Last July, the Sotheby’s auction house launched a digital replica of its headquarters in London. In real life, you can find it on New Bond Street. Its digital version is located in the Voltaire Art District of Decentraland, the decentralized platform in virtual reality that the Ethereum blockchain powers.
It enables users to buy land plots that they can build, monetize, and navigate upon. As of the moment, it had sold more than $50 million. This virtual gallery has showcased digital art all over five spaces on the first floor.
The launch happened during the first curated NFT sale of Sotheby’s that included the sale of the artwork ‘CryptoPunk’ for $11.8 million. As far as virtual art goes, it is practically petty cash, as an artwork got sold for $69 million at Christie’s last March.
These artworks are purely digital and blockchain authenticated. They are sent to the cryptocurrency wallet of the buyer without having to transfer a physical painting, as everything happens in the Metaverse.
Suppose you don’t know the term Metaverse. In that case, it is a virtual collectively shared space created because of the convergence of virtual physically persistent space and physically and virtually enhanced reality.
Specifically, it involves the fusion of these two, allowing users to experience it as either. In other terms, it will always be on as a parallel reality wherein users can synchronously interact with things, places, and people as they pull experiences and data out of the Metaverse and into existence, which is similar to what people are doing with the internet nowadays.
When it comes to the context involving real estate, it can be helpful to consider the Metaverse as simply a new economy that features commodities that range from virtual avatars, buildings, and land that people can buy and sell non-fungible tokens.
These are units stored on the blockchain and certify that the digital asset is non-interchangeable and unique. Often, these commodities are banking hundreds of thousands of dollars, as Reuters previously reported that real estate plots in the Metaverse could sell for more than $500,000.
Even if some investors warned that there would be a price bubble, the market is now hotter than before. Because of that, experts believe that the Metaverse can transform Earth’s nature of life as it radically changes how people shop, play, work, and more. It can represent a shift in people’s lives as significant as the internet and the telephone.
In the past July, an addition to the Metaverse arrived as announced by Republic Realm, a (virtual) real estate developer and investment platform. They launched the shopping district of the Metaverse Decentraland called the Metajuku. It is modeled based on the Harajuku district of Tokyo in real life. Spanning around 16 thousand square feet, the Metajuku features a couple of anchor tenants from the Tribute and Dress-X brands. Both of them exclusively sell digital fashion, just like the digital sneakers that we’re able to raise $3.1 million in just several minutes early this 2021.
Before the year ends, there are around 34 brands that are expected to join. According to an interview with the MD of Republic Realm, Janine Yorio, by Women’s Wear Daily, retail is among the highly logical cases for any virtual real estate because consumers are now well-experienced to buy things online.
With the Metaverse, online stores can have an extension where customers can try to wear or use and purchase items in a highly immersive 3D environment instead of the 2D stores currently available online. After all, many people agree that going shopping on the web can be both too repetitive and counterintuitive that it hardly replicates the meaningful experience of shopping in real life.
Since it does not come with the ability to try on, feel, and touch clothes, many customers get disappointed, leading to increased numbers in return and expenses for retailers, including the environment’s far-reaching consequences.
On the other hand, if you shop on the Metaverse, it can be highly immersive and seamless that it is almost indistinguishable from what people can experience in-store in real life.
Aside from that, the Metaverse’s highly lucrative opportunity is that it can potentially attract a new base of customers consisting of the Gen Z shoppers who are digitally native and have grown up using computers, social media, and video games.
This generation is more internet-savvy compared to the generations that came before they arrived. Aside from that, this generation expects to get more from life, especially retail, compared to the earlier generations that they constantly want to experience new things and demand more bang for their money. According to Doug Stephens, a global advisor on retail’s future and an international bestselling author, the easy transport of shopping conventions and concepts from the industrial age to the Metaverse will become ineffective and unimaginative. It would be better to assert that the metaverse benefits can let us break free from the limits of physical shops, so we can create an experience for customers beyond what the best online shop can provide now.
He said that what could be the reason for creating a 7–11 store’s virtual replica if people can potentially shop for a 7–11 snack from a 7–11 store that is within an Arctic exploration that Puff Daddy is leading?
Here, anyone can gain first-hand contextual information on the products they are selling and have them delivered to your home in the real world. It can be possible to experience anything in this world, so why would you want to use the retail version of the industrial era as the future’s template.
Doug Stephens has argued that Smart brands will be acquiring and developing virtual real estate and have it used as a platform to showcase physical and digital products to people who seamlessly move between worlds as other companies and brands stay stuck in the real world.
The project in the making is the Metaverse that constantly evolves similarly to our real-world countries and cities that grew and developed for more than thousands of years. People may not be able to experience its full benefits for decades. Until that time comes, the commodity market of the Metaverse can continue to flourish as more and more companies desire to reap the help of this parallel universe’s development.
