From Land to $SAND. — Issue #2
Digital land? Who on Earth buys digital land when you can own physical, real life land?
From Land to $SAND
The idea of investing has stayed consistent for a very long time. You buy land, you sell land for a higher price in the future. Whether you invest in residential homes, commercial office buildings, apartment complexes, or plots of farm land, the narrative is that if you bought, you’d make money. This goes for a lot of people. In fact, how many people do you hear in your every day life say that they have lost money with real estate investing? Especially in these crazy times with high demand for properties that are overpriced? Supply and demand. That’s the true beauty and curse of it.
You’ve heard of the metaverse. You log onto Instagram, you either see it in the Explore page, a high school acquaintance has tried onboarding you into their pyramid scheme, or you are already actively engaged in learning the value behind the metaverse. You’ve heard NFT’s that are pictures of monkeys selling for $200,000 USD plus. Now, maybe you haven’t heard of this. Digital land.
There are a few games that supply digital land. The two I am going to mention and talk about are Sandbox and Decentraland. Both of which are “metaverses” that allow users to sign in, meet with friends, play games, and network with people all around the world with a click of a button. Both of these worlds have their own currency, which you can purchase using fiat currency (USD, GBP, EUR, etc) on Coinbase, or through decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap. These currencies are known as $MANA from Decentraland and $SAND from Sandbox. What happens when you own either of the two currencies? Let’s dive deeper.
You can purchase plots of land from either the initial release from the developers of the project, or second hand from other users in the community. Some plots of land are worth more or less, depending on what part they are located at, who owns what plot near them, and the size of the plot. Want to know the numbers? Read them below.
Back in November 2021, a plot of metaverse land in Decentraland sold for a record price of $2.4M USD worth of $MANA currency. The buyer had used 618,000 $MANA tokens to purchase the property. Why did it sell for so much? Here’s some factors in that price.
Location- This plot of land is near the “Fashion Street” parcel of the Decentraland metaverse.
Use- To host digital fashion shows, events, and even host a mall-like structure to buy and sell clothing and accessories for your in-game avatar.
Size- The plot of land is made up of one hundred and sixteen parcels of land that measure approximately fifty-two and a half square feet in game. The grand total of square footage is 6,090.
Hype- Around this time, Facebook, Inc. rebranded their company to the name Meta Platforms, Inc. and announced their focus on building products for the metaverse. This announcement had brought major attention and publicity to metaverse companies like Decentraland, which in return caused the USD value of $MANA to spike in value upwards.
Crazy right? I’m not done just yet. Sandbox also has insanely high sales of land. In the same month, Sandbox had experienced the highest land sale in history with a sale price of $4.3M. The buyer had purchased the plot of land from video game production giant Atari. The plot of land measures 24x24, which stretches 576 parcels, 460 parcels larger than the last highest sale, just seven days prior.
Welcome to the new age, am I right? A lot to take in, a lot to learn, and a lot to earn. There is more to the metaverse than pictures of cute animals. People use metaverse platforms to build companies, meet people, and engineer the future. The time is now.
-N
