Not if it can generate income…

Originally published July 2022.

Mostly confined to cyberpunk and tech circles prior to 2021, the metaverse has since experienced breakout attention and entered the common vernacular. Not all of this has been welcomed. For every metaverse evangelist who emerges from the woodwork, so too does an equal and opposite detractor. Both archetypes tend to have very strong opinions about what exactly the metaverse comprises, often deviating from how it was originally characterised in Neal Stevenson’s 1992 novel, Snow Crash. In our recent research culminating in Unreal Estate: Metaverse, extended reality and the future of our physical world, we largely steered clear of this debate by focusing our analysis on the innovations in extended reality and virtual space that symbolise a disruption to the way we use and interact with our physical spaces.

The virtual land rush

Key ingredients of metaverse hype have been the launch of, or investment upswing within, virtual platforms such as Decentraland, Otherside, Sandbox, Somnium Space, Voxels, Super World and a list of others. On many of these platforms, participants can purchase virtual land and create experiences on them. More recently, we have seen mass virtual land speculation: $2bn of virtual land changed hands during the April 2022 launch of Otherside (see figure 1), causing the Etherium blockchain network to temporarily crash and prompting fees to skyrocket for processing the transactions, even if they didn’t go through. In the context of real estate, this would be akin to paying stamp duty before buying an asset, whether the deal goes ahead or not. The word ‘speculation’ is often used in tandem with a criticism that there has been limited proof-of-concept on these platforms, evidenced by the abysmally low level of user activity in some cases.