The tech world is increasingly starting to feel like one long, implausible mad lib:
One of the first companies to get into the digital real estate business is Metaverse Group, which operates a virtual world called Decentraland. Last week, Metaverse Group's parent company, Token.com, announced that a "116 parcel estate in the heart of the Fashion Street district within Decentraland" sold for the equivalent of about $2.5 million — a record! The new owner of this estate near Fashion Street could presumably profit if Louis Vuitton wants to open a store there: They could effectively be the brand's virtual landlord.
This Decentraland deal did not, strictly speaking, involve real money. The digital estate sold for 618,000 mana, a type of cryptocurrency used in Decentraland. When you say it out loud, "mana" actually sounds a lot like the first couple syllables of "Monopoly money."
"Imagine if you came to New York when it was farmland, and you had the option to get a block of SoHo," Metaverse Group co-founder Michael Gord recently told the New York Times. "If someone wants to buy a block of real estate in SoHo today, it's priceless, it's not on the market. That same experience is going to happen in the metaverse."
Hmm: "That same experience is going to happen in the Metaverse."
I thought the point was to make the Metaverse less like, you know, the real world.
