Media
In the last year alone, half a billion users joined social media, over two trillion texts were sent, online retail sales topped USD 600 Billion, and over a quarter of Americans worked from home. It is clear – the world is becoming increasingly digital as individuals take their lives online.
It’s no surprise that major players in the tech space have taken notice. Facebook recently rebranded to Meta and announced its focus on converting social media into an augmented virtual experience where people can interact more closely with their friends and co-workers. Google – launching a VR/AR research team – and Microsoft – soon to launch a virtual office experience – are following suit.
But perhaps the march of digitization can be best seen in the gaming space, where digital spaces are already thriving.
Roblox, a game famous for not being a game at all, but instead being an amalgam of casual user-developed mini-games and digital spaces, sustains over 20 million daily players, and generates over USD 300 Million in annual revenue from digital currency (Robux) sales. Further, Roblox recently paid out USD 250 Million to its user-developers, some of which generate full-time incomes through self-created in-game experiences like theme parks and cafes.
Social simulation games like Second Life and VR Chat sport healthy player counts as well, and have vibrant player-creator economies of their own. On the cryptocurrency gaming side, projects like The Sandbox and Decentraland have drawn interest through their creative virtual worlds and NFT-based digital land sales, yielding massive returns for investors.
With much of the world already being online, and virtual experiences becoming the norm, the metaverse is already primed.
Investing in the Metaverse
Physical spaces may become the basis for virtual experiences. 3D virtual tours, generated using advanced scanning technologies, are already commonplace in the real estate industry. And, with Meta’s focus on augmented experiences, it seems all but inevitable.
Soon, people may visit their friends in virtual cafes, where the coffee that they sip in the physical world is transmuted into the digital world.
Shopping, too, could go virtual. Due to more and more users making the switch to online shopping, thousands of physical retail stores close every year, leaving malls deserted and empty. Imagine a world in which these stores and malls were re-purposed, and used to host virtual shopping experiences. Shoppers could put on their VR headsets, teleport digitally to a shop of their choice, and browse virtual products that, when bought, were sent to their doors.
A visionary project in the crypto space, Futurent, is taking advantage of these possibilities by using NFTs to grant investors easy access to real estate.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, themselves are not the generative art that they’ve come to be known for. NFTs are verifiable records of ownership, stored on the blockchain. So, they can be used to track the ownership of any digital asset – art, music, video game items, and more. Through a process called tokenization, in which physical asset ownership is encoded into a blockchain, they can be used to track physical asset ownership as well. This makes NFTs uniquely positioned in the real estate market.
Given processing times, strict financing rules, and the large startup capital requirement, real estate investing is not open to most. Futurent changes all that. Using their platform, investors will be able to easily purchase properties using real estate NFTs. Further, Futurent’s real estate NFTs are fractionalized, meaning that they are split into multiple shares that can be bought by multiple investors.
Fractionalized NFT real estate enables investors to split property costs with several others, reducing the capital needed to get started and making generating passive income through rental revenue sharing easy. Payments on Futurent’s platform can be made using their native FUTR token, along with top cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. For more information, please visit Website | Twitter | Telegram | Discord | Reddit | Medium.
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