Building a Sustainable Metaverse: Lessons from the Virtual Land Collapse

This week Polygonal Mind, the team behind VIPE, CryptoAvatars, and countless other virtual experiences, announced they were closing up shop because of tough market conditions. 

It’s a sad development, as the Polygonal team have been true metaverse champions, but not necessarily surprising considering how the metaverse sector has been among the hardest hit in crypto’s post-2021 bear market. 

Of course, there’s the macro factor. The general slowdown around NFTs in recent years has affected all sectors, like art, collectibles, games, and beyond. 

Yet various pockets here have proven more resistant to the market downturn, like early Art Blocks works and top-end profile picture (PFP) collections. So why have popular metaverse land projects been some of the worst performers in contrast?

Indeed, if you compare the peak floor prices of some of crypto’s top metaverse land offerings to where their floors are at today, it’s a grim picture: Decentraland’s parcels are down 97.5%, The Sandbox’s are down 97.4%, and Yuga Labs’s Otherdeeds are down 97.2%. 

As I see it, the biggest common throughline with these projects is the “land speculation death spiral” phenomenon, which is not unique to NFTs and has been observed for decades in the mainstream in virtual worlds like Second Life and in games like EVE Online. 

This sort of death spiral often occurs when projects make digital land act too much like physical land, i.e. scarce and valuable. 

Such artificial scarcity incentivizes speculators to buy up large amounts of digital land, typically just sitting on the holdings unproductively while hoping their values increase. This positioning can drive prices to unsustainable heights, creating a speculative bubble. 

In turn, as prices rise, it becomes difficult for new or average users—the ones most likely to use a metaverse project productively—to afford access. This can lead to a concentration of land ownership among a few wealthy players, creating a "landed gentry" class that squeezes out real users and often doesn’t contribute to the virtual economy’s productivity.

The relationship described above is extractive and can be destructive on projects, e.g. whales tanking parcel prices by going risk-off and flooding the market with holdings sold at a loss, thereby destroying value for other regular players who bought in trying to be earnest participants and builders. That leaves a sour taste in everyone’s mouth and makes many people want to move on. 

Love it or hate it, tamping down on this kind of death spiral requires tamping down on speculation, which most 2021 NFT metaverse projects just failed to do. 

Virtual space is endlessly manipulatable and extendable, it doesn’t have to be scarce for in-world experiences. Going for openness and accessibility from the outset, and then monetizing via other avenues, would’ve been a good start. Expanding the amount of available land and making it very affordable would’ve been more viable, too. 

Another route that could’ve worked? The “metaverse land tax” idea. In other words, imposing a fee on virtual land ownership discourages runaway speculation by making it costly to hold large amounts of unused land. 

Mind you, this approach has worked well before. EVE Online survived its first real estate bubble by instituting a land tax, a move that has since been credited with lowering prices, increasing economic competition, and decreasing wealth stratification early on in the game’s life. 

Naturally, instead of a death spiral you want a virtuous cycle. For example, projects can use a “Citizen’s Dividend” to distribute their land tax proceeds to the most active and productive users of their virtual worlds. 

Speculators could still speculate in this paradigm, but the players that make these worlds teeming would earn for their contributions, and this compensation would keep users coming back for more, in turn making the worlds more teeming and investable for speculators, ‘round and ‘round. 

Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve though, right. 

It’s also fair to say that projects like Decentraland and The Sandbox had the misfortune of emerging during the first major metaverse bubble in 2021, when expectations and excitement far outpaced the reality of the tech at that time. The hype became a blessing, then a curse. 

In this sense, this period reminds me of the Dot-com bubble. 25 years later, the internet and internet-based businesses are ubiquitous in our lives. What didn’t survive was the original, unrealistic, hype-driven business approaches that drove the bubble to its height. 

I’m confident the metaverse will follow a similar trajectory, where in a couple of decades its possibilities will have become a part of our everyday lives. Virtual worlds will make up metagalaxies, and metagalaxies will become a metaverse, and crypto and NFTs can serve as the economic and cultural rails that help connect it all.  

The horizon is endless here, and the tech is progressing. In the grand scheme of things, nothing has fundamentally changed since 2021 about why an open metaverse is exciting, worth fighting for, and possible. It’s just become clearer that certain business models are no longer viable and that the arc of actualization will take more than a few years.

All that said, virtual land crises come and go, but crypto’s metaverse scene still has many bright spots today that are serving as beacons on the way forward. For instance, some of my favorites:

• 🤝 The WIP, for “work in progress,” is the longest-running web3 metaverse meetup, meeting every Thursday across various virtual worlds to hear builders share updates on the projects they’re working on. I even gave a WIP presentation in 2020 for DeFi Arts Intelligencer, the proto-version of Metaversal, and the meetup is still going strong four years later. I highly recommend it for anyone in crypto looking to have fun and dive deeper into virtual worlds. 
• 🧱 Openvoxels, an open metaverse interoperability lab by the M3 collective that is centered around Voxels, formerly known as Cryptovoxels. The group works to preserve Voxels artifacts and cultures, and it develops case study builds and new collaborative functionalities around Voxels assets. In other words, they’re an elite force of dreamers fighting to actualize an actually open metaverse. 
• 👾 Oncyber V2, a new release that updated Oncyber’s previous game engine system into a full-blown worldbuilding platform catering to DIY virtual experiences. Designed for coders and non-coders alike, the new platform is still invite-only for now, but it’s a fresh and flexible avenue to build anything from 3D websites to racing games on top of NFTs. 
• 🌐 Terraforms, a fully onchain land sculpture that simply exists for the sake of itself as art on Ethereum forevermore. It’s certainly not a traditional “metaverse” project, as it has expanded what we can think about when we think about virtual land. What if instead of real estate, digital land could be beautiful art that can be created upon and around indefinitely? That’s among the questions I think Terraforms answers in marvelous fashion, and it points toward more experimental horizons ahead. 

At the end of the day, a true metaverse doesn’t exist yet, but its pieces are being put into place all the while, and it will come to pass. It will touch all aspects of our lives, from work to play. And it will offer us the possibility of new bastions of collective memory to fight against the collective amnesia that haunts more ephemeral platforms like Discord and Twitter. 

One breakthrough will lead to more breakthroughs. New experiments will lead to new pillars of experience. And as tech advances like Midjourney’s real-time world simulator come to fruition, virtual spaces will become that much more endless and customizable. The real fight is to make all these threads come together in an open way so we can transcend the walled gardens that enclose us now. The good work continues in the meantime.