Land Grabbing

2022 is looking like it's going to be the year of the Metaverse and what are virtual worlds made of? That's right, virtual land!

Lately there has been an explosion in the prices of virtual land, more and more land drops are happening as meta games continue to develop.

My first experience of NFT "land" was earlier this year when I stumbled on a game called Upland, instead of my usual discoveries through Twitter or OpenSea this was a real world case of advertising that actually works. I use Brave Browser, not only because I like to earn Basic Attention Token while using it but also because adverts are a lot more discreet. One advert in particular happened to catch my eye one day, it was a monocled llama, oozing class and mystery I was drawn in like a moth to a flame, I had to find out what this llama was selling.

I clicked the link and after a quick bit of research it was clear, this llama was part of the Upland.me team and he was here to greet me into a virtual world where you can buy and sell properties based on the real world. I deposited about $55 and bought some plots that were available, at the time it was either New York or San Francisco, I chose New York as I thought it would be more desirable in the long term. You don't have to deposit real money I'm just impatient, there is a good system called FSA within the game. FSA are properties that are reserved for new players or players with lower funds to acquire at a lower price so you can build your portfolio without the risk of rich players poaching.

Since I joined many months ago Upland has gone from strength to strength, forging excellent partnerships and bringing increasing development and utility to Upland. Although I'm not on Upland every day I am happy with the portfolio I've built up and plan to sit on it with the expectation that it will one day be worth millions, can you ever be guilty of being too optimistic? 

It's not early purchases though, I've missed out on land sales before, I've briefly mentioned the NFT Worlds near miss in my 2021 review and even listed it as my regret of the year. I talked myself out of buying two or three at 0.11 ETH, they're currently worth around 4.4 ETH each. Whenever I feel like I'm chief trader and picking winners without fail I check in on NFT Worlds to bring me back down to reality and remind myself of poor decision making.

It's been clear for a while virtual land is going to be a big commodity, knowing that 2022 was set to be a massive year for virtual land I was determined to not miss out on the next big drop and it wasn't long before the next opportunity came knocking.

Regular readers will know I have some wallets that I check as part of my research, it's nothing underhand just some people that I consider knowledgable so I like to see what they are buying. This practice lead me to a project I was aware of but hadn't bought into... until now! 

BYOPills is undoubtedly a huge project that is set to explode this year, if you haven't checked it out already I would recommend it. Part of their development was the release of BYOLand, valuable assets that will be integral to the gameplay and allow you to generate resources which are essential to player progress. When I saw that one of my followed wallets owned three of them I was intrigued, at the time I didn't know land had been released so I immediately went to work researching what the potential of these NFTs were and what their likely value could be. After realising that there is no way I could assign a future value to these pieces of land I decided I had to buy three, it was only the second time I had followed through with the purchasing strategy of buying three. Three is the magic number because you can sell one after a pump, sell one when it pumps HARD and keep one for yourself.

I wasn't early early for BYOLand but I was still early, I paid around 0.24 ETH each, the hard work was done, now I could sit back and relax. I read a bit more about how the land would be utilised in relation to the game I realised if I was to make the most of my new land I would have to buy into BYOPills and get myself a character, for now I decided against it but I change my mind when the game is released.

The price for BYOLand today is around 1.1 ETH each, considering I paid about 0.8 for all three I'm currently sitting on a 2.5 ETH profit minus fees. I can only see the price increasing so for now I'm going to keep all three and hope the next milestone of 5 ETH is not too far away.

The problem with buying good NFTs is that the price goes up, this doesn't sound like much of a problem but it brings into play an aspect of NFTs and Crypto that I really struggle with, knowing when to sell. Holding too long is sadly the majority of my experience so far. I always wonder if I'm holding the next moonshot, the next 1000x, the next overnight millionaire token that will see my life changed forever, in reality more often than not I am holding something that is going to zero.

So with my first land purchases tied up I now begin my search to find the next piece, finding something pre-mint is a challenge and usually involves owning some kind of pass or existing token from the collection. I'll be searching wallets, Twitter, and Discord to uncover another gem and hopefully make a profit, after all, isn't that the goal of any land owner?