Metaverse real estate is now sold in cryptocurrency

Metaverse is getting hotter and hotter. Not hot, like a good meal or a Finnish sauna. This mostly fictitious virtual world has become as hot as the real estate market. Because recently, it is one.

If you have enough money and courage, you can now Buy digital land in the meta universeOf course, there is not only one meta universe. Just as websites are part of the larger World Wide Web, there are countless companies, including Meta (née Facebook), that build their own virtual realms, and they hope that people will soon come together as their digital avatars to play games and buy Things and interaction with advertising. 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-is expected to be able to collaborate with brands that hope to have a place in various iterations by digital asset owners in the future. Meta universe.

Metaverse Group is one of the first companies to set foot in the digital real estate business. The group runs a company called Decentralized Paradise. Last week, the parent company of Yuanjie Group, Passnet, Announcing “116 plots of properties in the heart of Decentraland Fashion District” Sold for approximately US$2.5 million -A record! If Louis Vuitton wants to open a store there, the new owners of this estate near Fashion Street may profit: they can actually become the virtual landlord of the brand.

Strictly speaking, this Decentraland transaction does not involve real money. The digital asset is sold for 618,000 mana, which is a 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 come to New York while farming, you can choose to buy a piece of SoHo,” Metaverse Group co-founder Michael Gord Told the New York Times recently“If someone wants to buy a piece of real estate in SoHo today, it is priceless and it is not on the market. The same experience will happen in the meta universe.”

All of this may sound a bit puzzling. Who will pay real money to obtain a part of the virtual world, which does not yet fully exist and will never appear in the real world?Well, if you have been following the NFT boom or the cryptocurrency boom in recent years, many people Millions of dollars are being invested in digital assets Hope that others may be willing to pay more for them in the future. This kind of meta-universe land plunder occurred under similar assumptions. However, what makes the Metaverse real estate boom even more tempting is that once you own a piece of digital land, you can make money by renting out or selling ads.

In its most basic form, the metaverse concept is the same as The early days of the networkSince the late 1980s, a common web programming language (HTML) has allowed people to build websites that host content or provide services to users. Eventually, when the website attracts enough of these users, the website owner can sell ads Or charge fees to make money. Of course, the biggest difference is that the network is designed to be free, and Metaverse seems destined to be owned by large companies.Just before it was announced that Facebook would be renamed Meta, such as Mark Zuckerberg Tell investors The company expects to spend more than US$10 billion on its Yuan Festival project this year alone. It is difficult for anyone to compete with this kind of cash.

Nevertheless, many companies are still trying.In addition to Decentraland, you can now buy digital land in Metaverse, the name is as follows Dream space, Sandbox, with Highland. A company called Selfie, Currently running an augmented reality application, will soon allow you to purchase virtual real estate linked to GPS coordinates in the real world through a new feature called PortlandThe idea is that by using tokens issued by Spotselfie-these are actually cryptocurrencies specific to this metaverse, much like the mana used in Decentraland-you will buy the right to the radius around the GPS coordinates, and then if Spotselfie decides Sell ​​ads in this position, you will get income. The biggest difference here is that Spotselfie’s metaverse is designed for augmented reality, not virtual reality. To view Metaverse, you only need to point your phone’s camera at a real-world location, and the Spotland software will overlay the digital world on your screen, advertisements, and all content.

This may be the future.If and when Mixed reality glasses become a thing -Some analysts believe that Apple A version of them will be released in 2022 -We may walk around, watching the overwhelming collision of the real world and the digital world. Although many companies are scrambling to make their own claims, it is not clear who will own the space. On the one hand, Ray Shingler, the co-founder of Spotselfie, hopes that by providing users with the option of buying immediately, his technology will bring some democratic Internet 1.0 spirit to the nascent meta-universe.

“I’m trying to find a way,” Shingle told Recode, “Users can actually get something from the app, and they actually control the metaverse. Because if you don’t control it as quickly as possible, it will lose to Facebook, Or lose to Gemini Brothers.” (He refers to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who recently $400 million received Provide funding for the metaverse project. )

Having said that, Mark Zuckerberg’s view on Yuan Festival may be wrong. It is entirely possible that not many people really want to hang out in the virtual world, meet other avatars and use cryptocurrency to buy NFTs. Maybe we don’t want to live in an endless digital space full of advertisements, these spaces are designed to track our behavior in ways we haven’t yet imagined.

However, if Metaverse is indeed the answer to the Internet in the 21st century, then you can buy it now. But hurry up. The market is actually very hot.

This story was originally published in the Recode newsletter. Register here So you will not miss the next one!