I am the original creator of this article and the original published article can be found here on my Medium blog account.
Decentraland, a decentralized user-owned virtual world on the Ethereum blockchain, launched their virtual land marketplace on March 19th, 2018. Late last year, Decentraland finished their first-ever Terraform event in which 70,399 parcels of land were generated. Participants spent just over 161,000,000 MANA tokens on this virtual land. This is approximately $10m worth of virtual land at today’s MANA token price.
The Decentraland land marketplace launched as a way for users to sell their land or, for those who might have missed the Terraform event, to snag a plot of land in the Metaverse. Ready Player One could not have come out at a better time.
If you need to read up on Non-fungible Tokens (NFT’s), here’s a great article explaining what they are:
Land Parcels Sold in the Secondary Market
https://decentraland.org/Since the launch of the Decentraland land marketplace, a third-party called NonFungibles.com has released a helpful tool to help us track the sales of land. According to the website, over 850 parcels of land have been exchanged within the Decentraland marketplace.
As I type this article up, there are over 2,100 parcels of land on the marketplace of the 70,399 minted parcels. Currently, the lowest price a parcel is listed at is 7,490 MANA and the highest, removing unrealistic outliers, is around 10,000,000 MANA.
NonFungible.com — Data So Far
Data Source: https://nonfungible.com
NonFungible.com is a website that has recently surfaced by one of the Decentraland community members to act as a tool for the community to have a transparent data-source to find past LAND sales. Verifiable data is extremely important to understanding the health of any economy, but even more when we’re discussing virtual world economies.
For now, the NonFungible website is in its early days and is very basic. I extrapolated the data from the website and crunched the numbers to provide you with a daily overview of March’s LAND sales in the chart above.
The month of March had 13-days of transactions with an average of 60 LAND transactions occurring daily. The average parcel of LAND sold for 20,527 MANA and March 22nd saw the largest transaction for LAND in the secondary market with a price of 2,000,000 MANA. At today’s MANA/USD rate ($0.073998), that is approximately $147,996. The lowest price LAND was sold for in the auction was 2,000 MANA, approximately $148 at today’s rate.
It may seem a bit weird for somebody to pay $150,000 for a parcel of virtual land, but weirder things have happened before this Decentraland land auction — CryptoKitties, another NFT, have sold for higher than $100,000 as well. Think of Decentraland as being a virtual world you can go play with your digital collectible in, provably rare digital collectible. Add that virtual worlds like Second Life have reached over a $600m economy, this is just the beginning.
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