grab is happening under a similar assumption. What makes the metaverse real estate boom all the more enticing, though, is the idea that once you own a piece of digital land, you might be able to make money by leasing it out or selling ads.
Users can wander around Decentraland to find stores …….
Source: https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/12/2/22812608/metaverse-real-estate-meta