“In fact, owning land has always been the American dream. “This pride of ownership is nothing new,” said Yorio. Yorio believes young people are immersing themselves in such virtual experiences of the “metaverse” to create communities and fill real-world voids in social interactions and peer engagement. Virtual spaceship in the Infinite Fleet game made by Pixelmatic
Non-land owners are also welcome and have flocked to Decentraland’s wearables market, which features helmets, goggles, vests and pants. There is a sense of community in Decentraland where parcel owners help develop new features. Like a physical homestead in the real world, investments don’t necessarily end with the initial land purchase. Parcels are brought and sold on blockchain-based websites like OpenSea.io and, where gamers, coders and everyone else can trade digital assets in crypto bazaars. Somnium Space, Cryptovoxels, Axie Infinity and The Sandbox are among Decentraland’s competitors. The average price of a parcel of land in Decentraland over the past week was $1,653.64 compared to an all-time average of $393.22, according to. The market capitalisation of MANA was roughly $1.36bn around 9:00am ET on Friday, according to CoinMarketCap. With a vibe that feels like a combination of Second Life and SimCity, and similar to games such as Fortnite and Minecraft, Decentraland offers parcels that all must be bought and sold using MANA, its crypto token. With its verifiable property rights, Decentraland is the most developed and fastest-growing virtual land investment. “On the heels of the GameStop saga, it has become apparent that retail investors have grown tired of operating within a financial system that favours the ultra-wealthy,” said Janine Yorio, head of real estate at Republic.
Republic, an online investment platform for early-stage startups and crypto, plans to launch a series of digital real estate funds soon. While the jury is out on whether investing in assets that only exist in the ether will prove prescient or deeply foolish, there is an undeniable zeitgeist surrounding maverick investors and their willingness to go where many portfolios have never gone before - so much so that some are banking that the appetite for digital land and other fantasy objects in virtual worlds will only grow. To prove its authenticity, ‘Everydays – The First 5000 Days’ features what is known as a non-fungible token that digitally attaches the artist’s signature to it and can’t be altered NFTs have propelled prices for many virtual assets, such as sports memorabilia and even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, which sold at auction this week for $2.9m.
That proposition has gained serious traction this year.Īmerican artist Mike Winkelmann, who goes by the name Beeple, became one of the three most valued living artists in the world earlier this month when his NFT digital collage titled “Everydays – The First 5000 Days” sold at auction at Christie’s for $69.3m.Īnd it’s not just virtual artists who are reaping major paydays.
That secure and incorruptible provenance means forgers can’t make a copy of an NFT and pass it off to some unsuspecting collector as the original. But unlike crytpocurrencies, an NFT is totally unique and the blockchain ledger it sits on verifies who the rightful owner is of that unique asset. NFTs are digital files underpinned by blockchain technology- the same technology on which popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum rest. It is also inspiring gamers to spend more time and money playing in their favourite imagined realms, and it’s spurring speculators to capitalise on the expansion of blockchain technology into new terrain in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The loneliness spawned by coronavirus pandemic restrictions has not just created the cultural space for meme-stock frenzies like GameStop - powered by retail investors. Since time immemorial, humans have fought over land - a scarce resource that determines where people can grow food, build houses and live out their days on planet Earth.īut only recently have the denizens of the internet begun fostering communities around the acquisition of virtual land that exists solely within fictional worlds created by video game developers.