Frequent metaverse travelers may soon find themselves feeling a sense of déjà vû.

In early August, the world’s first “MetaReal” Mansion was announced: new construction has begun on the 11,000 square foot Miami home, which will have an equally luxurious virtual twin in The Sandbox metaverse.

Once the property and its NFT are listed for auction by ONE Sotheby’s International Realty in early 2023, Sandbox fans may find themselves seeing double in one of Miami’s most sought-after neighborhoods.

That’s just the beginning though. Up next is a gradual merging not just of physical and digital worlds, but across virtual worlds. That’s the promise of designer-architect Luis Fernandez’s most recent project, the MetaEstates_Villa, an extravagant waterfront venue that recently ran its public NFT drop. 

The villa’s open aesthetic, towering pillars, and cliffside views give it massive curb appeal. But for metaverse lovers, the virtual property’s real draw is its novel interoperable assets technology, including metadata and file structures that allow it to be easily ported from one ecosystem to another.

By working with newly-launched 3D NFT marketplace MetaMundo, Fernandez provides the minimalist villa with the promise that whoever buys it can place it in Decentraland, Voxels, Spatial, or any of ten metaverse worlds.

MetaMundo is able to replicate assets using “seed files” that can be retooled across metaverse ecosystems. Enabling scaling from high- to low-quality graphics engines and back is an arduous process, one that currently requires just as much developer intervention as automation. Efforts in cross-world assets interoperability are likewise bearing fruit, with solutions like Crucible’s interoperable avatar builder and Webaverse’s VRM avatar auto generation tool.

“We had to work to create those files for each of the platforms, but then, also, I had to rethink some of the design elements,” Fernandez said in a recent Twitter Spaces event hosted by Lighthouse. “If you think of Decentraland, where it’s plots on streets with sidewalks, how that asset would now have to have a border and an edge. Whereas a platform like Spatial, it’s endless.”

MetaMundo’s experiment in cross-platform building is part of a larger trend toward interoperability in metaverse lands, with groups like the Metaverse Standards Forum and Open Metaverse Interoperability Group rallying to create common standards for a more collaborative metaverse.

It’s not hard to see why: buyers want to know they will be able to enjoy their assets for a long time after acquiring them, and that assets won’t be rendered useless or lose their value if an ecosystem falters or if buyers move them between worlds. That’s especially true in the early days of the metaverse, as dozens of projects emerge and the success of any one world isn’t guaranteed. 

“Over the years, I’ve seen so many platforms be created and then collapse, and incredible artwork or projects just get lost in the process,” Kirk Finkel, Lead Metaverse Architect at the Museum of Crypto Art, said in the Twitter Spaces event. 

“Interoperability is one of these incredibly important secret sauces to make this more sustainable for a work or medium to exist over time.”

Virtual property isn’t as purely speculative as some critics suggest, but there is no denying that it can be volatile. Sales prices have plunged by more than 80% this year amid the broader crypto slide and global economic downturn, according to MetaMetrik data. Metaverse companies that rely on property values and don’t plan for the long haul could shutter during such downturns – just as layoffs make physical real estate agencies and property management companies more vulnerable in cooler housing markets: 

As this tweet from Airdott shows, the macro-fueled “metaverse meltdown” underscores the virtual economy’s continued tether to the physical world. 

On the flip side – and if you’re a glass-half-full type of person – it also is a reminder that some of the metaverse’s greatest opportunities are in complementing in-person experiences rather than outright replacing them.

Popular land-based metaverse platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox have geographies loosely based on locations in the physical world: the former’s Crypto Valley is a digital facsimile of Silicon Valley and the latter’s Mega City is a voxel version of Hong Kong. 

However, others have chosen to directly tie virtual real estate to physical locations. SuperWorld offers nearly 65 billion land plots while making NFTS out of everything from the Taj Mahal to the pyramids of Egypt. Upland allows explorers to journey from San Francisco and New York outward to discover new unminted properties and participate in treasure hunts. 

The ability to buy your childhood home on a land-tied metaverse like SuperWorld and OVR creates intriguing sentimental value. It also opens up fascinating commercial potential, with investors betting that traffic to physical world tourist spots will drive virtual traffic and trade too.

In the summer of 2021, Boston Protocol bought an entire block of the Vegas City gambling district of Decentraland. Its intention was clear: the company’s co-founder Justin Banon imagined virtual businesses working in tandem with physical businesses along the Vegas Strip. 

 “Everybody recognizes that we’re very early and these things are going to be modern-day antiques,” Banon told the New York Times, envisioning a future where physical products were seamlessly exchanged for NFTs, and vice-versa. 

Metaverse companies are still experimenting with their use of virtual land and real estate, and they have their skeptics. In a YouTube interview with Altcoin Daily in August, billionaire investor Mark Cuban called buying virtual real estate “the dumbest sh– ever.” 

In the physical world, land value is highly tied to scarcity. In virtual worlds, though, “there’s unlimited volumes that you can create,” Cuban said, ostensibly eliminating land’s value as a scarce resource. 

His skepticism has been echoed by others, but there are some reasons this premise rests on shaky ground. While it is true that metaverse land is potentially unlimited, land tied to a specific virtual world is often not.

As each individual world grows in popularity and attracts new users, it will also face increasing demand for land on it — particularly land in sought-after locations, either due to their potential for virtual foot traffic or proximity to desirable brands. “There are only so many NFT plots that you can buy next to the Gucci store,” writes Adrian Krion in Coin Telegraph.

In fact, scarcity already plays a role in the high prices for virtual land. The Sandbox has a total of 166,464 “LAND” non-fungible tokens, with each of those NFTs representing one distinct property. Decentraland has a cap of 90,000 plots, where some key high-traffic locations sold for millions last year.

Other metaverse companies are seeking to de-emphasize land on their platforms. Portal is using novel city planning methods to bring metaverse neighbors closer together in hopes of ensuring “a dense, interesting city center for everyone to explore.” This is a thoughtful approach given that most metaverse experiences continue to lack population density and suffer from a feeling of emptiness.

Voxels allows users to build on non-public plots in its free mode, and has no planned cap on parcels, theoretically giving it unlimited expansion potential while lessening the importance of scarcity on the platform.

The next evolution of the metaverse may end up being a move away from land-based models entirely. In fact, some observers worry that land-based models might restrict access and creativity, as does the author of this piece arguing against land scarcity.

Metaverse ecosystems like Spatial and Mona are landless, meaning users don’t have to buy or rent land in order to participate in them. Instead, they feature user-owned galleries with no underlying game-owned public infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and forests connecting individual spaces.

Spatial allows users to create free “spaces,” 3D rooms that don’t have specified locations on the platform. Instead, they are meant to have utility for NFT assets bought or created by users, such as a gallery to hang NFT art on or an auditorium for staging virtual events.

“We allow people to create for free and empower artists to mint with us if they desire to turn their space into an NFTs,” the Spatial blog says, adding that those NFTs can then be used in Spatial for various uses. Mona also offers users personalized spaces in which to build. These spaces can then be linked through “portals” that serve as “a hyperlink to another Space or other  Metaverse world like Decentraland or CryptoVoxels.” 

In this way, developers potentially enjoy greater freedom to experiment with building more complex assets and diverse experiences, without the confines of a specific geographic space and its graphical limitations. Metaverse travelers on such “landless worlds” can create elaborate settings for them and their friends to appreciate for free, rather than being restricted to events and sites that they own, rent, or have to pay to enter.

“I think, right now, land-free platforms are just more accessible to people. And the more that we can make accessibility a priority, the greater the success will be for the metaverse at large,” Finkel said.

For creative purists, the landless model may also represent a certain aesthetic ideal. Platforms like Mona or Spatial may encourage purchasing based on an asset’s beauty or emotional connection to the buyer, as opposed to buying property based on its speculative (often, scarcity-based) value.

Even if platforms move away from land-based models, the need for users to transport their avatars and creations across the metaverse will remain, as Mona shows. So long as that need exists, Lighthouse will continue to use its position as the open metaverse navigation engine to light the way between disparate worlds, foster connections, and help ecosystems and creators gain the visibility they have earned.