For many homeowners, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a change in perspective on where they wanted to live. Why stay in a cramped apartment in the smoggy city when you can Zoom into your meetings from a country farmhouse or Edwardian manor or Martello tower?
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Or why not buy your own island, complete with villa? Part of an exclusive 100 person community called Fantasy Islands, far away from the hustle and bustle of crowded city streets, its website lists it as the creation of “lady pirate poet” Agadora Humphries.
And with prices starting as low as $104,000, it’s a steal – less than half the average cost of a first-time buyer’s house in the UK.
There is one slight catch, though – you can’t actually live in it because it only exists online. It exists in The Sandbox, a metaverse: one of many virtual worlds filled with digital assets ranging from dresses and sneakers to art and cars. Users buy a digital receipt of the property, a non-fungible token (NFT) that is recorded on a shared digital ledger known as a blockchain, similar to how cryptocurrency transactions are logged.
Welcome to the future of real estate – at least according to enthusiasts, who point at the millions of dollars already being thrown into the space. For its detractors, it looks like a rehash of earlier virtual worlds, with blockchain hype stuck on the end.
In 1992, long before the blockchain went viral, Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash touched on the idea of virtual real estate.
Jordan Fragen, senior market analyst at gaming data company Newzoo, says that would-be digital tycoons first got the chance to buy online virtual property in the mid-2000s.