The sudden boom in virtual real estate investments strikes many investors as speculative and unsustainable, but Gord said that the trend is still very new and buying virtual lands was almost equivalent to buying pixels of a website in the early days of the internet:
“Instead of advertising space, it would be invaluable if you could actually buy ownership of that space and buy real estate from Facebook or websites that will continue to be the truly dominant networks around the world.”
Gord discovered this area during the initial coin supply spree in 2017, but delayed work in the area due to the immaturity of the technology at the time. In early 2020, seeing how the pandemic was leading people to spend most of their time online, Gord began buying MANA for around 2 cents. Trading at $4.2 on Friday afternoon in New York, the token is up 34 percent last month and 4.493 percent year-over-year, according to CoinGecko pricing.
Gord takes an ambitious stance to become the world’s most valuable social network, surpassing Facebook, WeChat and WhatsApp; because its discovery will not only function as a means of communication. Gord says of this new field:
“If we are doing fashion shows, concerts or conferences on the Metaverse, that will attract tens of thousands of people in the short run. In the medium and long term, there is a reasonable possibility that tens of millions of people will have these experiences.”
30 times increase in sales
Gord saw the number of users on Decentraland grow more than 30 times from 16,000 at the beginning of the year to 384,000 at the end of November. As with real-world commercial real estate investing, Gord and his team evaluate location, foot traffic, proximity to the city center, value of past transactions, and size of plots before bidding on any digital property.
The company plans to hold more fashion shows in the metaverses and lease spaces to blue-chip brands that can showcase NFT wearables: “We have hundreds of people reaching out to us about rentals every day.”
Gord said, “I think the potential in the Metaverse is 200x in 16 months. So, it should be at least as big as the internet.”
Jordan Fried, CEO of Immutable Holdings, told Insider, “Is this a bubble? Definitely. It’s a bubble like any housing bubble,” he says. And he continues:
“Even if it’s not an NFT, it shouldn’t seem unreasonable for someone to be willing to spend $4,000 on a virtual Gucci bag in a Roblox game. If you spend a lot of time on Roblox, you really want a nice item that shows status in real life, like wearing a Rolex or Gucci bag.”
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