Metaverse real estate is now being sold for cryptocurrency

The metaverse is getting hotter. Not hot, like a delicious meal or a Finnish sauna. This mostly fictional, virtual world is getting hot as the real estate market. Because lately it’s one.

If you have enough money and courage, you can now buy digital plots of land in the metaverse. Of course, there is not just one metaverse. Like a website part of a larger global network, there are countless companies, including Meta (born Facebook), building their own virtual realms, where they hope people will soon come together as their digital avatars to play games, to buy things and interact with ads. The emerging real estate market for these 3D real-world spaces – including everything from virtual concert halls and malls to houses and monuments – envisions 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 enter the digital real estate business was the Metaverse Group, which runs a virtual world called Decentraland. Last week, the parent company of Metaverse Group, Token.com, announced that “a mansion of 116 plots in the heart of the Fashion Street district within Decentraland” was sold for the equivalent of about $ 2.5 million – a record! The new owner of this mansion near Fashion Street could probably win if Louis Vuitton wanted to open a store there: they could actually be the brand’s virtual landlord.

Strictly speaking, this deal with Decentraland did not involve real money. The digital property was 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 few syllables of “Monopoly money.”

“Imagine if you came to New York when it was farmland, and you have the opportunity to get a block of SoHo,” Metaverse Group co-founder Michael Gord told the New York Times recently. “If someone wants to buy a block of real estate in Soho today, it’s priceless, it’s not on the market. The same experience will happen in the metaverse. “

This all probably sounds a little mind-boggling. Who would pay real money for the rights to a part of the virtual world that does not yet fully exist and will never exist in the real world? Well, if you’ve paid any attention to the NFT craze or the cryptocurrency boom in recent years, many people are pouring millions of dollars into digital assets in the expectation that others may be willing to pay even more for them in the future. This seizure of land in the metauniverse occurs under a similar assumption. What makes the real estate boom in the metaverse even more tempting is the idea that once you own a piece of digital land, you may be able to make money by renting it out or selling ads.

In its most basic form, the concept of the metaverse is not so different from the first days of the network. Beginning in the late 1980s, the common web programming language (HTML) allowed people to create websites that hosted content or offered services to users, and ultimately, when websites attract enough of those users, site owners can sell ads or charge fees to make money from it all. The big difference, of course, is that the network is designed to be free, while the metaverse seems to be owned by large companies. Just before announcing that Facebook would change its name to Meta, for example, Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the company expects to spend more than $ 10 billion on its meta-universal projects this year alone. It is difficult for anyone to compete with this type of money.

However, many companies are trying. In addition to Decentraland, you can now buy digital land in metauniverses with names like Somnium Space, Sandbox and Upland. A company called Spotselfie, which is currently running an augmented reality app, will soon allow you to buy virtual real estate that is connected to GPS coordinates in the real world through a new feature called Spotland. The idea is that with the help of tokens issued by Spotselfie – this is actually a cryptocurrency that is specific to this metaverse, similar to the mana used in Decentraland – you will buy the radius rights around the GPS coordinate and then if Spotselfie decides to sell ads in this place, you get layoffs. The big difference here is that Spotselfie’s metaverse is for augmented reality, not virtual reality. To see the metaverse, simply point your phone’s camera at a real-world location, and Spotland software superimposes a digital world on your screen, ads, and more.

This may be the future. If and when mixed-reality glasses become something – some analysts believe that Apple will release their version in 2022 – we could walk around, watching a huge clash of real and digital world. And although many companies are struggling to pledge their claims, it is unclear who exactly will own this space. Spotselfie co-founder Ray Schingler, for example, hopes that by offering consumers the opportunity to buy now, his technology will bring some of this democratic spirit of Web 1.0 into the nascent metaverse.

“I’m trying to find a way,” Schingler told Recode, “where users actually get something out of being in the app and actually control the metaverse. Because if you don’t control it soon enough, it will be lost to Facebook or lost to the Twin Brothers. (He is referring to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who recently received $ 400 million in funding for metauniverse projects.)

On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg may be wrong about the metaverse. It is quite possible that not many people want to wander around the virtual world, meet other avatars and buy NFT with cryptocurrency. Maybe we don’t want to inhabit some endless digital space filled with advertisements and designed to track our behavior in ways we never imagined.

But if the metaverse is truly the answer to the 21st century web, you can buy your share of it now. Hurry, though. The market is almost hot.

This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Register here so you don’t miss the next one!