According to media reports, the median transaction price of Decentraland, the world's largest metaverse real estate sales platform, has dropped from US$45 in 2022 to US$5, representing a drop of nearly 90%.

In November 2021, famous singer JJ Lin purchased 3 pieces of virtual real estate at Decentraland for US$123,000, but now the properties are worth only about US$10,000. This means Lin lost 91% in his metaverse real estate investment. 

On April 9, #JJ Lin buys virtual real estate and loses 91% of investment# trended on Weibo. In response, JJ Lin said, "I heard recently that many people want to help me with my wealth management," with a picture of wallet posted. 

Photo/Weibo screenshot

In 2021, the concept of metaverse was all the rage around the world, and all major Internet giants began to sell land and real estate in the virtual world.

The early metaverse platform was doing one thing, that is, copying the earth and copying the things in the physical world. So the virtual paltform is the same as the physical world, with islands, cities, and land, and then to build houses.

Decentraland is one of the larger property owners in the metaverse, and Sandbox is the platform with the largest land sales volume.

Many well-known companies and stars have bought virtual real estate. Besides JJ Lin, Snoop Dogg also invested in metaverse real estate. At that time, the land price in the metaverse was even higher than the price of a villa in Beijing. However, the craze lasted less than a year and faded quickly after the popularity of ChatGPT.

According to data from metaverse analysis platform WeMeta, the median transaction price per square meter of land in the metaverse was US$20 in 2017, and rose to US$6,000 in 2021. However, things cooled down recently, with the medium transaction price dropping to $5 at present.

In addition, many virtual real estate platforms have suffered serious user losses. 

A year ago, the number of daily active users of Decentraland were more than 1,200 and that of The Sandbox platform was higher than 8,800. But as of April 7, the number was only more than 100 on both platforms.

Billionaire Mark Cuban said in an interview last year that buying real estate in the metaverse is the dumbest thing "ever" because "in virtual space, you can create an infinite amount of land."

However, there are also different views. Researchers from the University of Basel said that the economy of the virtual world is an attention economy, and "attention cannot be infinitely created." That is, the economy of the virtual world is tied to attention. McKinsey also predicted last year that virtual worlds could grow into a US$5 trillion market by 2030.