Yesterday I mentioned that "nearly all" metaverse platforms built around web3 features (blockchain, NFTs, crypto) have little or no active users. I qualified it that way because I recently found out about a possible exception:
Upland, the mixed reality real estate acquisition game (and the first customer for Linden Lab's Tilia payment service), sells NFTs associated with individual plots of land. And so far, the game/metaverse platform has over 285,000 unique Upland NFT owners. (Screengrab above, as shared with me by the Upland team.)
285K might not seem like much, as compared to say Roblox or Fortnite, but it is massive when compared with the current NFT market. As I noted last January, there are roughly 360,000 NFT owners in the entire world across the main blockchains. But Upland's NFTs, as co-founder Dirk Lueth told me recently, aren't tracked by Cryptoslam and most other blockchain analytics firms.
In other words, Upland reportedly has nearly as many unique NFT owners on its own platform as there are NFT owners across all other main blockchains — and far more NFT owners than Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, and other wel-known blockchain-based games/metaverse platforms.
Notably, most Upland NFT owners aren't active NFT speculators on other platforms, as is usually the case. According to an internal survey, 65% of Upland NFTs owners don’t own NFTs outside Upland.
Hopefully regular readers are wondering if Upland is even a metaverse platform at all. What with its flat 2D experience for the web and mobile browsers, it's not a 3D immersive virtual world, which is key to the classic metaverse definition.
That is true. But here's the thing: Now that it has an active user base in the six figures, the company is gradually rolling out immersive virtual world features beneath the Monopoly-esque property game — starting with a casual 3D racing game that's currently in Alpha. Watch:
While pretty rudimentary to start (so that it can be played on the web), this Unity-based 3D world will slowly get more creation tools for developers and users, Lueth tells me — and in a clever move, allow real estate owners to build pretty much whatever they want "behind closed doors" of their property. So while the Upland world is directly based on real world map data, property owners can turn their homesinto sci-fi/fantasy dreamscapes. (“I don’t know what people are doing behind their doors,” as Lueth put it to me.)
In this context, the Upland model is pretty similar to how the Metaverse is originally described in Snow Crash, where a vastly long Street is the main visual and physics-consistent metaphor, while individual landowners can create whatever they want on their own property.
All that said, I do remain an NFT skeptic. Talking with Lueth, I came away unconvinced that the blockchain adds any meaningful value to the Upland experience, especially because NFT interoperability across platforms remains a fanciful if not impossible end goal.
Then again, that might not matter for Upland, since it's mostly comprised of users who aren't interested in buying NFTs per se. Its mixed reality Monopoly gameplay aspect is broadly appealing to, well, anyone who already enjoys games like Monopoly, and Upland is architected for a mass user base, not core gamers. (“We go where the mass audiences is,” as Lueth put it.)
So I'll be watching to see how much Upland evolves from its mixed reality map origins to a full-fledged metaverse platform. Ultimately it may only appeal to people who enjoy the cut throat competitiveness of Monopoly, but then again, that's not a small population: Nearly 300 million copies of the classic board game have been sold. So far, Lueth tells me, the Upland playerbase includes people in the Texas badlands to a high roller in Saudi Arabia.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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