So, we’ve all heard about NFT’s and Non-Fungible Tokens and how they are driving the world crazy at his point. Almost everyone is talking about it, while most really don’t know what NFT’s really are. NFT’s if you don’t know that they are, are Digital Token or Crypto Tokens in the form of an Digital Asset that can be anything from an original artwork, tradings cards and collectible, music and videos that acts like a digital certificate for the ownership of the NFT Token and the Digital Asset associated with it.
NFT’s are really just digital collectibles, backed up by the blockchain technology. While, NFT’s don’t have much use as such, besides, acting like a digital certificate and backing up a digital asset like an artwork or digital collectible, people are still experimenting with it and one industry where we are actually seeing some amazing NFT projects coming up is the Real Estate Industry.
As because NFT’s are mostly associated with the digital things, from digital artworks, paintings, music, videos and there hasn’t been much use cases in the physical world where NFT’s could be used in real physical products.
A New Housing Market That’s about to Explode | Decentraland
NFT’s as we know are essentially Crypto Tokens. Just like Bitcoin, and Ethereum, NFT’s or Non-Fungible Tokens are also Crypto tokens. The difference lies in the term called “Non-Fungibility”. This means that you can have 2 Bitcoins and you give one to your friend. You each have 1 BTC each and value of each BTC remains the same. This is called Fungibility.
However, in the case with NFT’s, an NFT cannot be exchanged with on another as no NFT’s are identical. Hence, they cannot be duplicated, replicated or replace. This gives NFT’s the ability to be rare and unique to each other. This is also the reason why, the art industry, first saw a huge interest in NFT’s because the concept of NFT’s is very similar and makes real sense in the art world.
Think about it, NFT’s in one line means, “being one-of-a-kind”. The moment you purchase an NFT, there’s only one kind of it and there cannot be a similar one. Similarly, in the art world, There is only one Original Mona Lisa and there is no second one. This is the reason why Mona Lisa is one of the most expensive paintings out there because it is rare. NFT’s align to this sort of Rarity of the art industry.
Just recently in 2021, Beeple, a digital artist, sold his Digital Collage of his entire artworks, called “Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days” for a whooping $69 Million Dollars. While, a lot of celebrities like Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuck are already investing and creating their own NFT’s. The band King’s of Leon released their latest album, and they have also released NFT’s of their Album that includes exclusive Artworks for the buyer.
Similarly, NFT’s can be anything and it can also be memes. Recently, a lot of memes have been tokenized into NFT’s and sold for a huge price. The most famous one being the Nyan cat Meme that sold for over $500,000 Dollars.
NFT’s now have made their way to Real Estate or so called Virtual Real Estate. An entire world of Virtual Real Estate Market have accidentally being created in the game called Decentraland.
Decentraland is a game where players can actually buy and sell Digital Real Estate in the form of NFT’s. The Land is essentially an NFT or Non-fungible-token and when players purchase a land, they get a deed which proves the ownership of the land. While, players use a crypto-currency to buy the land, which in their case is called MANA or MANA Coin.
Leveraging the Ethereum Blockchain as a method to track the ownership of the Digital Land.
At the same time, players can interact in the game, go to the land marketplace and buy plots of land and build their own properties out there.
Not only that, players can also rent out their land to other players, or even flip it. This may be too early for the Real Estate Market to align with NFT’s but people have already seen lots of success and there are players who are actively buying, selling and flipping Virtual Real Estate Properties on Decentraland.
Contemporary Artist, Krista Kim, sold her NFT Minted Digital House for 288 ETH, which is approx. $500,000 USD Dollars. The owner of the house can now, actually use the digital file on other NFT platforms or so called Metaverses.
While, there are players on Decentraland that are making over $100,000 Dollars – $1 Million Dollars buying and selling Virtual Land NFT’s.
The Real Estate Industry has been seeing many projects and one of the most famous ones is Decentraland. Decentraland is however still digital and there is one project that is trying to incorporate Real world Lands and Real Esate into NFT’s. This project is called EtherLand.
So lets take a deep dive into what Etherland is and what is the main purpose of this NFT project.
Etherland NFT Project | Tokenizing Real World Assets
The core idea of Etherland is to essentially link Real World assets, in our case Real Estate with NFT’s. They have this estatopedia where they have all the data about Real Estate Lands which is going to be secured by the blockchain, which incorporates NFT’s into this database.
Here users can actually register them own home or Real Estate Property as an NFT. This can actually be a very good idea and I’ll explain why.
So what Etherland is essentially doing is they are creating this Real Estate Wiki type like site where owners can put their Real Estate land information on it. When users look at a particular property, they will find the information about the property, its history and so on.. While only the owner of the land can edit the data and the information about the property.
Each owner gets a Land ID and one can claim one’s own land as an NFT. This really gives the user, a good utility.
Some of the already minted NFT’s that they’ve started is called “Monuments”. These are historic places and lands on earth like the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower…etc that are in the form of NFT’s. As you can see from the image below, each land will have all sorts of information, which includes, the location, country, address, ethereum address.
While these monuments are already going for sale on OpenSea.com and some of them are selling for a lot of money.
Etherland is a great NFT project that is aiming to create an NFT platform or marketplace for Real Estate NFT. You could literally collect lands, properties and historic monuments and also have your own property as an NFT.
Really interesting project and the fact that I really love that they are combining real world data with NFT’s. From here we can really see how NFT’s are being experimented by companies like Etherland and hopefully in the future, we can see their marketplace coming alive.
Right now, currently, Etherland doesn’t have their own NFT marketplace, but they are selling minted NFT’s on OpenSea. You can definitely check them out.
