The mastermind behind Silicon Valley tech start-up Cheeze has revealed the company has purchased land in the digital world, where it is currently building an art gallery for minted photographs.
And Dubai-based Simon Hudson told the Arabian Business Money Forum the footfall for virtual galleries can reach 30,000 people in a single day – the Louvre in Paris, which is considered the world’s most visited museum, averages 15,000 visitors-a-day.
Founded in 2018, Cheeze aims to help people mint their high-resolution photographs into non-fungible tokens (NFTs), where they can then trade and sell them on the blockchain.
Hudson said: “If you look at the history of the digital land and games, this goes back to Tomb Raider and all these old-school games when you were running around and you were playing for years. Then platforms like Fortnite came about and these kind of multi-player virtual worlds grew.
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“To be honest with you, the introduction of the NFTs, which are these digital assets, just meant that you could take assets within the game such as swords and guns, or hats and skins, for your characters in the game and rather than going into the old-school stores that were in-game, you could go and trade them on the marketplace.
“Over the last couple of years we’ve seen these metaverse worlds where you’ve got the ability to go in and rather than just selling guns and hats and things, you can now purchase plots of land.
“The reason why it’s so important is that you’ve got 20,000 to 30,000 people a day playing these games, running around, and if you go in and purchase land, you can then build and develop on that land and you can integrate many things.”
Hudson revealed that the land bought by Cheeze in the online world Decentraland, and gallery built by an architect, who is essentially a 3D modeller, has cost “sub-10k”.
“We’re not going crazy, we’re just going to build an art gallery where, if you do mint your images on Cheeze, you’ll have the opportunity to showcase them in the art gallery on a given day,” he said.
Cheeze Minting Studio
Decentraland is a virtual place with its unique economy, currency (Mana coins, which started around two years and were worth 10 cents and are now going for $1.06) and social events calendar.
According to NonFungible.com, which tracks sales, the average price paid per parcel in Decentraland this year, through to March 15, was $2,703, over three times more than what it was last year.
“The game Decentraland as a platform is open to anyone. You get spawned, which is the term for landing in the actual game, you can then wander around and go and explore,” he explained.
“What’s really cool is that you can jump between the spaces, so you can go in and look at six or seven art galleries within 10 minutes and wander around, but because it’s all digitally linked, you can then share that you’ve purchased something from this gallery and you can send the coordinates to your plot of land on social media and you can get other people to come into it,” he added.
Serial entrepreneur Hudson also revealed that the company has just started paying its staff in cryptocurrency.
He said: “We’ve obviously got a number of engineers. A lot of them are remote and we’ve got people all around the world, and we’ve had a number of requests from our staff who have actually requested to be paid in cryptocurrency.
“It’s a lot faster, it’s a lot quicker to get the transaction to them, and secondly, they can then use that currency to purchase their own NFTs and do something with, and I think that this is going to be something that a lot of companies will do.”
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