Real estate just got a little more fake. The auction for the first home in the U.S. sold as an NFT — facilitated by fake estate, altcoin platform Propy — kicked off this morning at a listing price of 202.5eth. Despite an alleged 7000 interested bidders, only 1 wallet participated in the end. Assuming the anonymous, description-less profile that bid the base price belongs to an actual human, the first NFT home ever went for a cool $625k. And they also received a custom mural by a local Florida Man, because the Ponzi can’t fall too far from the scheme. Fittingly, the listing is located in Gulfport, a 90% white city a few hundred miles north of Miami that used to be a sundown town well into the 1950s. Florida Man strikes again. 

An ‘NFT home’ just means that, in this case the non-fungible string of immutable characters constituting an NFT links to a property title, not a JPG. Actually, since title deeds can’t legally be represented by tokens, it technically just a link to the operating agreement of an LLC that owns the property. So, really, it’s no different from a traditional transaction, just way more complicated, but with a unique marketing bent that, in theory, appeals to thousands, but, in practice, appeals to at least one Russian bot. 

The real money, turns out, is in bonafide fake estate. Metaverse worlds like Sandbox and Decentraland command floors of 3.7 and 4.9eth, respectively, for parcels of virtual land in their open world No Man’s Sky knockoffs. And Shiba Inu, no doubt fearing Elon might never tweet about them again, announced recently they’re getting into the land grab game, too. Of course, physical earthling land demands inherent value due to its scarcity, resources, and, you know, actual existence. Meanwhile, its digital equivalent can be drummed up by any asshole with a computer and cursory GTA V modding experience, but… I guess it’s Meta’s verse and we’re just living in it.