Carey School of Business, was asked if "virtual land" has any special qualities or uses that may be commonly overlooked - and could explain the considerable outlays for Otherdeeds and their ilk. Taylor chaired professor of real estate at Arizona State University’s W. Still, $320 million for 55,000 parcels of “virtual land” seems a bit pricey. Perfumo said earlier in a press release that “it expands from financial utility into creative expression and community building.” It also represents part of an ongoing evolution of the crypto industry. Before that, it wasn’t top of mind for most market participants.” “When Facebook rebranded as Meta in the second half of 2021, we saw a corresponding rise in the price of metaverse-associated fungible assets such as SAND and MANA. “The Metaverse is still a relatively fresh theme in the crypto industry,” Thomas Perfumo, head of strategy at Kraken, told Cointelegraph to help explain why the Metaverse seemed to be thriving when other sectors were moving sideways. The fungible SAND, an ETH-20 standard token, is used not only to buy land, purchase equipment and customize avatar characters but also enable holders to participate in The Sandbox’s governance decisions. In online “communities” like Sandbox, an Ethereum-based play-to-earn (P2E) game, players can build a virtual world, including the purchase of digital land whose ownership is guaranteed by an ERC-721 standard nonfungible token. The Metaverse sector includes assets like Decentraland ( MANA), The Sandbox ( SAND), Axie Infinity ( AXS), as well projects like Yuga Lab’s Apecoin ( APE). Over the most recent 12-month period, the metaverse sector notched an annual return of +389%, noted Kraken, compared with Bitcoin’s at -34%, Ether’s at +3%, layer-1 networks at -10% and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects at -71%. Still, even if the Yuga Labs sale didn’t go entirely smoothly, shouldn’t it still be celebrated as a milestone of sorts in the crypto/blockchain world, especially at a time when the price of Bitcoin ( BTC), Ether and other cryptocurrencies have been flat or ebbing?Ĭonsider a report published last week by Kraken Intelligence which reinforced the notion that the Metaverse - a community of online “worlds” with many devoted to role-playing games - is one of the brightest stars in the crypto-based galaxy these days. The sale also raised questions about Ethereum’s scalability - again - and the susceptibility of blockchain-based projects to manipulation and self dealing. If it cost $6,000 for a parcel, and as much as $6,000 in gas fees just to play, was it all becoming a playground for the very wealthy alone? Others wondered what all this had to say about gaming and NFTs. Some charged Yuga Labs with favoritism in the process, saying, for instance, it had saved all the good “land” for itself or existing owners of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. The Ethereum blockchain even went dark for a time. Hundreds of investors not only failed to secure an Otherdeed token, but they also lost their Ether ( ETH) gas fees as well. That’s above and beyond the cost of the land parcel. During that time, gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain soared - with eager customers sometimes needing thousands of dollars to complete a single transaction. ![]() The sale began at 9:00 pm EDT on April 30, and the NFTs were sold out in about three hours. Moreover, you might expect a lot of online traffic driving your way because the Otherside “world” is an extension of Yuga’s popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT project. ![]() What can you do with a plot of virtual ground? Well, you can develop your own online games on it or build a digital art gallery, among other things. In return for shelling out close to $6,000, a purchaser received an Otherdeed NFT, which authenticates that buyer’s ownership of a patch of digital real estate in developer Yuga Labs’ new Otherside game environment. Last week, 55,000 parcels of “virtual land” were sold on the Ethereum blockchain for more than $300 million, the largest nonfungible token (NFT) mint ever.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |