Principles of Real Estate in the Metaverse

Mark Twain once said, “Buy land; they aren’t making them anymore.” But if he were alive today, the famed American man of letters would have been forced to eat his own words. The emergence of the metaverse is opening up vast new spaces where land is being created virtually. For the less hip among us who might still not be in the know, the metaverse is a boundless digital world where our virtual versions can work, play, and socialize. The metaverse is powered by an amalgamation of emerging technologies, including blockchain, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D modeling, 5G, brain-computer interfacing, and the internet of things. What Can One Do in the Metaverse People can attend concerts, visit art galleries, play games, and buy and sell stuff in this new space, including digital land. The real (or is it virtual?) estate business in the metaverse is already a multi-million dollar enterprise. In fact, in 2021 alone, the sale of virtual land surpassed half a billion dollars, and market observers expect the figure to double in 2022. Big-name celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton and giant corporations such as JP Morgan, PwC, Samsung, and HSBC have already carved out large portions of virtual land on different platforms. Some of the more popular metaverse platforms for real estate trading include Sandbox, Decentraland, Axie Infinity, Enjin, Earth 2, Superworld, Nifty Island, and CryptoVoxels. In th...