JAKARTADAILY.ID - Facebook's rebranding into Meta has ignited people's interest in a non-existent land as "it introduced the term 'metaverse' to millions of people", said tech consultant Cathy Hackl as quoted by AFP (December 5, 2021).
Earlier this week, New York-based company Republic Realm said that it had spent a record-breaking $4.3 million on digital land. Republic Realm built its virtual land in The Sandbox, one of the many "virtual world" websites for people to socialize, including playing games and attending concerts.
Previously in November, a plot of land was purchased on rival platform Decentraland for $2.4-million by Canadian crypto company Tokens.com. Before that, the country of Barbados even announced plans to open a "metaverse embassy" on the platform.
The websites claimed themselves to be prototypes of the metaverse, a place on the internet that makes online experiences such as chatting feel face-to-face via the use of VR headsets.
In the past week, across the four largest metaverse sites, The Sandbox, Decentraland, CryptoVoxels, and Somnium Space, $100 million has been spent on digital plots of land, crypto data site Dapp reported.
"We're trying to translate the way we understand physical goods into the virtual world," Hackl said, adding that the digital land market is currently a trend with rents to land developers popping up, developing the ecosystem surrounding virtual real estate.
She also claimed that digital land had become a functioning asset, just like its real-life counterpart. "They can build on it, they can rent it out, they can sell it," said Hackl.
