JPMorgan Opens A Lounge In Decentraland Metaverse
JPMorgan announced on Tuesday the opening of a new lounge in Decentraland, a metaverse where users can build virtual spaces.
The new lounge, called Onyx Lounge, features an image of bank CEO Jamie Dimon, which transforms into a jpeg image of JPMorgan’s Global Head of Crypto and Metaverse, Christine Moy. A spiral staircase leads users to a room with nondescript chairs.
According to JPMorgan, they are the first company in the banking industry to enter the metaverse, a vast arena of different virtual worlds that also includes Crypto Voxels and Sandbox.
JPMorgan announced the lounge as part of a broader research report covering the metaverse space. The market capitalization of metaverse tokens has gone up since Facebook announced its pivot to Meta at the end of last year, and the report covered some of the opportunities the metaverse offers for brands and consumers. The report explained:
“We see companies of all shapes and sizes entering the metaverse in different ways, including household names like Walmart, Nike, Gap, Verizon, Hulu, PWC, Adidas, Atari and others.”
The metaverse has been flocked with parcels of real estate across different platforms. JPMorgan estimates that the average price of a parcel of metaverse land has doubled in a six-month window in 2021.
“It jumped from $6,000 in June to $12,000 by December across the four main Web 3.0 metaverses.”
Growth of this level will also result in the formation of digital economies as well as metaverse-focused financial products, JPMorgan report projected, elaborating:
“Supply and demand dynamics are driving more people into the meta-economy. In turn, this will require the development of new skills and will also generate new way[s] of making money. After all, people will have to develop and build the products that are consumed in the virtual world—establishing huge opportunities for the creator economy.”
In the future, the market for metaverse real estate could develop in a similar way as the real estate market in the analog world, the report predicted.
“In time, the virtual real estate market could start seeing services much like in the physical world, including credit, mortgages and rental agreements.”