Virtual vs Real Estate - The Metaverse, NFTs, and Induced Demand

4 thg 11, 2021

MANA tripled in price as of the last few weeks. After China's real-estate market took a nose dive this year, a lot of people are anticipating the same might occur in the US in the near future as the repercussions of the former start to affect the latter. Noone is quite sure what's actually going to happen, but so far the forecasts haven't been looking too good for US assets and the USD in an overall sense. (Video link below for visuals, examples, and tours of the ideas below.)

At the same time, we've seen a renewed interest in "virtual real-estate" -- even Mark Zuckerberg is talking about the "metaverse", so to speak. Are we about to see a spike in demand in these platforms in the near future? I do think that the future of crypto is not making money off of coins themselves, but taking a risk on the products built underneath them.

Some quick impressions of each metaverse:

Cryptovoxels - It looks and feels like "crypto Minecraft" -- the interface is a little rough and the loading times can sometimes be too much, but it does have a lot of energy and inspiration behind them. Kind of like what the "art districts" used to be like in the real-world, I think.

Decentraland - been around the longest and it does show. They have onboarding tutorials, the UI isn't perfect but it's mostly worked out, and has a nice balance between goofyness and a professional development. (You can find the DOGE museum in the museum district there, for example.) But the rent here is not cheap, at least from what I've seen so far. (This is the site that uses MANA, btw.)

Somnium Space - this metaverse feels like it was built by a bunch of MBAs who worked for a real-estate company prior. The listings, marketing, and style of it feels that way too -- and they're listing themselves as a "high-end" product so don't expect it to be cheap. But it does have a professional and clean feel to the whole thing, which may work for some.

The SandBox - I didn't mention this in the video since they don't seem to have a working demo yet, but they have been successful in raising funds from investors as of this week. How they do, is TBD. But it's also proof that there is interest in the space even from an investor's standpoint.

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It's interesting looking at this stuff because the process of buying a "virtual home" itself isn't too different from what you'd do in the real world. (All the way down to height limits too. 😩) The parcel listings look almost exactly like you'd see at a real-estate company, even.

But the political/cultural angle of these trends are interesting, also...historically, arts communities typically get pushed into less expensive neighborhoods as a matter of survival. But eventually their creativity and energy makes it a "cool" place to be, driving up demand. Because of NIMBYism and poor housing/zoning policies in the US, there's literally nowhere for the artists to go...so it seems like many of them have turn to virtual spaces as a place where they can control and present their works. I've long maintained that real-estate is a pretty overrating thing, especially in the US, but never really thought about the possibility of virtual-estate being a direct competitor to the real-estate sector until recently, really.