Digital scarcity is a recent emerging trend when it comes to projects like Decentraland, a VR platform powered by Ethereum, where users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications. One could see it as a decentralized, three-dimensional version of Web/Serverspace. 

Land in Decentraland

As of today in May 2019, Decentraland has become more or less of a concept, and most of the activity on it involves people buying and selling virtual land plots on the platform. The whole world consists of 90000 land plots, where each land plot represents space on a map and represents a kind of 16×16-meter area where one can build on in the future. All this “digital land” is fully tokenized and represented as an NFT (non-fungible token). 

But, there is a catch 22 to this. As we have seen with Crypto Kitties, people can pay exorbitant amounts of money for a virtual item. To bring it to the next level, when it comes to land in Decentraland, single land plots change hands with prices around 500 to 2000 USD for those in prime locations.

This is not the only thing a user can do; the platform has editor and construction tools who can build in a kind of sandbox environment, and soon, avatars should be launched.

CryptoVoxels the Mincraft of VR meets Blockchain

Another project I have been looking into is CryptoVoxels. CryptoVoxels is reminiscent of Minecraft. The advantage of this world is that it’s more or less up and running. Yes, it is still in its basics, but one can purchase land against Ether and with their colour token. A user can even bring colour to the world as well. In terms of land speculation, there is not too much going on at the moment, but we will see. 

Most of the people I meet inside CryptoVoxels are people who want to sell other NFTs in a virtual 3D store. CryptoVoxels makes it very easy to implement NFT sales and listings from opensea.io, which is the largest marketplace for crypto collectibles.

Conclusion

The marriage of VR and Blockchain is still in its early days, but I have heard of many other projects that want to build VR experiences. For instance, there are Beachhead2020, which focuses on the tower defence game Beachhead, or Verses, which even wants to reinvent the whole Web to be on its own and make it spatial. 

So far, I think NFTS  (non fungible tokens) as virtual tokenized game assets will be a multi-billion dollar market, but we are still in the infancy of that market segment. What is great is that some of those projects are really creative and community driven and are growing themselves naturally while they are being built. I am expecting some major announcements in this segment, as well as something like the VRBA (https://www.vrblockchainalliance.org/) with famous members such as High Fidelity or JanusVR.