As part of the design community’s incorporation of talent into the nascent, ever-growing world of blockchain technology and digital architecture, more spaces are cropping up that have the potential to do outsized business opportunities with ramifications in the Metaverse and beyond.
One of those spaces is the relatively new Decentraland, a 22-month-old 3D platform that currently plays host to over 90,000 parcels of land subdivided into individual 9-square-mile plots which can command prices as high as $2.43 million as the cost of digital land has boomed in unison with the rise of NFTs.
Thus far, Decentraland has featured some headline-grabbing projects, including a functional digital twin of the auction house Sotheby’s London headquarters. The display of NFT art has become one of the most predominant forms of building in the metaverse, followed by gaming, retail, and other forms of entertainment like blockchain casinos that have users lining up for a slice of the cyber action.
Building in the space is, at least in theory, open to anyone, but a few studios that deal exclusively in metaverse architecture have come to be seen as standard-bearers for an industry that has only recently begun imagining what applications the discipline might have in the digital realm. Entities such as Voxel (who designed now-famous NFT artist Beeple’s digital museum in another metaverse space called Cryptovoxels) and the affiliated Decentraland Architects offer specialized design services that can easily fetch up to $300,000 a project.
The boom has created an opportunity for people whose backgrounds are not necessarily in the professional architectural realm but nonetheless present in the void at the right moment and henceforth cashing in with a slate of big-name clients and digital design-builds.
“I went all-in on the metaverse when I discovered the connection between NFTs & video games in February of 2021,“ Decentraland Architects founder Luca Arrigo said in a previous statement. “At the time, the most usable and fun metaverse activity was by far Decentraland. I dreamed up the idea of an architectural firm for Decentraland and used my digital marketing skills to build a web presence. For most of 2021, we did small projects — waifus, small buildings, a farm…then in November, we built our first project for a big clients. Now we are regularly meeting with fortune 500 companies and established DAOs to help them build their first metaverse experiences. I hope to continue learning about new metaverses and figuring out what new opportunities our team can try our hand at.”
