The 'metaverse' bet: Crypto-rich investors snap up virtual real estate

That's the question faced by the Singapore-based investor calling himself Metakovan, who made headlines last month when he bought the digital artwork Everydays: The First 5000 Days by the American artist Beeple at Christie's.The work is a non-fungible token – a new type of virtual asset that has its ownership status and authenticity verified by blockchain. NFTs have exploded in popularity in 2021, with prices skyrocketing.

"The current Cambrian explosion of NFTs that you see is all about acquisition – people want to buy up NFTs, gobble as many of them as they can," said Anand Venkateswaran, aka Twobadour, who runs the Metapurse fund with Metakovan. Decentraland has seen more than US$50 million in total sales, including land, avatars, usernames and wearables like virtual outfits. A patch of land measuring 41,216 virtual square metres sold for US$572,000 on Apr 11, which the platform said was a record.

"All of virtual land and these virtual spaces are basically real estate on which experiences will start to centre, on which attention will start to focus," Twobadour said.So far, it's a relatively small number of people driving up land prices on these worlds. Some virtual worlds have their own cryptocurrencies: Decentraland's MANA has skyrocketed more than 3,500 per cent over the past year, according to Coinbase.Some early virtual land investors who bought in early are now selling to companies, said Samuel Hamilton, community and events lead at the Decentraland Foundation.

Last year, American rapper Travis Scott drew an audience of 27.7 million visitors to five concerts within Fortnite, the popular online game owned by Epic Games.Sebastien Borget, co-founder of The Sandbox, described the commercial activity within virtual worlds as a new nation forming and said the NFT-based economy would outgrow the real-world one within a decade.

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