Metaverse Land: What Makes Digital Real Estate Valuable - a16z crypto

Digital real estate has always had value. What’s different about web3 is that digital asset paradigms like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) make it possible for individuals to uniquely own – not just rent – specific pieces of digital real estate and metaverse land and locations for private or shared use. Blockchains, a core web3 technol

In addition to the question of where digital and metaverse land is most valuable geographically, there’s also the question of which platforms are most valuable to build in. Here, classic chicken-and-egg dynamics of bootstrapping and building marketplaces come into play: It’s best to build for platforms with established user bases; yet a

How should we think about what to build for the metaverse? The framework is so simple as to be almost tautological: People use digital spaces when they create opportunities not available in the “outside option” of the physical world. This means that the value of those spaces is determined by the activities people want to engage in there

People (or rather, their avatars) might walk out of a virtual concert together and then meander down an adjacent virtual shopping strip. Just like in the physical world, then, the shops closest to the virtual conference hall will get the most “foot traffic.”

All of this means that the value of metaverse land and real estate to users will likely depend on what’s locally proximate, rather than on the full geography of that metaverse. We can expect to see thriving shopping malls, micro-cities, or even entire virtual worlds that are kind of like islands in digital space – packed with activity t