A version of this article was published in TIME’s newsletter Into the Metaverse. Subscribe for a weekly guide to the future of the Internet. You can find past issues of the newsletter here.
Chris Adamo considers himself late to the game when it comes to investing in NFTs, or nun-fungible tokens. He collected his first one in summer 2021. But when it comes to buying up property in the metaverse, Adamo is early. Eight months ago, the Miami-based venture capitalist and a group of associates calling themselves the MetaCollective DAO used a virtual real estate broker to buy 23 parcels in The Sandbox, a user-generated, blockchain-based virtual world, for prices starting at 1ETH (about $3,000). A nearby property sold for about 42ETH, or $130,000.
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The land—pixels, really—borders the compound of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a buzzy NFT community, and a plot owned by Adidas. They’re calling it Sandbox Hill Road, as a nod to Silicon Valley’s famous Sand Hill Road and The Sandbox, the platform where this “land” exists. Already, the parcels’ value has gone up about ten times in price, making their holdings potentially worth many millions of dollars.
“It’s like the New York City of The Sandbox,” Adamo says. “Like the Lower East Side or Soho right now.” Translation: it’s hip—or at least, they are invested in believing it can be.
If the metaverse is meant to encompass everything that exists virtually, from digital art to virtual worlds, then the real estate parcels that are being snapped up can be seen as just one type of metaversal investment, often listed as NFTs. These virtual worlds—The Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, Earth2, Nifty Island, Superworld, Wilder World—each offer different things to users: hyper-realistic graphics, gaming options, communities of specific types of early adopters. (Snoop Dogg, for instance, staked out a home for himself in The Sandbox; Paris Hilton has an island in Roblox.)
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Source : time
