Owning a Virtual Real Estate in the Metaverse

Huy Nguyen Trieu, co-founder of CFTE joined Citi Global Insights’ Ronit Ghose to discuss the virtual real-estate market in the Metaverse, particularly the Sandbox. Scarcity for virtual lands is created artificially, and extreme volatility/uncertainty is likely as virtual worlds are still in build-mode and not fully live. In 2021, the Sandbox had 65,000 real-estate transactions totalling $350m with most of it in 4Q21. In the Sandbox, a very small percentage of real-estate is traded actively as most land parcels are being bought to hold/develop. The majority of virtual land transactions happen in the secondary market i.e. NFT marketplaces. Huy thinks the TAM for virtual real-estate will be driven by the applications built on top of it e.g. NFTs, DeFi, gaming etc. but inherent risks/concerns around scams and interoperability need to be addressed.