Metaverse Land - Should Portals be your first investment?
‘Explore, build, invite, chat, play, collect’ – right in your browser
Portals is the metaverse project that has a very real chance of unseating Decentraland and Sandbox to become a go-to destination in the metaverse.
What is Portals?
Portals is a browser-based metaverse that has been in development since early 2021 (built on Solana). With a focus on a dense city center and zero-friction user experience, Portals is an immersive social space where you can explore, make your own, and gather with others.
With easy drag-and-drop build tools and built-in communication features, its simple to customize immersive virtual spaces—such as residences, offices, game experiences, or storefronts—in a downtown metropolitan area. The team intend to build a dense, virtual Neo-Tokyo/New York, where people can explore a single city block with hundreds of fun things to do and discover.
City planning and real estate will be executed in a way that ensures a dense, interesting city center for everyone to explore.
Portals Downtown: Coming in March 2022
Building One Access Cards
An Ivory, Onyx, or Vision Access Card will grant you ownership to one of the exclusive real estate units in Portals Downtown. Join brands like FTX, Binance.US, Audius, and more in establishing your footprint in Portals Downtown.
Tell me this isn’t an apartments you’d like to hang out in with friends in the metaverse.
More important, tell me that a bi-level Vision is not a penthouse Portal that celebrities, sports stars, and corporations are going to want own and/or rent. There are only 75 Vision Portals, and there are certainly far more than 75 potential buyers.
And tell me that once you get celebrities nabbing a Portal, that there’s not a boatload of people who are going to start paying a lot of attention to the Portals project and are suddenly going to want their own Portal. I mean, just this month an unnamed buyer dropped $1.23 million on three plots of digital land next door to Snoop Dogg’s virtual mansion inside The Sandbox.
Not knocking Sandbox — it’s a winner, for sure — but it’s blocky and cartoonish. Portals is upscale, elegant, classy.
As such, each is going to attract a much different crowd. And my bet is that Portals grows into a “mega”verse as it pulls in buyers and renters who wants to express a different vision of wealth and refinement.
Team and Investors
Building out a metaverse that has the visual quality of Portals — demands serious resources and access to venture-capital dollars; hiring incredible technology talent; game-art studio partnerships at the highest levels; big-brain thinking on the tokenomics/economics of the project so as not to dilute early investors, yet continue to build out the metaverse so that it becomes it’s own digital city for a massive crowd of future users; an intense focus on solving real-world challenges while building out digital world use-cases that go beyond “look how pretty a Vision Portals is!”
My Thesis for buying Land in the Metaverse
I know all of that sounds farfetched to folks who don’t see the future of the metaverse. I had someone reply to one of my tweets and tell me that the metaverse will appeal only to “a handful of people who need 3D VR worlds.” That statement will be true only when dictionaries collectively redefine “handful” as hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of people.
Web 3.0 — the metaverse — isn’t about the cuteness of VR words. That implies little more than online gaming. No. Our entire internet experience — pretty much everything we do on the internet going forward — will increasingly happen inside the metaverse in some form or fashion.
Which explains why so an uncountable number of metaverses are popping up, and why an unknowable number will pop up. So, it’s legit to ask: Well, why Portals? Why not X or Y — or that purple one over there?
But I think about it this way: I want to be part of a metaverse that appeals to a truly broad audience. I want to own property in a metaverse that attracts:
The gamers who are going to enter portals for, well, the gaming.
The “I want to be entertained” crowd that will head to portals for music venues, movies, concert halls, to shop, or to just amble around in a cool, online city.
The “What the hell is a metaverse” crowd that will show up to learn about crypto, NFTs, the metaverse and to just experience what the metaverse has to offer in a way that is engaging and educational, and isn’t about gaming and cartoonish landscapes.
The social-media crowd that would otherwise chat by way of typing on Facebook or WhatsApp or wherever, but who will instead want to meet “in person” at a coffee shop in Downtown Portals, and rely on voice chat in real-time as avatars.
The corporations, the DAOs, the gaming unions, the charities, the investor clubs — so many others, really — that want their own Portal to serve as their base of operations in the metaverse. (Some DAOs have already expressed in this, based on their tweets.)
And those celebrities and the wealthy who are absolutely going to be jonesing for an Onyx or Vision Portal once they find out about it.
Examples of companies currently building out their Portals:
Binance
FTX
As you can see from the images and the companies involved - the project looks unique and of a high quality.
Final Word
Until proven wrong, I continue to believe that Portals is going to create both wealth and passive income for those who diamond-hand their NFTs, simply because this is a first-mover metaverse tied to reality and not fantasy.
I am equally convinced that once Portals goes live this month, and current owners start Tweeting and posting videos and images of themselves (As avatars) in their Portal, we’re going to see demand pick up from celebrities, companies, and the wealthy who don’t yet know Portals exists, but who will see it pop up on their social media feeds and in the popular press.