Remember when a plot of digital land in Decentraland sold for $2.4 million? That was late 2021. Snoop Dogg was building a virtual mansion. Companies were buying parcels next to his because proximity to a celebrity supposedly mattered. Adidas, Samsung, HSBC – everyone wanted metaverse real estate.
By 2023 most of that land was worth a fraction of what people paid. A lot of it was worth basically nothing.
So what are NFTs actually doing in the metaverse now that the dust settled? Short version: less than the hype promised, but more than the doomers claim. The pieces that survived are the ones that solved an actual problem.
How NFTs and the Metaverse Got Tangled Together
The pitch made sense on paper. A metaverse is a persistent virtual world. If you spend real money on something inside it – land, a jacket for your avatar, a rare item – you want to actually own that thing, not just rent it from whatever company runs the servers.
NFTs handle that. The token sits on a blockchain, your wallet holds it, and the platform can’t just delete it or take it back. In theory you could even carry it between worlds.
That last part – interoperability – was the dream nobody delivered. Your Decentraland wearable doesn’t work in The Sandbox. Your Sandbox land means nothing in Otherside. Each world is its own walled garden, same as before, except now the items are NFTs instead of database entries. The blockchain layer added real ownership but the cross-world portability everyone promised never showed up at scale.
Virtual Land: The Big One That Burned
Virtual real estate was the headline use case and the biggest casualty.
The two names everyone knew were Decentraland and The Sandbox. Both sold finite plots of land as NFTs. Decentraland capped its world at 90,601 parcels. Scarcity plus hype equals a speculative frenzy, and that’s exactly what happened in 2021. Plots that minted for a few hundred dollars were flipping for tens of thousands.
Then the traffic numbers came out. Reports surfaced showing Decentraland had a few hundred to a couple thousand daily active users at a time when its land was theoretically worth billions in aggregate. The math never worked. You can’t have a multi-billion-dollar real estate market in a town with no residents.
The Otherside metaverse from Yuga Labs (the Bored Ape people) sold land NFTs called Otherdeeds and raised a staggering amount in 2022. The actual playable experience took ages to materialize. By the time anything shipped, attention had moved on.
Land still trades today. Floor prices are a shadow of the peak. The people still buying tend to be builders actually making experiences, not flippers hoping for the next sucker.
Avatars and Wearables – This Part Kind of Works
Here’s where NFTs in the metaverse hold up better.
Your avatar is your identity in a virtual world. Wearables – clothes, accessories, skins – let you customize it. When those are NFTs, you own them outright and can sell them when you’re done.
PFP collections bled into this naturally. People already used their Bored Ape or CryptoPunk as a profile picture across social media. Turning that into a 3D avatar you walk around in was a small step. Some projects built whole identity systems around it.
The reason this works better than land: people genuinely like customizing how they look online. That’s not speculative. Gamers have been buying skins in Fortnite and CS:GO for years with zero blockchain involved. NFT wearables just add the ownership-and-resale layer to a habit that already existed.
Brands Came, Mostly Left, A Few Stayed
The brand gold rush was wild while it lasted. Nike bought RTFKT (a digital sneaker studio) and launched NFT footwear. Gucci, Adidas, Louis Vuitton all ran metaverse plays. Banks bought land. Fast food chains opened virtual restaurants nobody visited.
A chunk of this was pure FOMO marketing – “metaverse” was the buzzword that unlocked budget approval, so brands threw money at it to look forward-thinking. When the hype faded, so did the campaigns. Nike eventually wound down RTFKT entirely, which tells you how that bet aged.
What stuck around were brands using NFT-style items for actual customer programs – loyalty perks, event access, digital collectibles tied to real products. The marketing stunts died. The utility plays mostly survived.
What NFTs Actually Do in Virtual Worlds Now
Strip away the speculation and you’re left with a few things that genuinely function:
Ownership of digital items. You buy a wearable or an item, it’s yours, you can resell it. Simple and it works.
Identity. Avatars and PFP-linked identity that you carry across the platforms that support them.
Land for builders. Less of an investment vehicle now, more a space for people actually creating games and experiences.
Access tokens. Holding a specific NFT can unlock entry to events, areas, or communities inside a world.
None of this needs the trillion-dollar metaverse that Zuckerberg renamed his company chasing. It’s smaller and more practical, which is usually what’s left after a bubble pops.
Is It Worth Getting Into
Depends what you mean.
If you want to buy virtual land hoping it 10x’s – that ship sailed, and the wreckage is still washing up. The speculative window closed hard in 2022 and there’s no sign it reopens.
If you’re a creator who wants to build experiences in a world like The Sandbox, owning land makes sense as a tool, not a lottery ticket. If you enjoy customizing an avatar and like the idea of actually owning the items, NFT wearables are a real thing you can use today. If you’re a brand thinking about it, the loyalty-and-access angle has a track record now while the pure marketing stunt does not.
The metaverse didn’t eat the world like the 2021 forecasts said. NFTs didn’t power a new digital economy worth trillions. But virtual worlds still exist, people still spend time and money in them, and the ownership layer NFTs provide still does a job. That’s the honest state of it – smaller than promised, more real than mocked.