Mark Cuban has been an active part of the emerging crypto world and Web3, and speaks highly of many areas of it. However, in a recent interview with Altcoin Daily, Cuban decides to unleash on the concept of buying digital land in metaverses.
The interview with Altcoin Daily (linked below, and opening at the correct time) covered a lot of ground and is well worth watching in full. However, what has grabbed headlines is his comments on land in the metaverse.
I wouldn’t want to mischaracterize his stance, so take a few minutes to watch that section if nothing else, but the cliff notes are this: the metaverse is a vague, ambiguous term at present, and buying land in it is the “dumbest sh*t ever”.
You should never use Twitter as a litmus test for how people feel about something, but there have been a lot of outspoken and angry metaversians, presumably with digital land. At the risk of upsetting these same people, I find it hard to disagree. There aren’t many “metaverses” worth buying land in (I’m excluding games where land offers perks to the owner) unless you have a good angle. The Sandbox and Otherside are likely the best bets and the former is primarily a marketing campaign to show your company is engaging with Web3. TIME and HSBC‘s involvement in The Sandbox, for example, were little more than ways to get headlines, as was JPMorgan’s Onyx Lounge in Decentraland.
There is a lot of talk about metaverse land as if you’re buying the digital equivalent of real estate, and at present, you really aren’t. Whether that will ever be the case remains to be seen, but we are some way away. As unlikely as I find it, it is conceivable that a handful of the most popular digital worlds will have primary hubs for their players and that the finite space around that hub would be valuable. But, outside of that, the lack of scarcity and the irrelevancy of location renders metaverse land a far cry from physical counterparts.
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