IOI
After purchasing the plot for $300 last year, illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick sold it for $28,000.
A virtual plot of land obtained from the Axie Infinity metaverse was flipped by Kieran Warwick, co-founder of the upcoming NFT-powered gaming metaverse Illuvium, for a gain of over 9,000%.
Kain’s brother Warwick recalls purchasing the plots around mid-2020, saying at the time “there were not many use cases” for data land, with in-metaverse advertisement and mining still uncommon as utilities in virtual properties.
On July 13, 2012, he announced the sale of the plot for $28,000 a year after purchasing it for $300.
As a result of Warwick’s investment in Axie Infinity, despite its lack of apparent utility, plot land values have grown by thousands of percent over the past year. It took Axie Infinity a year to build out the functionality of its land.
This was purely speculation. I thought that play-to-earn in itself, which is the new paradigm in gaming that is gaining steam at the moment, would attract such a large audience. I will undoubtedly make money in the future by buying a rare piece of land,” he declared.
There are four metaverse projects that Warwick has invested in, but only Axie Infinity and Mars have been named.
“I want to have land in all of the different games that I think are […] going to grow in the next few years.”
As a physical real estate investor, he links his investment strategy to looking for development signs and other indicators of growth when attempting to forecast whether property prices are likely to increase in a particular suburb.
“It’s the exact same principle in the metaverse,” said Warwick. “If you feel like there’s going to be popularity and there’s going to be other people building next to you […] then it’s a no-brainer to buy these land plots. In almost every single case, they’re very rare.”
“If they mint 10,000 land plots, and then all of a sudden there’s a million players, you can see that the scarcity there is going to really create some allure.”
There are many benefits of owning land
Additionally, Warwick notes that virtual real estate investors can put their land to work by hosting advertising on their plots within Decentraland, going beyond traditional buy-and-hold tactics.
As metaverses grow, Warwick predicts that virtual land utilities will be “endless.” At the moment Warwick thinks “advertising opportunities” are the biggest use cases.
In addition, Warwick confirmed that he will soon start selling his own virtual plots, emphasizing Illuvium’s pre-determined use cases.
Virtual landowners will be able mine for minerals in Illuvium’s mini-game that will allow them to mint items inside the game using a mineral they gather.
“You can only mine it if you have land, so immediately there’s a use case,” Warwick said, emphasizing he does not want the sole utility of Illuvium’s real estate to be speculation: “just a stagnant thing where people buy, and it’s only important if someone else wants to buy it.”
