Flipping houses to "meta-universe"? A 4.8 square meter virtual land was sold for 15 million

Per editor: Cheng Peng, Yi Qijiang

The Wachowski brothers announced in November that they would re-direct "The Matrix 4: The Matrix Reborn", which swept up a wave of sci-fi fever. In the economic situation where inflation was not significant that year, the Matrix trilogy won a high-light result of $1.7 billion at the global box office, and the commercial value behind it can be seen.

In addition to movies, recently, the concept of imagination and substitution is the "Metaverse" (Metaverse) that major Internet players are competing to enter.

Not long ago, the global technology giant Facebook announced that its business layout turned to meta-universe, and even changed its company name to Meta, which pushed the attention of all walks of life to the "meta-universe" to a climax, not only setting off a boom in the capital market, some governments have also noticed this emerging industry, and South Korea is to build Seoul into a "meta-universe city".

At the same time, a wave of "speculation fever" has also blown into the meta-universe world.

A 4.87 m2 virtual land

Sold for 15 million yuan

On Tuesday, in the virtual world platform Deccentraland, a piece of digital land was sold for a high price of $2.43 million (about 15.52 million yuan), once again breaking the price record of virtual real estate. The sale price is more than double the previous virtual property record of $913,000, and the price is already slightly higher than the average price per unit in Manhattan, and much higher than the price of a single home in other U.S. boroughs and San Francisco.

The buyer of this digital land is Metavalse Group, a subsidiary of digital asset investment group Tokens.com. The company bought a piece of digital land for 618,000 mana. Mana is a cryptocurrency circulating in Decentraland, which is equivalent to $2.43 million if converted into fiat currency.

The land for sale is 116 plots in the heart of fashion Street Estate, and Tokens.com said they will use the land to expand the digital fashion industry.

Of course, if you calculate the average price per unit area, Decentraland's house prices are still inferior to those of first-tier cities in the United States. A parcel in Decentraland equates to 52.5 square feet (about 4.87 square meters), so the land Tokens.com buys is about 6,090 square feet ( about 565.8 square meters ) — much higher than the average residential area of 1,150 square feet (106.8 square meters) in San Francisco. That means that in Decentraland, the price per square foot of land is around $400, compared to $1,200 in San Francisco.

Land and properties in Decentraland are free to buy and sell in tokens

The recent surge in the price of crypto tokens connected to the metacosm has also skyrocketed, with mana prices rising nearly 60% in the past week.

The metaverse boom may have a negative impact

People's Daily News: Be wary of "drumming and spreading flowers" type of financial scams

If you want to say that the hottest word in the technology circle and investment circle in 2021 must be metaverse.

In addition to Roblox, which is known as the "first stock in the meta-universe", Facebook, Microsoft, Epic Games, Tencent, Ali, etc. have entered the game, attracting investors and entrepreneurs to run in.

In March this year, the game "Robles", which is known as the most embodied in the concept of the meta-universe, received $520 million in financing, and the developer of the game, Roblox, known as the "first stock in the meta-universe", had a market capitalization of more than $40 billion on the first day of listing, up 10 times from the valuation a year ago; ByteDance also acquired VR startup Pico for nearly 10 billion, highlighting its determination to lay out the meta-universe... In addition, Facebook, Microsoft, Epic Games, Tencent, Ali and other major technology giants at home and abroad have entered the game, but the same meta-universe track, the way of "drag racing" is very different.

According to the science and technology daily on the 25th, from the current situation, the major science and technology companies mainly rely on their existing advantages to lay out the meta-universe field, which can be divided into three modes:

The first is to focus on core components and basic platform areas, accelerate the layout of meta-universe hardware entrance and operating system, with international digital technology giants such as NVIDIA, Meta, and Microsoft as the mainstay, and domestic companies such as ByteDance are also accelerating the research and development of meta-universe-related hardware.

The second is to focus on business models and content scenarios, explore the implementation of metaverse-related application scenarios, and focus on domestic digital technology giants, such as Tencent, which said it will accelerate the research and development of metaverses in games, social networking and other fields.

The third is the government's promotion of enterprise entry models, mainly Korean companies. South Korea is one of the most active countries in the world to promote the development of the meta-universe industry, its capital Seoul announced in November this year to become the first city government to join the meta-universe; at the same time, the development of the South Korean meta-universe industry is mainly led by relevant government departments, guiding and promoting Samsung, Hyundai Motor, LG and other enterprises to form a "meta-universe alliance" to form a joint force for the development of enterprises in the meta-universe field, so as to promote the realization of a wider range of virtual reality connections and establish a national meta-universe development platform in South Korea. In addition, South Korea also wants to build Seoul into a "meta-universe city", and recently released the "Meta-universe Seoul Five-Year Plan", announcing that from next year, it will build a meta-universe administrative service ecology in all business areas of the municipal government such as economy, culture, tourism, education, and petitioning in three stages. The total investment is planned at KRW 3.9 billion.

Since the beginning of this year, due to the major investment institutions around the world have increased the layout of the metaverse field, the attention and heat of the metacosm have continued to rise. On the one hand, this boom has promoted the development of metaverse-related technologies such as XR, digital twins, and artificial intelligence, and enhanced the development momentum of metaverse-related industries, which has certain positive significance.

On the other hand, this boom has also produced some negative effects, and even misleading the development direction of the meta-universe industry, mainly reflected in the following three aspects:

First, enterprises have poured into the meta-universe field and created "meta-universe human design". Since the implementation of metaverse application scenarios requires the comprehensive integration of multiple digital technologies, some technology-related enterprises take advantage of the fire of the metaverse concept to quickly package themselves into a metaverse enterprise, or change the original business of the enterprise to be related to the metacosm. This kind of behavior of over-pandering to the concept boom and deviating from the original technological development path may not be very helpful to the actual enterprise, or even counterproductive.

Second, some technology bubbles have been added, and even some new routines and scams have been spawned. The favor of technology giants and venture capital for the metacosm has brought about a sharp rise in related concept stocks, which has increased the metacosm bubble to a certain extent. For example, the phenomenon of squatting meta-universe-related trademarks that has broken out in the current market, the business of some enterprises is almost unrelated to meta-universe. There are even unscrupulous companies and individuals who do "loopholes" under the guise of the meta-universe, and thus give rise to some routines and scams.

Third, sell anxiety and wealth pie, harvest "IQ tax". Some institutions and individuals often use exaggerated words such as "ultimate", "last time" and "future channel" to describe the metaverse, through the sale of anxiety and wealth pie, in the form of paid courses, new knowledge training and other forms of "traffic soup" and "IQ tax".

People's Daily also posted today (25th) that since the beginning of this year, celebrities, big V, and enterprises have created and launched their own NFT products, and digital artworks have become one of the fastest application scenarios for NFT landing. The concept of metacosmity continues to be hyped, allowing the market to see business opportunities for NFTs. In the view of some industry insiders, the metacosm provides a more diversified application scenario for NFTs, and NFTs will become an important tool for realizing the digital assetization and circulation of virtual items. It is worth noting that the current hype for the concept of NFT and meta-universe has spread to listed companies and secondary markets. Some behaviors such as rubbing hot spots and speculating on concepts are also causing vigilance from regulatory authorities. Industry insiders believe that at present, the legal nature, trading methods, supervision subjects, supervision methods, etc. of NFTs in China have not yet been clarified, and there are risks such as speculation, money laundering and financial productization in NFTs, and we should maintain a cautious attitude towards NFT investment and be wary of financial scams that "beat the drums and spread flowers".

Daily economic news is synthesized from Science and Technology Daily, Financial Associated Press, and People's Daily News

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