Gairad DeCastro is bullish on the metaverse, so much so that he told Motherboard he recently sold an investment property in the real world and invested the proceeds into the booming digital land market. The 32-year-old small business owner believes the investment could turn out to be a “very good play” compared to the physical housing market, which he sees as “extremely inflated” right now.
“I got a great return on the house,” DeCastro told me, “and saw an opportunity to take that when it was at its peak and invest it into something that could be, you know, ground level.”
DeCastro’s new digital land represents, depending on who you ask, an enviable early investment in the future of the internet or misplaced hope in one of most overhyped marketing schemes in the history of U.S. capitalism. What’s less in dispute is that he is one small part of a growing population engaged in an intense digital land grab—buying, selling, renting, and building in the so-called metaverse in hopes of making a buck. “We’re all speculating at this point,” DeCastro admitted.
Many blockchain-based metaverses that link digital property to non-fungible tokens, including Decentraland and The Sandbox, have decided to establish a fixed quantity of land—“We won’t expand it,” The Sandbox’s CEO has said—under the justification that limitless land would lead to “abandoned” areas while a finite amount would lead to clustering, upkeep, and social…
