Photo credit: https://pixabay.com/photos/woman-headset-virtual-reality-vr-6882918/
It has been just a few months since Facebook rebranded itself as Meta but the real-estate wars have already gained momentum in the metaverse. In a record-breaking deal, a plot of digital land just sold for more than $2 million in a virtual world, highlighting the interest of investors and big tech companies to bet their fortune in securing their spot in the metaverse.
Axie Infinity, a play-to-earn platform, announced in a tweet on Wednesday that a piece of Genesis land plot had sold for 550 ether, worth over $2.3 at current levels. Axie Infinity allows users to buy land and other assets, win and sell axie-related NFTs, and create digital pet axolotls to play games.
Axie tweeted, “We believe this is the largest sum ever paid for a single plot of digital land.”
A Vietnam-based company named Sky Mavis developed Axie Infinity, and it is one of the biggest non-fungible token platforms in the world. Axie Infinity, which was founded in 2018, raised millions of dollars from investors and is now valued at $3 billion.
Although the idea of the metaverse is still in its infancy and what it would look like is not yet clear, most people—from video game companies and tech giants to crypto enthusiasts—are visualizing it as a technology that will offer endless possibilities in an online environment.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in his letter, “In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.” He also added, “It will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.”
Recently, there has been a gold rush in the metaverse as Crypto enthusiasts are buying virtual land by investing millions of dollars. Some of the price tags of these properties are much higher than those for most of the real properties in even the most expensive part of the world.
Since most of the transactions in the virtual world take place in cryptocurrencies, this led to a steep rise in the valuation of the currencies linked to the virtual world. According to the Coinmarketcap, the past few weeks have seen 38%, 74%, and 150% growth in Decentraland’s mana token, Sandbox’s sand, and Gala Games’ gala respectively.
