Is earth2.io a scam?

Dear investors,

Ever heard about earth2.io? No, I am not talking about that excellent SF movie "Another Earth" by and with the awesome Brit Marling, no I mean a new hype around virtual real estate in the finance and trading space!

What is it?

It is about buying and trading actual land on a digital copy of earth, as a "beginning of our world's future virtual existence", as they say. It is about a virtual, digital world on a 1:1 scale with our real earth. The Earth 2 digital grid system is geographically linked and 100% matched to the world we live in. There are 5.1 trillion uniquely identified virtual land tiles (each 10x10 meter) on the market and you can smoothly scroll through them by some clever rendering! Amazing, isn´t it? Unfortunately it is NOT blockchain-based, so no NFTs involved.

Apparently you can buy, sell and bid on the virtual land. The basic price of an unclaimed 10x10m tile is 0.1$, but many in some popular areas are now worth a multiple of it!

These are the countries where the most tiles were bought in the last 7 days:

Why participate?

1. You can profit from a higher value of the land, if there are people willing to buy it from you
2. You earn a Land Income Tax on the land you own based on future new sales of land in that country
3. There is a referral system that gives the purchaser of land 5% credit back on their purchase and 5% credit to the owner of the referral code.
4. Some land tiles will contain treasures or resources which you will loot when buying them (not yet implemented)
5. Advertisments on popular areas you own will generate Ad income (not yet implemented)
6. If someone buys e.g. a shopping center on land you own you will get a share of the income generated (not yet implemented)

So all in all sounds good. Too good to be true? I tried to check out popular areas in Vienna, the town where I live, and practically all tiles are already taken. It looks like this:

Specifically, I checked the area around the OLDEST CHURCH in downtown Vienna (the "Ruprechts church" from the 12^th century, I described it in my post about the early history of Vienna), in the red cirle below:

Seems that a tile in this area increased already by 875% in value. Can this be real?

This brings me back to the initial question. Just before thinking about where else to find cheap land, I saw an interesting thread on Reddit here which is quite negative on the project!

A scam?

Warning flags for a scam for me are these:

• The business model extremely relies on value generation - from what? Just being the first?
• There is so far no way to cash out profits. Theoretically it is possible, but there were always some hiccups, excuses, server down, etc.
• The fact that the VR pioneer Dillon Seo is advisor on the project is quite hyped, but that guy is advisor on many projects, on the other hand the dev team is small and the CEO, Shane Isaac has no successful track record whatsoever (do you know xyz, the other company he is involved in?).
• According to the redditor, the communication and faq sucks, the transparency is bad

Not sure, but for now with the limited information I have this looks rather scary and I better let this pass.

But what do you think, can this be an interesting investment opportunity or is it just a scam? By chance anybody here who had tried it out?

^{all pics are from https://earth2.io/}