The metaverse land boom: economy of the future or a bubble?
The virtual real estate economy wobbles when it holds on to the same dynamics and value judgements as the physical property market
AS A fan of Snow Crash, the 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, I naturally became a fan of the metaverse - a virtual reality world where users interact, game and experience things as they would not in the real world.
My fascination with the metaverse motivated me to follow closely the development of early crypto project Decentraland, one of the leading metaverse platforms powered by the Ethereum blockchain.
What intrigues me is that even in the absence of mass user adoption or market fit, the metaverse thesis has exploded in popularity over the past 12 months. This spike in popularity was initially fuelled by the non-fungible token (NFT) hype. It subsequently peaked in October 2021, when Facebook was rebranded as Meta, symbolising the technology conglomerate's transition towards building products and applications supporting the realisation of a metaverse reality.
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