If you’ve ever played a free-roaming game like GTA, you surely recall how it felt to be completely submerged in an alternate reality that, despite existing solely on your computer, felt so genuine.
Dealing with virtual land can, in many respects, be quite similar to playing Grand Theft Auto. Like in the game, you can command your avatar to visit the barber and get a haircut.
Alternatively, you may go to an arcade and play some games. There are countless options.
The key distinction is that, unlike in Grand Theft Auto, the avatars you see wandering the Metaverse are human people, not robots. Even the shops are run by actual people here.
Metaverse land refers to virtual land within the metaverse that can be owned and developed by users, similar to how people own and develop physical land in the real world.
This virtual land can be used for a variety of purposes, including building virtual homes, businesses, and other structures, as well as hosting virtual events and gatherings.
How Metaverse Land works
Imagine a world where you can visit an art gallery, watch a show, or visit libraries while sitting at your desk.
Now imagine someone paying a lot of money, let’s say $6000 for one of the 16 x 16-meter square boxes on the surface of this earth.
It might sound a little bit crazy, but that’s simply what virtual land ownership is all about.
In this article, for context, we’ll be using Decentraland as an example to illustrate how Virtual land works.
This is Decentraland, a virtual city home to over 9000 parcels of land. It’s just one of many metaverses where you can visit, sell, purchase or just run around for the fun of it.
And over 2 billion worth of transactions of Ethereum have been recorded here; Yes, we’re talking about real money here.
You see, virtual land is looking more like the next frontier for digital ownership. Its technology has the ability to usher in a new era of decentralized finance in the global economy.
And we’ve already started. There is no turning around.
As you know, Decentraland is a metaverse, and metaverses similar to this have existed before. GTA V, Fortnite, Second Life and some other video games are all metaverses of their own kind.
Decentraland was made public in 2020 by Argentineans Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano who wanted to build a virtual reality experience hosted by its inhabitants.
Like every Web3 development, the inhabitants within are contributing to the content and experience and in turn helping drive up the value of Decentraland’s cryptocurrency
And so, for instance, with Decentraland they have their own native currency called $MANA. This currency can be held like a stock and can appreciate in value significantly Also, the currency can be used in-game to purchase unique items like skins, suits, and land of course.
Steps to buying Metaverse Land
Digital assets can be bought and sold easily in the metaverse within the click of a button.
Most desktop metaverse platforms are simple to use, which makes it quite convenient to explore metaverse land before making a purchase decision.
First of all, you’ll need to open an Ethereum wallet on Metamask(recommended). This wallet will be used to hold the cryptocurrency of the metaverse platform you will be purchasing the land in.
Then, select a Metaverse Platform e.g Decentraland and sign up as a user.
Then, access the marketplace and choose a site or a parcel of land with huge potential to invest in.
Following your choice of a virtual asset, you can find out more about it on one of the several websites hosted by third parties who act as resellers, like OpenSea.io or NonFungible.com.
These websites can display any available sales history for you. You can use them to search for nearby homes that might serve as useful benchmarks.
How are people making money selling Metaverse Land?
Firstly, it’s called a non-fungible token meaning there’s only one of them, it’s unique like an NFT and its digital. And because each NFT is unique, they’re not interchangeable, unlike a dollar bill for instance.
Let’s take Decentraland for context here…
decentraland
In Decentraland, users are buying and selling NFTs in the form of art, music, digital apparel called wearables, games, and land.
They are also using real money through $MANA(the native currency) to buy, sell and rent digital land for staggering prices ranging from $10,000 to $92,000.
In Decentraland, the land is separated into 90,000 256-square-meter parcels and each parcel is its own verified NFT meaning it is completely unique and can’t be duplicated, unlike the natural world.
You own the land, that’s an actual NFT and it gives you the rights to build whatever you want on your land like shopping malls, sports centers, or art galleries. You also have the right to provide access or denial to anybody on your land.
To make money on this land, owners can build businesses that offer something to buy or rent or store the NFTs they’ve purchased.
Another way owners can make money on their metaverse land is by selling spaces on their buildings in the metaverse for promotions and advertisements.
For example, if I buy a parcel of land for 3000 MANA, just under $3000 and I build a gallery to showcase some NFT art, artists could promote their work there and curious visitors make my land more popular due to visits which will make it more profitable.
The owner of this metaverse land doesn’t need to go through the entire city planning or the physical limitations in the real world. Their imagination control what they put on their land.
As a matter of fact, it’s not just only individuals that are investing in the metaverse. The land will be valuable as long as people continue to use this world as a platform for the development, acquisition, and exchange of NFTs.
It’s like living in a trendy, desirable neighborhood in the physical world or like a typical role-playing game except for the violence of course.
You can tell by a quick look at it that the developers were all inspired by games like Second Life and Minecraft.
Final Words
If metaverse economies like Decentraland want to seat at the real-world table, it seems they may have to face real-world scrutiny. That means, ensuring that the future of virtual reality belongs to the people.
In Decentraland and Sandbox, prices are rising because of the promise that virtual real estate can be used to get quality attention, either now or later.
What actually makes these virtual lands valuable is not the fact that they’re just blocks of 3d pixels, It’s actually the fact that the most influential people in the world are building on them.
Also, huge brands like Adidas and Atari, and celebrities like Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg are in fact owners of these “3d pixels”. Snoop Dogg owns a Sandbox mansion where he performs and hosts parties for fans.
And if you’re looking to buy a piece of land close to Snoop’s mansion, we’ll be calling prices from as high as $458,000 and more.