Rights and What You Own When You Buy Virtual Land NFTS

When you buy virtual Land, what exactly do you own? In this episode, learn about the various rights you are entitled to and what you can and can't do with your virtual Land. It also explains how you can use your virtual Land and what you should know before making any purchases.

SuperWorld is an augmented reality (AR) virtual world geographically mapped onto the real world, allowing users to create, discover and monetize AR content.

The SuperWorld virtual real estate platform is mapped over the entire surface of the globe, allowing users to purchase —literally—any place on Earth. From skyscrapers and stadiums to historical monuments and iconic structures, including wonders of the natural world, when you step into SuperWorld, you’ll truly make a world of your own.

Know More About SuperWorld Here superworldapp.com

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Rights And What You Own When You Buy Virtual Land NFTS | Hrish Lotlikar & Zain Jaffer

As a VC, I have seen maybe 3 or 4 pitch decks where only advisors and maybe even in one case on the founding team didn't have the name of the actual person. They had a digital avatar and that gave them a lot of credibility. These guys are into it. I'm investing in some monkey’s project here. This is how people are taking it. This identity extends. There's a fascination people have with avatars and identities.

I want to touch on another concept here. We have had a guest from one of my previous shows. It was all about property rights and digital rights. When you are overlaying a digital world and a real world, in your case, 64 billion plots. You can go to SuperWorld’s website, browse through and buy tiles. Are you telling me that I can own the Eiffel Tower or Google's headquarters? This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen when it comes to lawsuits and property rights. What are your thoughts on all of this? What's the answer to this?

To be clear, in SuperWorld, we have created a virtual overlay of the real world and divided that overlay into 64 billion plots of land, 100 meters by 100 meters. When you buy those plots, you do not get ownership of the physical property or land on top of the surface of the earth. What I'm doing is blocking out a block of land on top of the virtual land.

When you buy a virtual block of land, whether it's in your neighborhood or Paris, encompassing the Eiffel tower, for you to understand where that block is, we tell you, “This is where the Eiffel Tower, White House and Big Ben in London is.” This is a way of understanding the map of the earth and what is there. What you are buying is a virtual plot of land on the SuperWorld platform structured as an NFT that enables you to become a stakeholder on the platform. Being able to earn monetization from your activity and user activity that happens there on that blocking, you are buying a piece of the SuperWorld platform. That's what it means when you buy land.

I don't want to use the school or a military site as an analogy because there are a lot of fun things you could probably do by overlaying things. Let's pick a sporting example like a sports stadium. If I buy a plot of land for a sporting area that belongs to a certain team. Who gets to control what's displayed in that plot of land that I bought online or in the virtual world?

If you bought a plot of land that covers Yankee Stadium and you are a Yankees fan, let's say.

What if I'm not? What if I'm from a rival team? That's where I'm getting to here.

Let's go with that. Let's say you buy the plot of land that encompasses Yankee Stadium. You might need to buy 1 or 2 to get the parking lot and all that. You get all of those and you are a Red Sox fan. You can create anything you want at that location and so can any other Red Sox fans at that location or other Yankees fans. There is an infinite number of filters in the world.

If I go to the game and I'm your friend, let's say I'm a Red Sox fan and I want to see your content because I know that you've put some crazy stuff out there, I can see your content by going to your filter of the world but I can also go to the Boston Red Sox filter and see what they are doing, the official content that they are placing at Yankee Stadium. If I was a Yankees fan, I might never want to see your content. I don't care. I want to see what the Yankees, my favorite players or my favorite fans of the players are showing me.

Back to eSports or watching these eSports games, some people might want to see what fans are creating and what morning content that's being created there. The other way to think about it is maybe there's a car show at Yankee Stadium and there is all these car content, which maybe both of us would never even know about because we are not even going to the car show but the cars are there. They are on the field because the car show is coming and they put the cars there because they know the Yankees fans and these Red Sox fans are even here.

When you buy physical real estate, you are limited to one experience.

What's the primary overlay? Where I was going with this is the platform could be easily abused if you take over sites and forced content. Your platform doesn't do this it seems but what if someone was smart enough to go buy the Yankee Stadium at a discount? When all the fans are there, they could start putting crazy stuff in the Super Bowl layer.

What you are saying is, “No. Everyone gets their perspective and you can tap into those.” It's like a Twitter. When you go to Twitter, you can see a curated feed. There must be some linkage to see the official property owners and virtual representation but you can also go and browse through and click on people's content.

That's exactly right. If I don't want to see anything, I don't have to see anything either.

Why buy? The real estate folks are wondering, “I'm going to buy this plot of land like a parking lot. When COVID happens, I can sell that site to the government and we can do testing. I can send it for party space, knock the parking lot down because of the zoning rights and eventually build a skyscraper. I get to control what happens with the physical real estate that I bought.” What are you saying here? Are you saying I can buy virtual real estate but have no benefit? Except that could sell the rights but what do you get by owning the rights?

What I'm saying are a few things. When you buy physical real estate, you are limited to one experience because you build a parking lot and a store there. That's what's there. You have to build in physical space. You don't have the option of having an infinite number of things there, depending on who shows up.

The beauty of the metaverse and SuperWorld is that what is there is based on what you want to see, who you are, what your mood is and what brand you are engaging with. The content itself is variable. If you own the land, you are able to get a share of all of that monetization that happens there in the infinite number of filters that exist.

Someone should go and buy the Yankee Studio. People should be going out and buying every major landmark. That's what you are saying.

That's what's happening. Everyone has different kinds of interests. Some people buy stadiums, downtowns, vacation places, historical places, their homes or residential places because the content can be viewed anywhere. These infinite number of filters can exist in your house too. If you live in a skyscraper, there are lots of people that live in a very dense, verticalized structure. That even further causes more filters to be created because you are going virtual.

You are buying a future revenue stream of all commercial activities and any transactions that happen in that plot of the virtual land. That's the business model and the future cashflows that you are buying when you buy the plot.

The best way to put it is if you are a stakeholder on the platform, you are buying part of the physical world. Back to the land analogy which we call virtual real estate for a reason is this real estate in the physical world, you'd build a stadium or a store but in this case, you can build an infinite number of things and so can everyone else. You are becoming a stakeholder because you own this plot of land which is this open canvas for anyone to create, discover and monetize anything.

The beauty of the metaverse and SuperWorld is that what is there is really based on what you want to see and who you are.

Being a VC, I can't help but deep dive into business models. What I find fascinating about the infinite number of metaverses that can exist is that it's a beautiful idea that you can have an infinite number of metaverses and in each one, you can have an infinite number of filters and things that happened. The network effects is a term often misused but the network effects here for the few key platforms that take off are unbelievable.

I'd love to talk about yours but an easy one here is one of the big ones like Decentraland and The Sandbox. As they start to get more users, brands coming in and people seeking money and buying land, that creates these inbuilt network effects where the more consumers, brands that come and money that's spent, the more entrenched and valuable that ecosystem becomes.

The tokens are trading for the market cap in the billions of dollars. Virtual homes are being bought for millions of dollars too and also virtual plots of land. Unlike your land, these are purely fantasy land on their map. I love what you are doing because it overlays with the real world but I can't think of another business that can create such a crazy network effect. I don't know what you think about that idea.

It's very powerful and mind-blowing. What I always hear when people understand what we are building at SuperWorld is the word mind-blowing. It blows my mind because as you very aptly stated, it’s the opportunities and network effects that are created when you are working, playing, entertaining yourself, educating yourself, interacting with lots of brands and being able to do that in geospatial environments, whether you are there or not there.

If you look at what's happening in the culture in the past couple of years with COVID, a lot more people are becoming very accustomed to doing things virtually. We are on a Zoom call and most people are. Most people have realized that maybe they prefer that as opposed to going in for a commute sometimes or maybe all the time.

As we are getting more virtuality in and of itself inherently, it adds a tremendous amount of optionality in terms of creation, discoverability and monetization. At SuperWorld, we are in digital commerce, eCommerce, advertising, gaming, data, analytics and decentralized finance, to name a few. Those are going to evolve as the technologies are involved and as we start getting into a brain-computer interface or haptic suits and clothes for your avatar. Those use cases and features are going to get even more ingrained in many aspects of our lives.

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About Zain Jaffer:

Zain Jaffer is an accomplished executive, investor, and entrepreneur. He started his first company at the age of 14 and later moved to the US as an immigrant to found Vungle after securing $25M from tech giants including Google & AOL in 2011. Vungle recently sold for $780m.

His achievements have garnered international recognition and acclaim; he is the recipient of prestigious awards such as “Forbes 30 Under 30”, “Inc. Magazine’s 35 Under 35,” and the “SF Business Times Tech & Innovation Award.” He is regularly featured in major business & tech publications such as The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch.