Last Friday, JZ, founding contributor of MetaOasis DAO, attended MetaOasis DAO x EasyFi Twitter Space and talked about several land-focused popular topics.
Let’s take a quick look at the main recap of Twitter Space:
Q — Why is there such a buzz around virtual land in the metaverse?
Firstly, the mindset, people love real estate from all over the world, like I’m from HK, the lands and apartments are super expensive, and so many people live and squeeze in a “tiny” apartment and everyone’s dream is that they could buy a spacious apartment.
So in the mindset, everything is linked with real estate, I think we’ll catch somebody’s attention and even investors.
In Dec last year, the tycoon family of Real Estate developers just purchased one of the biggest pieces of land in The Sandbox, which means developers in the real world are interested in participating in virtual lands because of this mindset, something related to real estate must have some values.
Secondly, I think that virtual land is the key/entrance to the Metaverse. You should build something for people to spend their time and to get experience. So if you’re bullish on the future of the metaverse, you should also be bullish on the land.
Lastly is the utilities. The NFT market as a whole is emerging, most of NFTs are PFP projects, and the volume of them will be twice the volume of other categories of NFTs combined together. Utility becomes a very crucial problem for NFT products. In virtual lands, there are still many potentials to be realized, like unlocking your avatar in these lands, earning some profits by staking land, and you can provide assets or exclusive experiences for users to play in your land.
Q — How do you make the lands affordable to people in the metaverse?
Now, we can see that the average price of the leading virtual land projects is one piece of land; some cost 3 to 4 ETHs for the total price, which is a high barrier to entry for the investors and creators.
If you are an independent small design studio and want to build up your own gaming experiences in one of these Metaverse lands, you may not have the amount of money to get access to do it.
Nowadays, there are several possible solutions, but I don’t think they are very mature right now.
It seems like you can either do some renting of the lands. Like in the NFT Worlds, I have recently seen one of the hottest projects. They have some mechanisms that the owners of NFTs can rent their lands to some users & players to earn their own $WRLD tokens. This is one of the solutions.
I think there are some other solutions, including fractionalized NFTs. You can fractionalize ordinary NFTs. The land itself is also the NFT so that you can do fractionalization. But l don’t think these attempts are very successful so far. They can’t create a lot of liquidity for the project now.
So in our DAO, we will issue our token. You can buy our token, which means that you own a portion of the land portfolio that we purchased. Furthermore, we form a community of creators, artists, and design studios to build on these lands. Each revenue generated in the future from these lands will come back to the DAO treasury to increase the DAO tokens’ value.
Q — Investing virtual lands sounds a bit sophisticated. How to evaluate virtual lands and do you have the criteria?
I think the most important one is how to tell whether it is a good project or not for you to make the judgment, and the second question will be how to pick a specific land in such a project.
So the most important question is whether it is a good project for us. We have several merits to looking for specific projects. Firstly, there will be some criteria for analysis. I think universally applicable in other projects will be checking the community, whether it is vibrant and whether there are many active participants, whether their team members are seasoned or crypto native, do they full field the promises of roadmap.
Other merits we are looking for will be whether it is programmable, user-generated, friendly to creators. If they cannot be user-generated in these lands, it’s not the virtual land that we are looking for.
Besides, we’ll see whether this project is decentralized. Whether it is using blockchain technology and good infrastructure.
So we will judge if it is a good project combined with these merits.
If you look at the leading projects such as The Sandbox, Decentraland, Crypto Voxels, NFT Worlds and others, you can see all of these merits in these leading projects.
Get down how to get a specific land in the projects. I think there are many different opinions now.
From some angles, location is the most important factor in the real world. But, in the metaverse, someone will argue that you cannot benefit from just being the big names’ neighbors.
Janine Yorio (Head of real estate at Republic) said land value in the metaverse would be determined by what owners do with a property, like designing a popular attraction, museum, or feature, rather than location.
But, if you see the data from the Sandbox and Decentraland, you will see the location is still the matter.
For example, Snoop Dogg’s partnership and virtual world in Sandbox are fetching a premium and parcels near Atari development.
So, I think the location is still an important merit.
Q — How do you design your HQ? What are the opportunities for creating the economy?
We are trying to gather a community of these artists, creators, and developers.
Firstly, to provide them a lower barrier to entry since buying land is expensive so that they can build on the metaverse.
Secondly, it is to explore some cooperation models with creators and designers a revenue-sharing scheme (they can issue their NFT or P2E in these lands), where they can get the reward benefits for joining to build the metaverse.
Check it out for the full recording: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1vOxwyvWQyPGB
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