Since October 30, facebook changed its name to Meta and announced that it will "all in" the metaverse in the future, as the most sought-after concept of the year, the metacosm is constantly challenging the public's imagination as attention has increased.
Today, the meta-universe boom has spread to the field of real estate transactions. Over the past month or so, more and more investment firms have begun to "snap up" land in virtual worlds such as "Sandbox" and "Decentraland" and so on.
A piece of virtual land 27.39 million
On Tuesday, November 23, a piece of digital land was sold for $2.43 million at a high price in the virtual world platform Decentraland. The sale price is more than double the previous virtual property record of $913,000, and it is also 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 Decentraland virtual world is known as a replica of Second Life, where users can buy land, visit buildings, walk around, and meet people in avatars. Users use real money to buy land in the virtual world, and then they can build houses and open shops, which is not much different from buying a house in reality.
It is understood that the land sold is located on 116 plots in the fashion street estate of Decentraland, and buyers Tokens.com said they would use the land to expand the digital fashion industry. Andrew Kiguel, the chief executive of Tokens.com, said the assets would be used to supplement the real estate held by subsidiary Metacostem Group.
It is worth noting that the land and other items in Decentraland are sold in the form of crypto asset NFTs, so the cryptocurrency MANA is equivalent to the "money" of this world.
Founded in 2017, Decentraland is a blockchain-powered virtual reality platform. And perhaps we can describe it in a more understandable way: an open-world game (linked to blockchain).
In Decentraland, users can define their own image and then explore it freely, such as watching fairs, socializing, shopping, and so on. The land and items in this game are sellable, and users can purchase them with non-homogeneous tokens (NFTs).
The difference from regular online games is that once the transaction is complete, the purchaser will have complete control over the land – which means you can even build a pavilion in the game yourself and collect other players' tickets.
Its actual picture looks like this:
On Tuesday, a piece of virtual land on the virtual gaming platform Sandbox sold for $4.3 million (about 27.39 million yuan), setting a new record for the transaction price of "meta-universe" real estate and breaking the record of $2.43 million set by a virtual piece of land on the Decentraland platform, according to the Securities Times.
According to foreign media reports, the buyer of this virtual land is Republic Realm, a company that invests in and develops virtual real estate and other digital assets. According to publicly available market information, Republic Realm currently owns about 2,500 digital lands on 19 different metaverse platforms.
Last week, singer Lin Junjie also announced on Twitter that he had bought three virtual lands on Decentraland and officially entered the meta-universe real estate world. According to foreign media estimates, Lin Junjie spent about $123,000 on the purchase of the three plots. About RMB 784,000.
Is virtual real estate reliable?
What is Metacostem Real Estate? According to China Merchants International Research Report, First, Metacosm is a 3D online virtual platform on which people can play games, create, work, and trade cryptocurrencies.
Second, virtual real estate is real estate in the metacosm. Each piece of land is given its unique and non-replicable non-homogeneous token (NFT), or piece of code, and used to distinguish each plot and each transaction. Game developers and players can buy/sell in primary/secondary markets on the platform and use virtual properties for an immersive residential or commercial experience.
Who are the main players in Meta-Universe Real estate? The first is land suppliers: land is provided by game developers. Industry leaders include Decentraland, The Sandbox (with a $93 million investment from Sun Hung Kai), Cryptovoxels, and Somnium Space. In China, Tianxiaxiu (600556 CH) also developed the same metaverse game "Rainbow Universe".
The second is buyers: the main buyers are cryptocurrency companies, such as Metavalse Group (virtual real estate companies), Token.Com (virtual currency and meta-universe real estate companies), luxury brands (LV, Gucci, Burberry) to advertise, stars such as Snoop Dogg and Lin Junjie, and retail investors.
Why would anyone buy virtual real estate? CMB International said the properties had real value. Justin Bieber held an online concert in the virtual world in November this year. LV and Gucci also plan to advertise in-game rental ad slots. In addition, non-homogeneous tokens increase in value rapidly, and asset appreciation is stronger under the dual drive of coin speculation and house speculation.
Taking "Rainbow Universe" as an example, "Rainbow Universe" is a game product launched by the domestic meta-universe concept company Tianxiaxiu, which can have virtual residences, virtual items, and also experience the decoration of houses and social interactions.
According to official sources, the "Rainbow Universe" platform will issue a total of 350,000 sets of virtual houses, which have 13 types of room types according to the different landforms of planet P, and the circulation and scarcity of each room type are different, and the level of the house is divided into SSS, SS, S, A, B, C, the higher the level, the rarer. Prices range from $8.88 to $88 and even higher.
On idle fish, the most exaggerated set of "SS roundabout island" virtual real estate has been speculated to 999,900 yuan, and even so, 39 people have marked "want".
Li Meng, chairman of Tianxiaxiu, released an open letter on November 18, claiming that Rainbow Universe is a 3D virtual social product based on blockchain technology, and has moved VR, AR and MR (MIXreality mixed reality) as well as materials science, distributed science, AI algorithms and even quantum computing to endorse itself.
"I believe that soon we will be able to build a 'building' in the rainbow universe, all the employees of the rainbow show will work together in the virtual world of the rainbow universe for one day, and there will be more enterprises and institutions in the rainbow universe in the future, which is also in line with the big theme of China's future low-carbon environmental protection."
However, on the evening of the 19th, Tianxiaxiu received a regulatory warning from the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
And user feedback, the only thing that can be played in the rainbow universe is decoration, but it takes money to buy items. In the exchange group of the rainbow universe, in addition to the speculation, a very small number of discussions about the game itself also make players dissatisfied: "This game is to buy a house, decoration and decoration, I don't think it's fun." ”
Some insiders said, "This kind of high-priced virtual real estate is more of a gimmick, in order to maintain the development of the metaverse, there will be some eye-catching concepts to join in." For example, the concept of virtual superyachts has recently emerged. From the perspective of practitioners, the transaction situation of this kind of sky-high virtual real estate will not last long, and the authenticity of its actual transaction volume data also needs to be examined.
Experts said that the situation of virtual real estate transactions in the meta-universe is more of a financial problem and requires the supervision of the financial sector. As for the relationship between such transactions and real estate, it still needs to be observed. In the metaverseic world, what is the positioning and function of such virtual real estate needs to be further studied later.
In early November, CITIC Securities issued a 163-page Metacostem Depth Report titled "Metacosm futures and investment opportunities."
In the investment proposal section, CITIC Securities said that there is still a long development path from the ultimate metacosm, and there are more uncertainties, but it believes that the metacosm is the digital survival of mankind in the future, which will have a profound impact on society and bring great industrial ultimate opportunities. In the process of gradual development, we will continue to see the emergence and integration of single-point innovation in all aspects, continue to move closer to the ultimate meta-universe, and continue to bring investment opportunities.
CITIC Securities said: "At the current point in time, it is difficult for us to give short-term beneficial investment targets for the meta-universe, but in the medium and long term, we are optimistic about the investment opportunities in related fields brought about by this, such as: Nvidia, Epic, Unity, Tesla, Tencent, ByteDance, Mihayou, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Roblox, Baidu, Xiaomi, etc." ”