With the rise of the metaverses, there are many people who want to buy land within these virtual universes and then sell them or build their own space within it.
La The question everyone is asking in that regard is: How can I buy land in the metaverses? The truth is that it is very simple and in this tutorial we will teach you how to do it.
Steps to buy a land in the metaverse
Before starting, you must be clear that buying land in the metaverse is a risky action. If you do, you should be aware that the purchase can appreciate or go under, just as it happens with the crypto world. Many metaverse projects are under construction or work in progress, others are incomplete, others are still in the design phase, and most are projects that are not yet fully defined.
Taking into account this risk and the opportunities and threats that the purchase of a land in the metaverse represents, you can follow the following steps to carry it out:
First step: identify the metaverse of your interest
As we have already discussed, there is a wide variety of metaverses out there waiting for you. But, not all of them are for you. Some are meant to build gaming communities, others are meant for the creative and expressive, other metaverses are meant to build communities and businesses. As you can see there are metaverses for every need and that will lead you to ask yourself: What am I looking for? Once you identify a topic of interest and an available and actively developing metaverse, you can move on to the next step.
In this example, we will focus on Decentraland. First of all, it's a metaverse with enormous freedom. We can have fun, entertain ourselves, create personalized spaces, create and join communities, do business… In short, Decentraland is “the real world but in digital bits”. For this reason and the fact that it is an established project with a long history, we choose this metaverse as our space.
Second step: know the network in which the metaverse is deployed
Blockchain metaverses work thanks to the smart contracts that enable your DApp, and that means that they depend on a specific network. For example, Decentraland depends on the Ethereum network, but you can also interact with it through Polygon. This means that you must have a MetaMask or compatible wallet enabled to use these networks. In case you do not have the wallet or the networks configured, do not worry, in the next step you will know how to do it.
Third step: configure the cryptocurrency wallet to use
Now that you know that the metaverse is on a certain network, it's time to configure the wallet. Generally, since metaverses are Web3 constructs, the MetaMask wallet is more than enough to allow us to interact with it, regardless of the network it is deployed on, as long as we configure the wallet to use that network.
Installing MetaMask is quite simple, you just have to go to its official website (URL: https://metamask.io/) and from there choose the browser you are using to install the wallet.
The installation process is quite simple, guiding you through a series of steps in which you must enter the password of your wallet and make a backup of the seed. This last step is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT and you should keep the wallet seed and key in a safe place, since these two elements together are what will allow you to recover your assets in case you lose access to the device where you used the MetaMask wallet.
You can see the complete MetaMask installation process step by step in this article that we have prepared explaining this powerful Web3 wallet. Once the wallet is installed you can use Chainlist to add the blockchain network where your metaverse is.
In this case, being Decentraland and being in Ethereum, we should not do anything else, MetaMask by default comes with this network enabled.
Fourth step: top up the wallet with balance
The next point is to recharge our wallet with balance to be able to interact with the metaverse. In this case, you can top up your MetaMask wallet by buying ETH and MANA (Decentraland's native token) using Bit2Me services. Bit2Me allows you to securely buy and sell these cryptocurrencies in a few easy steps, so you can top up your MetaMask wallet with these two tokens for use in the Decentraland metaverse.
Of course, each metaverse has its native currency. For example, Sandbox has the SAND token, which you need to be able to perform actions within that metaverse. So you should read a little the documentation of the metaverse you have chosen to know what token you should have and its usefulness within the metaverse.
Fifth step: register in the metaverse and interact
Once we have our wallet recharged, the next thing is to go and register in the metaverse and interact. Currently, there are metaverses in which the interaction is 2D, that is, a web that allows you to perform actions because the 3D experience is still under development (eg Bloktopia). But there are others where the experience is 3D, as in the case of Decentraland, and there our interaction changes radically.
We can not only see the metaverse, but interact with all its parts and navigate through it without limitations, beyond those imposed by its digital inhabitants. The best thing is that you can access this metaverse from any device with a Web browser that uses HTML5 technologies and offers WebGL acceleration and almost all current devices offer this capability, so the experience can be lived from multiple spaces.
Sixth step: go to the official marketplace and buy your land
Finally, we can buy our land, since we are inside the metaverse. Buying it is simple, we simply have to go to the metaverse marketplace and look for the land we want. In this case, the Decentraland marketplace is available in this link. From there we can search for wearables, skins and anything else you can imagine and integrate into the Decentraland metaverse.
Of course, this is where we can find the land we want to buy and for this we just have to select the "LAND" option and we will see the lots of land that are available in the Decentraland metaverse.
Each metaverse has its own particularities and configuration. For example, in Decentraland the "Genesis Plaza" marks the point of arrival of everyone in the metaverse and is the central place of this universe, so buying it is impossible. But the lots of land (represented in the small boxes) can be bought, and in this screenshot all the boxes in cyan are lots of land available for purchase. The land closest to the Genesis Plaza has a higher value than those further away, something that you should take into account when buying them.
Knowing that, buying is simple, you just have to select the lot of land of your interest and when you click:
You will be able to see the Buy buttons (Buy) the lot of land that interests you. In this case, a piece of land for the cost of 9666 MANA that we can acquire and use for our enjoyment in this metaverse. Even before buying the lot we can "jump" to it to see it and see if it meets our expectations.
It's that simple to buy a lot of land in a metaverse. In this case, Decentraland makes it very simple, but most metaverses follow the same process, so you won't have a problem buying the land you want from other metaverses within the ecosystem.