According to many feeds from a wide range of trading platforms and crypto exchanges, the new trend in the blockchain world is buying real estate properties in themetaverse.
It is not a mystery that real estate has always been a good investment. This kind of investment offers the investor a cash flow, diversification in your investments’ portfolio, tax breaks (depending on where you live), and a protection against inflation. So, what about the real estate of Metaverse?
As claimed by our colleagues and experts from Critpovaluta.it, the most visited crypto-news site in Italy with a large following on this twitter profile, founded and led by Alessio Ippolito (CEO and Founder of Alessio Ippolito SRL), Metaverse real estate is booming. According to Gianluca Grossi, an Italian expert of the crypto-world, real estates and most cryptos related to them, such as SAND and MANA, have become a valuable asset for many top-investors.
But let’s start from the beginning and take a look at the concept of Metaverse itself.
Metaverse: A definition
A Metaverse is a new form of digital reality which combines a variety of different new-tech aspects, such as social media features, gaming, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
When a Metaverse grows, it creates online spaces where all the users involved in the project can enter to interact. Those interactions usually try to recreate what we do in our real world, and enhance it. Fantasy becomes true in the Metaverse, especially when VR and AR are involved.
To understand the relevance of this (new) world, we should remember the move Mark Zuckerberg made at the end of 2021, when he decided to change Facebook’s name to Meta.
Since then, the hype regarding the Metaverse, especially those who already have been established on blockchain tech, has grown exponentially.
Metaverse and Cryptos
Bitcoin revolutionised our world when it came out more than 10 years ago, and the concepts of decentralisation and Blockchain have entered the financial and tech worlds. But Metaverse is a new concept which only recently started to fuse with crypto ideas.
A Metaverse can differ enormously from one another, and it usually focuses on specific subjects such as gaming, social interactions and much more.
For example, a 2022 pay2earn Metaverse gaming project coming this year called Silks will focus on the horse-racing industry. Yes, in such a Metaverse, everything will be connected to horses and races, customisation of your gaming experience and much more. But what someone might learn from such a game? Easy, cryptocurrencies. In this case: the Silks crypto (STT), which will be rewarded and mined in the game through horse racing.
If you think this is crazy though, and it will never happen, you should also know that such a project in reality already exists! While Silks is on early-access in fact, another crypto-game regarding horses already exists and it is called ZED Run. The difference here it’s that, while ZED Run is built around an ecosystem of NFTs on the Ethereumblockchain, we cannot talk about a Metaverse because it doesn’t have any way to “enter” that world through AR or VR. On the other hand, Silks specify this in their whitepaper.
While these examples of Metaverse, NFTs and cryptos are absolutely legitimate and can give you the chance of gaining an enormous amount of money (a ZED Run “Genesis” Horse costs more than 20,000 USD on average), they are nothing if compared to the real estate crypto Metaverses.
Metaversesand Real Estates
When we speak about real estates in a Metaverse, we are speaking of NFTs present on a specific blockchain. And to be called so, a Metaverse must have a “virtual land” to create things such as maps, coordinates, cities, neighbourhoods and much more, just like in real life.
As of today, the most important and renown of these projects are essentially two:
- The Sandbox Game ($SAND): originally, this was a mobile game in 2012 and called “The Sandbox ” due to the fact that you might build a nonlinear gameplay by building up your world from the beginning. In 2018, the property of this game was bought by Animoca Brands and transferred on a Voxel-style blockchain. Since then, the Sandbox world has grown exponentially and NFTs related to it have become extremely valuable. Amazingly, the most expensive NFT ever purchased in the game (and in the world until today) was not a piece of the Sandbox land, but the “Metaflower Super Mega Yacht”, bought for 650,000 USD.
- Decentraland ($MANA): this was the very first Ethereum-based virtual Metaversefully accessible in VR, which was launched in 2017 and released in 2020. Nowadays, the main cryptocurrency of this Metaverse is not ETH, but MANA. Thanks to it, any user can buy in-game NFTs such as items for personalising their characters, items to use in the game and, it goes without saying, a piece of land. In 2021, virtual estates bought on Decentraland went from a minimum of $6,000 to $100,000 and more.
Getting Started WithMetaverse
Facebook acquired Oculus, the VR headset pioneer, back in 2014. Many have speculated on the purpose of such a purchase, since Oculus was a gaming console oriented headset, and Facebook was certainly not a gaming focused company.
With the announcement of Metvarse, as well as previous speculation, it’s been confirmed just how invested Facebook was in the Metaverse concept, how long and how much they’ve been thinking about it and planning it. People may not agree with some of Facebook’s decisions, mostly based on ethical grounds, but they do have a track record of seeing the writing on the wall early.
It’s a safe bet to say that Metaverse is here to stay, grow, and evolve. And just like with cryptocurrencies not long ago, this early period of getting involved is critical for those who wish to own a sizable stake in such properties in the future, and be a real player in this new “game”.
It’s still too early to say what Metaverse will turn into, and what sorts of economic activity will sprout from it, but the concept itself is proven and unavoidable, and Facebook certainly has the enough money and brilliant manpower to make the most of it.