Author: @hiCaptainZ

Editor: @JaylenChan, @axwagmi

Recently, Pixel Metaverse - Worldwide Webb has drawn attention to virtual land through airdrops, resulting in a rise in transaction volume in connected sectors. Not only that, but Yuga Labs, the parent firm of BAYC, which started the PFP NFT trend, held a virtual land sale in April, propelling metaverse land to the top.

According to WeMeta, a metaverse land information aggregator, the market size of six land-based projects in the last month, including Decentraland, The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels, and NFT Worlds, peaked around the end of April and is now drawing down alongside the broader NFT market. Monthly sales in these virtual territories totaled more than $28 million as of mid-May.

What is NFT Virtual Land

Since 2020, the field of crypto has grown at an exponential rate, with hot sectors like Defi, GameFi, NFT, and Metaverse forming the foundation for the virtual land market's success.

Virtual land is essentially a component of the "metaverse," the next generation of the internet in which the actual and virtual worlds mix, complete with hyper-realistic VR experiences and their own ecosystem. Sandbox, Decentraland, and Cryptovoxels are examples of virtual worlds and games that allow players to own land in their games.

If the PFP project solves the problem of the user's metaverse image (who am I), then the virtual land tackles the issue of the user's metaverse address (where do they live). Although the metaverse is digital in itself, it is meant to mimic the actual world. It should be noted, however, that the metaverse's objective is not to replace reality but to enhance the digital space we experience today. As a result, the essential needs in real life, "food, clothes, shelter, and transportation," are frequently also the basic needs of Metaverse users. Since the virtual world does not require food or transportation, clothes and shelter have become the two most fundamental necessities.

NFT virtual land is a self-owned digital land area on the Metaverse platform. Decentraland, The Sandbox, and Otherdeed are popular NFT land initiatives. Because each NFT is unique and digital ownership can be easily confirmed, NFTs are ideal for expressing land ownership. NFT land may be utilized for advertising, socializing, gaming, working, and a variety of other purposes. Individual plots are frequently used by landowners to enjoy online activities, exhibit material, or monetize in-game. Big businesses and celebrities, such as Adidas and Snoopy, have also begun to invest in and use NFT property.

Grayscale, a venture capital firm, considers the Metaverse to be a $1 trillion potential opportunity, while others, more optimistically, estimate it to be a $30 trillion opportunity! In comparison, the world's top internet corporation now has a market worth of roughly $900 billion, while Apple was once valued at $2.8 trillion.

Virtual Land Valuation

Fundamentally, virtual land is the transport space for social scenes. While most price swings may be ascribed to speculative properties, there are still methods for evaluating virtual land and quantifying the underlying worth inside a specific plot. PangeaDAO makes an attempt to analyze virtual land based on the following factors: location/use, size, scarcity, popularity, team and roadmap, organizational structure, and investors.

Location

Real-life assets are valued primarily by their location, and virtual land is no exception: the market price of a parcel incorporates neighborhood value and distance from popular lots. Before 1950, Las Vegas was nothing more than a desert. It grew immensely important after WWII when hotels, casinos, and other forms of entertainment were erected. "They will come if you build."

Some metaverse initiatives are focused on games, while others are broader. Many Metaverse projects integrate sections with similar functions. Decentraland, for example, contains areas like Fashion Street, Vegas City, and Festival Park that incorporate the business case into the project.

The first land auction in Decentraland generated 34,358 parcels. The light gray plots correspond to the nine squares, the dark gray plots are for the road system, the dark yellow plots are for the 56 blocks, and the white portions are for unsold plots. "The Economics of Blockchain-Based Virtual Worlds: A Hedonic Regression Model for Virtual Lands," Goldberg, Kugler, and Schär, 2021

Land Size

Many metaverse virtual lands provide variable lengths, widths, and height plots. The greater the parcel cluster in some metaverse projects, the more flexibility to construct. The height of a Decentraland structure, for example, maybe determined using the logarithmic formula log2 (n+1) x 20, where n is the number of parcels. The 2x2 stands 46.4 meters tall, while the 2x3 stands 56 meters tall. This is a big distinction, especially if your structure is intended to be viewed from a distance.

All apartments at Worldwide Webb are separated into four sizes: large, medium, tiny, and attic. Different sizes have various rights. In general, the higher the size, the more tokens may be given, and uncommon things are easier to drop.

Rarity

Like a cryptocurrency with a limited total supply (such as Bitcoin), most virtual world creators restrict the quantity of their territory. As more companies enter the virtual world, developers build games, and artists give exclusive concerts or experiences, there will be an increase in consumers desiring to consume content, and prices will climb as users and demand expand.

Otherside is a metaverse gaming environment created by Yuga Labs and NFT game publisher Animoca Brands that combines several NFT projects. According to public information, the total number of land contracts Otherdeed is 200,000, with the first batch of 100,000 copies distributed in May and the final 100,000 copies due in August.

Popularity

The popularity of a project is an important factor in determining the value of virtual land. The number of users is, without a doubt, an important metric. The popularity of a project may be described by its daily/weekly/monthly active user growth, user engagement and churn, and the number of time users spends on the project.

Although a given metaverse virtual land is restricted, multiple metaverses can exist concurrently, thus we usually consider the project's popularity when selecting a virtual land. This is also simple to grasp. A city with a net population influx will almost certainly see an increase in housing prices, whereas a city with a net population outflow would see a substantial decline in housing prices. The Metaverse is a social environment in and of itself, and every one of us is hesitant to stay in a sparsely inhabited virtual area, right?

Team and Roadmap

A clear roadmap will keep followers interested, and a good team will guarantee that the roadmap is executed. Projects are destined to expand beyond what we are acquainted with, especially now that the metaverse is in its early phases, and when that happens, the tone and style of the development team and the core community of builders becomes crucial.

Organizational Structure and Investors

In the Web3 period, should you use the traditional corporate system or the DAO? Are there any celebrity investors available for an endorsement? Users will have varied psychological expectations as a result of diverse organizational structures and investors, which will impact the project's future development.

Typical Project Introduction

Virtual land is broadly divided into two types: metaverse virtual land and in-game virtual land. The former is often represented by Decentraland, and virtual space users' activity is mostly social. The latter is often represented as Otherside, and games dominate user behavior in virtual space.

Metaverse Lands

Decentraland

Decentraland is an Ethereum-based 3D virtual environment and community where users may buy, build, and decorate residences, attend events, and start crypto companies. Decentraland is split into 90,601 LAND parcels, each measuring 16 meters by 16 meters. Its height is determined by Cartesian coordinates and is connected to the topography where the land is located (x, y). Users must buy and sell using the MANA token, and these tokens may also be used to purchase wearables like as clothing, shoes, avatars and names, and so on. Virtual exhibits have already been launched by well-known businesses such as Estee Lauder, Tommy Hilfiger, Samsung, Skechers, Sotheby's, and Honda.

Comments: The first metaverse project, with an early entry, a good image, but a high building threshold, sluggish loading, and poor progress after DAO.

The Sandbox

LAND is the name of Sandbox's virtual land. The total amount of accessible LANDs is 166,464 blocks, which compose the whole Sandbox map and never expand or decrease. 123,840 of these are for sale, 25,920 are provided as incentives to Sandbox partners, producers, and users, and the remaining 16,704 are utilized for events and games. Once a person buys a plot of land, he or she may populate it with games and objects. Each LAND token is an NFT created with the ERC-721 standard. A 11 piece of LAND is 96 meters wide, 96 meters long, and can sustain a maximum height of 128 meters, which is large enough to accommodate all forms of blockchain game experiences but not so large that it cannot be handled by a single person. An ESTATE (land group) is made up of many parcels of LAND (see the Sandbox map below).

The Sandbox ecosystem is made up of three key components: VoxEdit (creation editor), GameMarker (game creation), and Marketplace (trading market), with users able to log in using encrypted wallet Metamask or social sites like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Atari, Adidas, Square Enix, Crypto Kitties, Atari, HSBC, and Shaun The Sheep are among The Sandbox's partners. Furthermore, NFT ventures such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, CyberKongz, Party Degenerates, and others have bought land on The Sandbox.

It has excellent financial connections and operational capabilities after many rounds of investment. Simple to construct, constructed in vox format, no complex 3D modeling necessary. However, it is still in the Alpha stage and has terrible playability. Furthermore, the app loads slowly and provides a bad user experience.

Cryptovoxels

Cryptovoxels is an Ethereum-based metaverse, similar to Minecraft, in which players may construct, produce, and trade digital goods on the streets using bespoke pixel monochrome blocks. Former Decentraland member Ben Nolan founded CryptoVoxels, and he is the only developer of the whole project.

In the near future, CryptoVoxels intends to introduce Scarcity Island, a virtual region with autonomous voting scenarios. The land may be built with a basement, users can dig beneath the earth, and it can be utilized as an asset in autonomous voting. Furthermore, according to Cryptovoxels' 2022 strategy, it plans to establish the Origin City land repurchase program, introduce the official trading and leasing platform by the end of this year, and reduce the formerly infinite land maximum to 70,000. The graphic below depicts a map of user-built structures as well as the whole metaverse.

Comments: The web page opens rapidly, there is no need to download special software, it is simple to use, simple to develop, simple to take the capital, and it has great team autonomy. However, the image is hazy and insufficiently detailed, and the team's marketing skill is lacking.

NFT Worlds

NFT Worlds is a fully decentralized, fully configurable, and coachable gaming platform that lets users all over the world build monetized games and experiences. NFT Planets include 10,000 randomly created worlds with an extent of 500 square kilometers. It is based on Minecraft and comprises 10,000 distinct 3D pixel worlds that are produced procedurally and have diverse attributes. NFT Worlds also introduced the novel concept of staking, which allows NFT holders to stake their NFTs in order to earn the token WRLD as interest. Furthermore, in the near future, NFT Worlds will release the second NFT series NFT Worlds Genesis Avatars, with a total of 15,000 NFTs, which will be utilized as playable avatars in the NFT Worlds ecosystem, as well as a beta launcher. The diagram below depicts the essential attributes of each virtual country as well as the virtual worlds that have been created thus far (about 30).

The holder of an NFT world owns rights to that world in the NFT world ecosystem, the power to create anything in that world, the in-game experience, and so on. The environment may be converted into anything, such as a racing game, a fighting game, a role-playing game, a blend of two or three genres, or a map for other people to play, experience, and more. All of this takes place in a massively multiplayer setting.

The project is based on "Minecraft," the development pace is quick, the player conversion is quick, the vox voxel block is utilized, and the building is easy. However, due to the vast size of the land, the quantity of development work required is enormous, and there are legal hazards involved.

Somnium Space

Somnium Space is an open-source social virtual reality environment powered by blockchain and totally designed by users, allowing them to purchase digital land on which to construct VR houses and structures. In early 2020, Somnium 2.0 was released, bringing the project one step closer to a genuine Ready Player One virtual experience. Somnium 2.0 hosts all players in one large universe, unlike other multiplayer VR games, which divide players into sub-servers and mirrored instance rooms.

Players may purchase virtual land and create anything they want on it: nightclubs, art galleries, residences, the options are unlimited, as are the benefits for earning users. Somnium Space is available on PC and mobile devices. WORLDS, PARCELS, AVATARS, and ITEMs are examples of Somnium Space items. Somnium Space is made up of 5026 plots positioned along the river that vary in size and shape and are classified into three sizes: S-type: 200 square meters, 10 meters high; M-type: 600 square meters, 25 meters high; XL type: 1500 square meters, 50 meters high. The price of a plot is determined mostly by its size, features, and closeness to desirable factors. Somnium Space offices have already been launched by companies such as Nifty Gateway, FTX, and others. The virtual world and all of the maps are depicted in the image below.

Worldwide Webb Land

Worldwide Webb is a 9508-player interoperable pixel art virtual environment in which people may own land, equip their own NFTs, and so on. Land, having multiple properties of space and time, is a major asset of Worldwide Webb. At the same time, Worldwide Webb may be used as metaverse/in-game props in other NFT projects, such as in-game avatars, pets, lands, objects, and quests, and has now incorporated CryptoPunks, Cool Cats, CrypToadz, PunkCats, Cypher City Pets and Neko, and other prominent NFT projects. It is worth noting that Worldwide Web just stated that it will deliver landowner-based airdrops of resources, tokens, voting rights, uncommon objects, and hints to unique events.

On November 29, 2021, the first NFTs symbolizing Worldwide Webb homes were coined. It began with 5,000 little residences priced at 0.069 ETH (about $300 at the time); 3,000 medium-sized homes were provided for 0.12 ETH (about $522); 1,000 big units were sold for 0.24 ETH (about $1,044); and 69 penthouses were auctioned for 1 ETH (about $4,350). Using Worldwide Webb's Apartment Editor tool, these are incredibly customizable. The graphic below depicts the virtual space's scene and map.

Otherside

The PC version will be released first by OTHERSIDE, a new project from the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club. Popular NFT projects such as BAYC, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Meebits, CoolCats, World of Women, and Nouns have appeared in previously announced promotional videos. According to the official plan, the Otherside project Ape Land would have 200,000 pieces of land available for sale in April and August. Otherdeed is a unique new NFT created specifically for this game, a token representing some sort of virtual land.

So, how can you tell the difference between the worth and rarity of land that has been acquired or is about to be purchased? Otherside NFT's scarcity system has multiple Koda categories, including geography, level, and artifact. The land's location is critical for the connection; for example, closeness to the core/central region is more rare, which also benefits BYAC/MAYC holders. Otherdeed plots are graded from 1 to 5. The greater the grade, the higher the floor price, although the distinction is subtle. There are eight functional land types and 29 environmental kinds in terms of land types.

The most central position in the Otherside universe is an island with just 294 pieces of land on it. This is considered the most central place in the "Ape Universe," comparable to Manhattan in New York. Within 300 but not on the island: 244, 246, 259, 260, 267, 273, 277, 281, 285, 290, 293, 294, 298, for a total of 13; over 300 but on the island: 304, 308, 311, 313, 315, 329, 335, for a total of 7.

Arcade

Arcade is a metaverse realm with social and GameFi components. Users may earn token prizes by engaging in different activities with their favorite NFTs, chatting with other users, building houses, and playing games. Arcade Land includes a total of 10,000 pieces of digital land among them, which are classified into four sorts and differ in terms of space and application. Landowners have access to Token, NFT, metaverse, and gaming resources, and may also be used for renting, advertising, and building projects, among other things. Arcade is developed by the same team that created the BAYC mobile game "Apes vs. Mutants," and the game will employ the BAYC token ApeCoin in the future. BAYC, CryptoPunks, Meebits, Cool Cats, Mfers, and Phanta Bear are among the current Arcade partners. Recently, well-known musician JJ Lin declared on his own social media that he owns Arcade Land's virtual land.

Status of Current Landholders

By analyzing land supply, land transactions, and the number of landowners, MetaCat produced the following statistics (as of April 30, 2022):

(1) Landlords of metaverse platforms are often lesser. The total number of landlords on the leading metaverse platform is around 35,000.

(2) The total number of landlords in SomniumSpace and NFT Worlds is fewer than 1000.

(3) The terrain in NFTWorlds is densely packed. 88 percent of the total land plots sold, the number of sales is 8816, but the number of landowners is only 779; further investigation revealed that NFT Worlds has the most land plot holders with 8988, the address In actuality, it is the contract address; 89 percent of the total parcels are covered by the contract. There are over 3,900 landowners that purchased the LAND and promised it to the contract to mine $WRLD, therefore the platform is extremely data-focused. From another angle, 89 percent of the plots are in the same contract, implying a significant danger of plot concentration. It will suffer massive losses if assaulted.

(4) SomniumSpace is an extremely narrow market, with just 5,000 plots available, only 1,957 sold, and only 852 landowners.

(5) Cryptovoxels is the sole platform that offers on-demand extra issuance, and sales volume provides for the greatest amount of supply, accounting for 92 percent;

(6) The Sandbox is top in terms of land supply, sales, and landowners, but because it has the most supply, the percentage of sales and supply is the lowest, at only 13%.

Due to a lack of data statistics channels, we can only observe that the monthly platform traffic of Cryptovoxels is 1 million, and the monthly active users (MAU) of Decentraland is around 500,000.

Project Progress

Platforms with a high degree of completeness include Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, and Worldwide Webb Land. Looking at the present completeness of the project from the standpoint of the player's experience, Cryptovoxels and Decentraland belong to the higher degree of completion in the 3D metaverse. Players can enter any plot to play, and Cryptovoxels' loading time is quicker than Decentraland's. Although these two projects have a high degree of completion, when entering the world, there are still wide open places that have not been developed (the completion degree of the project party's building project is high, but the completion degree of player construction is still relatively low). Because of its 2D interface, Worldwide Webb has a very rapid loading speed, and players may freely enjoy it.

Platforms with a lesser level of completion: The Sandbox, NFT Worlds. At the moment, The Sandbox includes only two games that regular users may access via the official website. With hundreds of thousands of acres and the first cumulative land purchases, this is a fairly low degree of completeness for the metaverse platform; NFT Worlds currently has only 19 acres. The world is operational (although multiple projects have declared collaboration with NFT Worlds, it is possible that it is still under development), you must download the relevant version of the client to enter, and there may be a long line.

Otherside and Arcade are examples of idea platforms. These two initiatives, which both focus on game experience, have lately gained popularity, although they are still in the idea marketing stage and have not created actual and functional goods.

Conclusion

Virtual land, in essence, reflects users' social demands, and its main value stems from the advertising impact based on social space. The bigger the value, the more popular the project. From a larger viewpoint, the PFP project and virtual land address two basic challenges in the metaverse, namely "Who am I" and "Where do I reside," or, to put it another way, "identification" and "group borders."