An auction that concluded on Sunday saw Illuvium, a future Ethereum-based role-play game, sell NFT digital land plots for over $72 million. It seems that the NFT market still has a punch to it and the interest is nowhere near being extinct.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are crypto assets based on blockchain technology that contain unique identifying numbers and information that distinguish them from one another. A token can represent a variety of assets, including art , music, real estate, and more.
What is Illuvium?
By leveraging NFT immutability, Illuvium Land offers layer-2 scaling for Ethereum, making transactions faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
Approximately 20,000 digital land plots were available to investors and potential participants during this sale, which began on Thursday the 2nd of June.
Depending on the type of the game within the Illuvium ecosystem, players have access to lands, avatars, outfits, or weapons.
The game and the auction
The environment will, in the end, have 100,000 land plots, and each of these plots will have its own set of in-game features. These features can include the ability to harvest fuel and sell it to other players in the game.
Illuvium plans to make this game available for Windows and Mac computers.
During this auction, among the 20,000 plots originally planned for future gifts, 29 were kept by the creators. In addition, two more Tier 5 plots will be for sale via conventional auction. These are the most valuable plots in the game.
To sell the 19,969 plots, Illvium used a Dutch auction structure, which saw the price of each plot decrease with every batch.
During this auction, 12003 tier 1 plots were sold for 1207 ETH, 5011 tier 2 for 1027, 2087 tier 3 for 1063, and 868 tier 4 were sold for 719 ETH.
About $72 million were raised by Illuvium during the auction. An announcement in a tweet said 4,018 ETH, which is approximately $7.4 million, will be reallocated to holders of the ILV tokens who have staked them.
To reduce the overall supply, 239,388 sILV2 tokens worth about $22 million will be burnt or permanently destroyed.
How will the land plot NFTs benefit users?
Based on the game’s logic, players must use their land plots to be able to take advantage of the ecosystem’s mini-games. In essence, players may use their digital land plots to create Fuel, which is an in-game resource. Each collector can use Fuel to transport themselves around the game realm.
The land parcels are divided into five tiers. Tier 5 land plot NFTs (the most sought-after) will boost production by 900 percent. As a result, those who hold these land plots will advance faster in the game.
The future of virtual land space
In the virtual land selling industry, a blockchain-based network has emerged. As a result, the community raised millions of dollars for metaverse games like The Sandbox and Decentraland.
A survey conducted by Metametric Solutions estimates for virtual land to be worth $501 million. A total of $85 million was paid for it in January 2022 alone, and 2021 was all sold.
In July, Illuvium land sales of $203 million were recorded, which is remarkable considering the current bad market for NFTs, which is also afflicted by the crypto market.
With a record-breaking day of $476 million on May 1, OpenSea anticipates daily trade volumes in the $25 million to $40 million range, which is a good performance given the recent NFT hacks that took place on this leading NFT marketplace.
