THE HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS OF THE METAVERSE

Virtual landowners have found a way to put their investments to work-by porting the class system to the cloud.

- JOEL KHALILI

FOR THE MODEST price of 10,000 mana tokens (about $7,000) per day, back in January anyone could have rented parcel 27,87 in Decentraland, a 3D virtual world that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. Renting the land would have given the tenant the right to build anything on it-a shop, an event space, an art installation, whatever. But the real winner would be the landlord, who goes by Beatrix#7239, their virtual pockets lined with crypto-cash.

Not every property is as pricey as parcel 27,87, which is centrally located, near where people first spawn into Decentraland. However, a market for leasing virtual real estate is beginning to take shape, creating a new source of income for meta-version landowners.

Brands like Mastercard and Heineken have long been able to rent Decentraland plots via third parties for one-off events or product showcases, but in December the platform released tools to allow anyone to rent virtual land. The objective is to democratize access to the virtual world, says Nico Rajco, who led development of the feature for Decentraland. Everybody benefits, he says, because renting gives new users an ideal "jumping-off point" and landowners can earn a passive income. But the new system is also changing the social fabric, dividing people into haves and have-nots.

When Decentraland launched in 2017, users were given the chance to purchase ownership rights to any of 90,601 parcels, each represented on the Ethereum blockchain by a non-fungible token. At the time, plots sold for roughly $20 apiece, but by late 2021-the height of the NFT boom-land routinely changed hands for tens of thousands of dollars. One company, Metaverse Group, purchased a single parcel for $2.4 million.