In short
- The Ethereum-based game Illuvium sold NFT digital plots worth over $ 72 million.
- The plots offer various benefits in the upcoming PC and Mac game, which will be released later this year.
Illuvium, and forthcoming Ethereum-based role-playing games, digital plots sold worth more than $ 72 million NFTs during a sale that ended on Sunday.
The sale, which started on Thursday, led to almost 20,000 digital plots being sold to investors and potential players. Illuvium’s land NFTs are running on Immutable Xa layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum which enables cheaper, faster and more energy efficient transactions.
An NFT is a blockchain token that proves ownership of a digital asset, such as works of art or collectibles, and in the video game area that can mean land, player avatars and clothing, or weapons.
Illuvium’s game world will eventually contain 100,000 total plots, of which holders will have access to various benefits in the game, such as the extraction of fuel that can be sold to other players for a potential profit. Illuvium will be launched on Windows and Mac computers later this year.
Among the originally offered 20,000 plots, 29 were retained by the developers for future distributions, while two additional Tier 5 plots – the most valuable in the game – will each be auctioned off using a standard auction format.
For the 19,969 plots sold, Illuvium used a Dutch auction format which saw the price of each plot gradually decrease during each lot of plots put up for sale. Prices started at 2 ETH (currently $ 3,700) for level 1 plots, 6 ETH ($ 11,100) for level 2, 20 ETH ($ 37,000) for level 3 and 80 ETH ($ 148,000) for level 4.
Illuvium raised more than $ 72 million during the sale. The creators, according to and tweet, said that around 4,018 ETH (over $ 7.4 million today) will be redistributed to the game’s ILV token holders who have bet it. Meanwhile, 239,388 of the game’s sILV2 tokens (approximately $ 22 million worth) will be burned or permanently destroyed, thus reducing the total supply.
“Inflation bad, deflation good,” reads an official statement regarding the planned combustion.
Virtual land sales have generated hundreds of millions of dollars for blockchain-based metavers play like Sandboxes and Decentraland. A report from MetaMetric Solutions claimed that virtual land worth around $ 501 million was sold throughout 2021, with another $ 85 million in January 2022 alone.
Illuvium’s land sales are not quite a record – other Ethereum-based games Ember sword had sales of $ 203 million in July last year – but that’s remarkable because of the current bear market for NFTs, which has suffered along with the crypto markets.
The leading NFT marketplace OpenSea has seen daily trading volumes in the $ 25 to $ 40 million range latelyafter record-breaking single day of $ 476 million May 1, while top projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club have set declining valuations.
Do you want to become a crypto expert? Get the best from Decrypt right to your inbox.
Get the biggest crypto news + weekly summaries and more!
