Crypto is disrupting everything. Property is next.
Just when you think you have a handle on crypto and what it means, something else comes along and blows your mind… again.
Over the past 18 months Crypto has really embedded itself in the mainstream.
And we went from coins to NFTs (non fungible tokens) – authentic signatures of digital art (if your definition of art includes cat memes).
Now with Facebook rebranding to “Meta” we are starting to see the birth of “metaverses” – virtual worlds where people can interact…and stay with me… buy and sell virtual plots of land to build and sell virtual houses.
Yep, people are buying and selling real estate that’s not actually “real”.
We have well and truly jumped the shark when someone’s paying $4.3 million for a plot of land in cyberspace:
The idea of spending millions on non-existent land may sound ludicrous – but feverish predictions of a virtual reality future are pushing investors to bet big on digital real estate.
This week, New York-based company Republic Realm announced it had spent a record-breaking $4.3 million on digital land through The Sandbox, one of several “virtual world” websites where people can socialise, play games and even attend concerts.
That came hot on the heels of a $2.4-million land purchase in late November on a rival platform, Decentraland, by Canadian crypto company Tokens.com. And days before that, Barbados announced plans to open a “metaverse embassy” in Decentraland.
Such websites bill themselves as a prototype of the metaverse, a future internet where online experiences like chatting to a friend would eventually feel face-to-face thanks to virtual reality (VR) headsets.
“Metaverse” has been a Silicon Valley buzzword for months, but interest soared in October after Facebook’s parent company renamed itself “Meta” as it shifts its focus towards VR.
Virtual reality has been around for a long time but it’s only now starting to become realistic enough to use and affordable enough to scale.
But why should we care? Well I care because any disruption generally leads to potential money making opportunities…
And when you hear virtual land being sold in the millions, do we really care that the concept is weird… There's money to be made here people!
But think about it: The pandemic is now stretching into its third year. It has already forced us into the virtual world – we do virtual meetings, virtual seminars and virtual drinks… There’s virtual tours of homes and virtual auctions.
If virtual reality technology is here now… let alone where it will it be in 5 years… or even 12 months!
If it’s here now, it's inevitable that it will become further entrenched in our lives.
And it's not really a stretch to see that people who grow up with this technology would also want to own assets in these worlds – assets published to the blockchain, non-fungible and paid for with crypto.
The metaverse is new, there virtual assets to be bought… it's effectively the digital frontier and people smart enough to get in now may well be the oil barons of the metaverse.
Now I’m not liquidating my real-world portfolio to push into digital real estate – I just don’t know the space well enough yet.
But the point is, the blockchain is disruptive tech, and it’s disrupting everything.
And where there’s disruption, there’s money to be made.
JG.