How and why I have become a virtual land baron in OVRLand
About six months ago, I was introduced to digital art and spent some time looking at pieces on various sites. I bought about 5 pieces and invested a total of $200. I purchased some pieces that I thought were neat and two pieces for my wife for our anniversary. The pieces that I bought her were Beyonce and Jay-Z headshots by Otha Davis III. I bid $60 on each piece and got them both. Originally, I wanted to purchase a digital art frame to showcase my pieces. But after doing some research, I realized that the frames that exist weren’t going to fit my needs so I ended up printing and framing her pieces online. I wish I could say that she loved them, but they are still sitting on the desk where they were originally placed today.
Around the same time that Beeple’s art was auctioned off for $69.2 million dollars, I received an offer for $500 on my Beyonce piece. I declined it and put a price on my Jay-Z for 1 ETH. Within a couple of days, I got an offer for $1900. It took me about 6 minutes of thinking to accept the offer. I was elated! I’ve never bought my wife a gift and made money on it. Now, I don’t understand the NFT space and think that it’s a bit of a gimmick as this artist has now put up countless pieces that are selling for thousands of dollars each. But I won’t argue with a 26X (after fees to Makersplace) ROI. Here’s the picture that I sold. I thought it was pretty cool.
I decided that I wanted to parlay my gains in the NFT space. As I stated a second ago, I’m not an art aficionado and it took me quite a bit of time to find the pieces that I did buy at their more reasonable prices. Last week, my friend asked me if I heard about OVR. I told him no and he explained that they have a game like Pokemon Go where you can find cryptocurrency treasures worth real money. He seemed pretty excited about it so I decided to research OVR. I was pretty impressed with what I found. They already have a functional app on Android and IOS and its platform is based on augmented reality not virtual reality. I don’t fully understand the difference, but augmented reality is accessible with phones and tables whereas virtual reality requires glasses or goggles.
The unique thing that I liked about OVR is that they are building a virtual playground based on earth. I remember last year when Decentraland went live and I went on it for about 10 minutes and couldn’t understand how it would be cool or what would be a good way to invest in the land. Regrettably, I decided to pass on purchasing any LAND on Decentraland or the native token MANA (.08 cents at the time). OVR has a token that is traded on Uniswap and it has gone bonkers. What’s neat is that the OVRLand properties are something that I can relate to and the auctions all start at $10. I could go onto their website via metamask and type in different places and they were still available for purchase.
I took my proceeds from the Jay-Z NFT sale and bought up some OVR tokens on Uniswap and went to work acquiring land in OVRLand. I didn’t know where to start: Should I buy my house, my office, the statue of liberty, some pieces of the beach? I tried going on Telegram and the OVR reddit page and no one had any strategy to share. I wasn’t (and still am not) if it’s better to buy multiple adjacent hexagons (plots are sold as hexagons in OVRLAND) or to buy single plots in different areas. So I decided to do a little of both.
Once you initiate an auction in OVRLand, others have 24 hours to outbid you before you win the auction and own the land. If they outbid you (by at least double the current bid) than you have 24 hours to outbid them. I did get outbid on 6 out of about 80 plots that I initiated auctions on. I decided to just let them go and not get into a bidding war. I like that it allowed me to be creative on where I could purchase land. I now own property at the White House, outside of the Sydney Opera House, a few restaurants, the Kardashian’s house, at the Taj Mahal, the Las Vegas Strip, and several football stadiums around the country. Many areas have already sold, but there is still a good amount of availability.
On a risk scale of 1–100, I would say that purchasing plots in OVRland are around an 88. It’s a high risk, high reward opportunity. My concerns are that the technology never takes off and my worthless virtual land is officially worthless or that my lack of tech skills means that I won’t be able to effectively monetize it. Additionally, I dislike that I’m pretty much buying the land without any strong strategy in place. I risked money that I considered to be “found” money and for now I am happy with my long shot gamble. A couple things to note- it looks like the number of OVR token holders is going up steadily over the past week (about 300/day which is good without a big exchange) and the number of auctions for OVRLand has been pretty consistent as well. Also, pieces of other virtual lands have skyrocketed in value so it may make sense for you to dabble in it or at the very least check it out. To learn more, you can visit: https://www.ovr.ai/
**This is not financial advice and I would strongly recommend doing research before investing in cryptocurrency, NFTs, or digital land
Read more of my other ideas:
How I am building my Bitcoin stack using BlockFi and Celsius
