Looking Glass Labs Ltd. (LGL) has announced that its flagship studio, House of Kibaa (HoK) will conduct its inaugural sale of a collection of virtual land assets in the form of up to 10,000 four-acre parcels within a consumer-focused area of its broader metaverse on April 16-17, 2022.
Codenamed Project Origin (Origin Metaverse), each parcel or Pocket Dimension is a fully customizable, metaverse land asset with ultra-realistic scenery that works across multiple NFT and blockchain environments, the company said.
The land sale will be conducted via a private offering of up to 5,000 Pocket Dimension lands for a fixed price of 1 ETH (C$4,250) to allowlist members on April 16, 2022 and subsequently, via a general offering of the remaining parcels to the public via a Dutch auction for a starting price of 2 ETH (C$8,500), reducing 0.2 ETH each 45 minutes with a floor of 1 ETH on April 17, 2022.
Dorian Banks, CEO of LGL said: “In 2021, the metaverse ecosystem saw many new and eager participants enter the space in the form of consumer, corporate and institutional entities. As this interest has sustained and matured, building a long-term presence in multiple metaverses has become a strategic priority for many in 2022, with land ownership being at the forefront of this initiative."
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In 2021, property sales on the four major metaverse platforms – Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, Sandbox and Somnium – totaled US$501 million, according to data provider MetaMetric Solutions. In January 2022 alone, sales topped US$85 million, which places the metaverse property market on pace to reach nearly US$1 billion in 2022.
Separately, market research conducted by Brandessence found that the metaverse real estate market size is expected to grow at a strong cumulative annual growth rate of 31.2% from 2022 to 2028, noted LGL, a Vancouver-based digital platform.
Pocket Dimension will feature 10 different environments, including Archipelago, Countryside, Dale, Dunes, Fjord, Marsh, Savanna, Tundra, Woodland and Zen. Each environment will offer users various forms of utility including, but not limited to, mining valuable resources, hosting events, renting out space, integrating custom structures and adding digital assets.
Pocket Dimension will also be able to seamlessly integrate all of HoK’s 3D-ready NFTs as avatars in the digital world, as well as avatars of those of its third-party clients, including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Gutter Cat Gang and HAPEBEAST.
Landowners can visit, invite friends, display NFTs, create settings, collaborate with others or facilitate experiences through various utilities and uses in each Pocket Dimension. Landowners will also have access to all of the broader suite of utilities that will be included in Project Origin.
Parcels will provide their owners with additional unique benefits such as being blockchain agnostic with wide NFT compatibility (Polygon, Ethereum, Solana and NEAR), an extensive avatar system, a unique Non-Playable Characters host system, a comprehensive peer-to-peer marketplace, a substantial social currency ecosystem and more.
The land sale is a foundational step in the Origin Metaverse becoming a hyper-realistic virtual world with a functioning digital economy, which is expected to be operationalized later in 2022, LGL said.
It is the first opportunity for invited guests of LGL and HoK, community members of the company’s NFT partners as well as the general public to acquire land assets in the Origin Metaverse.
“HoK also plans to conduct similar other land sales for business-oriented dimensions to provide companies or their brands with the opportunity to also establish a commercial presence in the Origin Metaverse,” it added.
CEO Banks likened the land race to the early days of the dot-com boom, when enterprising first movers acquired domain names to stake their claims in the emerging digital space now known as the Internet.
“The same pattern is repeating itself with metaverse land, in my opinion, and I am excited that HoK has brought its Origin Metaverse to the point of launching its inaugural land sale in just a few weeks,” he said in a statement, describing it as a strategic and financial milestone for the company.