On Next Earth, a virtual replica of Earth on Ethereum, the virtual property market is booming. In the world’s first ITO, virtual land tiles were sold to thousands of buyers. So far, over $1.1 million in virtual property has been sold. This is due to the growing demand for NFTs as people seek out rare opportunities that represent something more than just another digital asset.
This includes the sale of major stadiums and famous buildings, along with tens of thousands of virtual acres. The land sector on the blockchain is one where NFTs are already starting to make major inroads. Scarcity and rarity are two qualities that make collectibles such as art and wine widely sought after, but there’s another aspect that makes virtual real estate so alluring: ownership.
In the world of digital scarcity, non-fungible tokens represent unique assets — unlike fungible cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are exchanged for equivalent value.
The Benefits of Virtual Property NFTs
Virtual land has also become an increasingly popular investment option for those looking to diversify their portfolios, whether it’s an NFT-focused portfolio or even a traditional investment portfolio with an allocation to alternatives.
NFT-based virtual land offers the benefit of investing in a brand-new asset class, but unlike physical real estate or art, it can be bought and sold instantly on a blockchain without any third party managing its ownership or transactions—therefore eliminating middlemen from the equation.
And because there is no physical asset backing each parcel of virtual land (unlike with physical real estate), parcels can be bought outright instead of fractionally or leased (like rental properties). This provides an additional layer of value for buyers who may not want their asset tied up for decades unless they plan on staying there themselves (or unless they intend on leasing it out).
The ability of NFTs like Next Earth’s plots to be traded freely without restriction has created a huge opportunity set for developers looking to create new experiences around them—opening up new avenues for monetization that were previously unavailable when digital items could only be sold from one central-entity-owned server farm shop unto another.
In addition, NFTs provide developers with an interesting way of creating scarcity within their virtual worlds by limiting how many items exist within them at any given time; this creates demand among players who want access to these scarce assets before someone else.
The Mainstreaming of Blockchain
As we progress along the second decade since the birth of the blockchain, we are finally seeing mainstream adoption across multiple industries thanks in large part due to benefits such as unprecedented levels of security and transparency throughout each transaction.
Blockchain technology has already been applied successfully across multiple verticals outside of gaming and collectibles, including healthcare and insurance, voting and governance, music rights management, supply chain management, and financial services.
Virtual land is another exciting vertical that blockchain technology and the NFT space, in particular, are poised to disrupt. Now that we are in the euphoria of the blockchain, it is unlikely that virtual land will remain an obscure concept within a small niche community for long—once mainstream adoption does occur, expect NFTs to become as commonplace as collectibles have already.
Beyond virtual property, per se, NFTs also provide a wide array of other exciting applications for the blockchain and its democratizing power. From unique art to historical quotes, there are numerous use cases for NFTs that go far beyond virtual property alone. As a result, the growth of NFT virtual properties is helping to strengthen the industry as a whole, and vice versa.
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