Even in a weak market for NFTs, the role-playing game’s maiden land sale on Immutable X yields a large amount of cryptocurrency.
In summary
- Illuvium, an Ethereum-based game, sold approximately $72 million in NFT digital land plots.
- The land plots in the upcoming PC and Mac game, which will be released later this year, provide a variety of rewards.
During an auction that closed on Sunday, Illuvium, an upcoming Ethereum-based role-playing game, sold more than $72 million worth of digital land plots as NFTs.
Nearly 20,000 digital land plots were sold to investors and potential players during the sale, which began on Thursday. Illuvium’s land NFTs are powered by Immutable X, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution that makes transactions cheaper, faster, and more energy-efficient.
In the video game world, this may imply land, player avatars and attire, or weaponry. An NFT is a blockchain token that confirms ownership of a digital asset, such as artwork or collectibles.
Illuvium’s game environment will eventually have 100,000 total land plots, each of which will have access to numerous in-game perks, such as the ability to extract fuel and sell it to other players for a profit. Later this year, Illuvium will be released for Windows and Mac computers.
The developers kept 29 of the 20,000 plots initially provided for future giveaways, while two more Tier 5 plots—the most valuable in the game—will each be auctioned off using a conventional auction system.
Illuvium employed a Dutch auction structure for the 19,969 plots that were sold, with the price of each plot decreasing steadily during each batch of plots put up for sale. Tier 1 plots cost 2 ETH (currently $3,700), Tier 2 plots cost 6 ETH ($11,100), Tier 3 plots cost 20 ETH ($37,000), and Tier 4 plots cost 80 ETH ($148,000).
During the auction, Illuvium raised more than $72 million. According to a tweet from the developers, 4,018 ETH (about $7.4 million today) will be reallocated among holders of the game’s ILV token who have staked it. In the meanwhile, 239,388 sILV2 tokens (worth approximately $22 million) will be burned or permanently destroyed, lowering the overall supply.
An official explanation for the planned burn reads, “Inflation is bad, deflation is desirable.”
For blockchain-based metaverse games like The Sandbox and Decentraland, virtual land sales have earned hundreds of millions of dollars. According to a research by MetaMetric Solutions, virtual land was sold for $501 million in 2021, with another $85 million sold in January 2022 alone.
Illuvium’s land sale isn’t exactly a record—fellow Ethereum-based game Ember Sword sold for $203 million in July—but it’s noteworthy given the current bad market for NFTs, which has been hurting alongside crypto markets.
Following a record-setting single day of $476 million on May 1, leading NFT marketplace OpenSea has witnessed daily trade volumes in the $25 million to $40 million level of late, while major projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club have seen plunging prices.
Source: Decrypt