The NFTs have had a rough year. OpenSea saw a record-setting monthly sales volume of $5 billion in January. It only traded about $329 million worth of digital assets per month by September, leading to layoffs. The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) token's price floors dwindled to a fraction of their former value.
It is clear that the NFT market has reached a point of no return. Digital assets have lost their shine due to the broader crash of the industry, which has revealed how little tangible, worth enduring, these assets actually have.
NFTs are still alive and well. A growing number of web3 operators are focusing on housing to keep them alive.
The makers of the NFT are selling more than just digital homes. These new ventures are listing real properties and giving potential investors the chance to purchase those properties. The digital token is more like a mule. Either paperwork or something else. All of the house-buying paper trail is said to be embedded with the digital token.
It's called the click-add-to-cart-ification of home buying. On the NFT maker's side, there is a link between the NFT and real estate, which is more tangible than ever.
The Head of web3 Initiatives at Roofstock onChain, the web3 subsidiary of web2 rental property investment platform Roofstock, told Futurism that the purchase decision becomes simpler when the investor makes it. A transaction is done one click.
The first sale of Roofstock was a single family home in South Carolina that was sold to a seasoned property investor for a cool $175,000 worth of stable coin. This was not the first sale of it's type. In February, a startup called Propy sold a Florida home for $653,000 of ether.
According to Natalia Karayaneva, the only bureaucratic process that Propy had during the auction was a five-minute process.
Both of the sales relied on the first transfer of home ownership to an limited liability company.
It's tempting to cut out steps in the way to buy a home. A lot of money ends up going to the process of buying a house, not just the value of the house. That process is long and complicated for a reason, and seasoned property investors like the ones that Roofstock's marketing to are the people who know how to navigate that process well.
Some experts don't think that this evolution is necessary.
I wonder if we can house the homeless in the Metaverse while we are at it? Michael Every is a global strategist at the bank. That looks like the direction of travel.
It's certainly of concern here as well. If your home ownership is embedded in an NFT, someone could theoretically just hack you and steal it, for its part, Roofstock assured Futurism that it has digital safeguards in place against hackers. Everyone in the system says that and they're getting hacked a lot.
It could be argued that neither Roofstock nor Propy are actually NFT creators. The startups are using the token, but they don't have anything worth building into them. There is only one asset in the house. One home has incorporated NFTs into a home sale.
"You bought virtual real estate, it's not only a $7 million house, but I mean, you bought virtual real estate," said the real estate developer behind the project. Eager to combine the very real houses he builds with the cryptoverse, Guinovart listed Reflection manor, a real-life $ 7.7 million dollar mansion in Miami, with a few digital pot-sweeteners.
Is that land worth anything? It is not possible to say yes. They could be one day.
"Two to three years from now, when alpha is fully open, you have virtual property that could be worth one million, two million dollars," he said.
After Roofstock announced its first sale, a real estate investment firm in the Bahamas decided to turn a 60-acre chunk of the Fyre Fest island into a luxury resort community. The venture claims that every single property built on the island will be sold on an NFT.
It's appealing to some, especially those who want quick and easy access to offshore bank accounts. It looks like it's a good way to launder money and switch useless NFTs for real world assets.
Everyone has a point. There's still a lot of room for misuse even if most of these properties are sold in good faith.
It's likely that this trend will continue, as it almost certainly confirms that NFTs can't exist on their own. While Roofstock and Propy have found a use case for them, NFTs weren't made to be payment platforms. They were made to be assets, and their apparent demotion to a point-of-sale system or even just currently-worthless pot-sweeteners isn't a good look for an industry trying to architect an ever- more digital version of the future.
Developers are transforming the Fyre Fest Island into an exclusive colony for millionaires because of course they are.
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