The metaverse is a bridge between physical and virtual worlds within an open-source virtual universe. According to Zion Market Research, the global augmented and virtual reality market was valuated at 26.7 billion dollars in 2018 and is expected to reach 814 billion by 2025. There are many metaverses, each with their own particular approach to developing innovation. Within any saturated market we can logically assume only a small handful of projects are going to be successful, whilst the majority are likely to fail. So, what makes Bloktopia special? What makes it stand out from the rest?
Disclaimer: NOT FINANCIAL NOR INVESTMENT ADVICE. Only you are responsible for any capital-related decisions you make and only you are accountable for the results.
What is Blocktopia?
Bloktopia is a tokenized decentralized VR crypto skyscraper that sits on the Polygon Network. It is a 21-floor building in recognition of the 21 million BTC. The concept of the project can be pictured as a gigantic VR building that encompasses within its floor’s lands, stores, games, learning experiences and more. This metaverse aims to be a central hub that welcomes all levels of crypto experience. They are the first platform where users will have access to crypto information, education and immersive experiences like games or VR shopping. The 3D animation behind the project is created with the most advanced technology developed so far for this purpose, so the graphics are stunning.
Principles:
The project is based in 4 core principles: Learn, earn, play and create. The world of crypto can be an extremely difficult environment to learn properly as all the information is spread in different places like Twitter, YouTube, Telegram and other platforms; Bloktopia will position itself as a central hub where users can learn in an open, friendly environment. Through a series of income mechanisms that we will discuss latter, the projects allow the users to generate revenue via both passive and active income. Users can come to Bloktopia and interact with the environment via games, friend interaction and navigating thorough an immersive first-person perspective of a virtual reality world. Finally, the project encourages its users to create scenes, artwork, challenges and more using an incorporated in game building tool. There is also a software for more experience creators so they can develop games and applications.
Gameplay:
To start to interact with this metaverse the user needs to create a Bloktopia wallet that needs to be verified via email or different social media like Facebook or Twitter. This wallet acts as a passport for this metaverse and it is also the place where the in-game token BLOCK is stored. This wallet will eventually support multiple chains but for now it only supports Polygon network. After creating the wallet, it can be connected to the Bloktopia metaverse and the creation of a unique personalized avatar and a unique name is allowed. These will again be linked to the wallet & acts as your digital ID in the metaverse. The user then will spawn right outside the building, from there you can enter into the first floor. For this reason the first floor is the most crowded and expensive to purchase land on. As you go up in floors, prices tend to decrease.
Blocktopia also fully supports VR so users can become completely immersed completely in the reality. For example, we currently know that players can attend a crypto lecture by some important person in the auditory or they could play games in the 21st floor. There is also a space on the first floor where users can check crypto prices, see maps of the building, look into the day activities and their schedules with the possibility to register into one if you are interested. The variety of activities, games, virtual stores or any other VR project is limitless due to the open software that allows metaverse participant to add their contribution. Because of this factor, only time will tell what kind of things will be developed in the building to satisfy user interests.
In Game Economy:
Understanding the in-game economy is important as it’s the main driver of value for the $BLOK token. There are several ways of generating income within the metaverse, the first and most simple ones is by participating in activities and games which earn BLOCK tokens as a reward. The most important way of income for both Bloktopia and the users are two mechanisms: Reblok and Adblok.
Reblok
Reblok is a term used to describe the action of buying, selling or leasing a piece of virtual real state in the Bloktopia metaverse. The land can the purchased or sold in the Bloktopia marketplace, a place still under development, with $BLOK tokens exclusively. There are two types of land ownership: Sole ownership where Bloktopia real-estate is represented by a single NFT and owned by a single person with full rights over the land and with the ability to develop their REBLOK however they chose. Whether they choose to utilize the space to create content or just refurnished as they like is up to the owner. On the other hand we have Joint ownership where a block of real state is represented by multiple NFTs that may be owned by several people. In this case the use of the Reblok will be decided by a Governance Mechanism with each NFT representing a voting right. Both types of owners can generate passive income renting their land for a limited amount of time, in the case of Joint ownership the reward will be distributed proportionally between holders.
Now the important part is to understand why virtual real state is so important to the game economy. Major participants of the Crypto and NFT world would like to have their part in the metaverse to do their own advertising. Some of them may develop their own platform connected to the metaverse. The following projects and companies have been mentioned by the team as already possible tenants of lands:
As we can see all are huge names in the crypto space which already suggests that the demand for land is high.
Adblok
The second mechanism to generate income passive is Adblok. Adblok consists of the existence of add totems - there 84 small totems and 21 large totems in the whole Bloktopia. As these tokens sugges their purpose is to post advertisement in the shape of an image or a video. Adblok token owners will own 50% of the token while the other 50% will be owned by Bloktopia team. This split mean that half of all the revenue generated by them will go to the owner as a way of passive income. How expensive an Adblok is to buy or to rent depends on the location and as we mentioned before, the first floor is usually more expensive because it has the biggest flow of people.
One last way of passive income is via external building advertisement. It may soon be possible for landowners to rent a panel in the outer layer of their building. However so far no specific information has been released yet regarding this topic.
Land Price & JOBES
Land and Add prices are incredibly expensive at the token current prices with the average price for a piece of land being around 1,000,000 $BLOK. Majority of investors are never going to be able to justify paying that much even if they can afford it. It’s clear that the land is designed for companies & investment firms that have the expendable capital to purchase virtual real estate for marketing & renting purposes. The average add totem price is also around 1 million BLOK too. To make it easier on smaller investors it is possible to partially own real state through JOBE’s. A JOBE (Joint Owned Blok Enterprise) is an integrated system of shared ownership within Bloktopia. For the minimum price of 4800 $BLOK you can join a JOBE, own a small portion of a piece of land & start earning passive income! JOBE’s make land ownership possible for everyone, a great addition to the Bloktopia!
Tokenomics
Like we mentioned, the metaverse token is called BLOK. It has a total supply of 200 billion, with a current circulating supply of 8.34 billion according to CoinMarketCap. This put the current unlocked supply at just under 5%.
19% of the total supply was distributed between early adopters, Seed, Private sale 1, Private sale 2 and public sale. The users that purchased tokens via these mechanisms still have a considerable % of their tokens vested overtime which means they are currently unable to sell or use them in the metaverse. The remaining tokens were distributed in the following order: 33% for the treasury, 25% for staking rewards, 15% for the team, 7% for advisors and 1% for Exchange liquidity.
The main use case of the token is to make possible all the in-game economy. All in game purchases are done with the $BLOK token. Whether a player is purchasing real state, generating revenue through an add or actually renting a land to have a VR party with your friends, it will all be done with $BLOK. Besides earning via in-game economy, token holders can also stake in the platform liquidity pools with different time restrictions and different APY that vary between 20% to 60%. The metaverse has an additional interesting use for the token called BLOK-BIT, a model that allows token holders chose to support exclusive projects that are looking for funds and invest in them in a shark tank environment. So even if a player does not own land (which is very likely) they can still support developing projects in the ecosystem and generate an additional income.
Team and alliances:
Although all four members of the team presented in the Light paper are capable professionals and visionaries, we wanted to make special emphasis in the CTO Simon Benson. Benson is best known for his role at Sony where he was the founder of Play Station VR. The project has many important allies in the space but it is worth mentioning that Polygon itself is a major investor. Bloktopia has also has an impressive portfolio of big investors, some names & investment firms I’m sure we’ve all heard of by now:
Why we’re bullish!?
Gameplay alone, Bloktopia is one of the strongest competitors on the market. The futuristic cyberpunk look puts Bloktopia in a league of its own. Their own integrated game design engine is going to help keep things interest for the many players. The in-game economy is also very strong with passive income opportunities for investors of all levels.
The big-name collaborations that are getting announced regularly via the Bloktopia social media is also a huge bullish indicator. Solana, Avalanche, Binance & KuCoin just to a name a few. Why are these in particular so important? As we’ve already mentioned Bloktopia intends to go multichain which means the BLOK token & NFT marketplace will be available to interact with across multiple different blockchains. This means greater accessibility for investors that are not using the Polygon chain. A port over to the Solana blockchain would be huge!
The Metaverse is flourishing! Every day we’re seeing new billion-dollar brands stepping into the space. Just recently we saw Addidas collaborate with Sandbox (& Coinbase). This is a trend we’re likely going to see continue.
Collaborations / investments from both Binance & Coinbase hints heavily towards upcoming exchange listings. More availability = more investors.
Potentially bearish
If we want to look at the good, we must also look at the bad. Like with any project there will always be downsides, here are the most prominent ones we’ve come across: Owning land, not through a JOBE, is very expensive & probably unachievable for the vast majority of investors. The reason for this is the limited space, as there are only 21 floors there is going to be a finite amount of real estate. This may be off putting for some that come from other Metaverse games where land ownership is easily affordable.
At the end of November, a large amount of initial investor funds that were previously locked are set to be unlocked. A big increase in supply like this can be negative for price if early investors decide to start taking profits – but it’s not a guarantee. Nothing is ever this black & white. it could even end up being a positive. Just be aware that it is happening.
The low circulating supply is also a point of contention, currently less than 5% of the total supply is in circulation. The rest is primarily in the Bloktopia treasury & locked for future staking rewards. The team behind Bloktopia is clearly smart enough to not flood the market supply, and they also plan to do a lot of token burns.
Understanding Asset Price
Before we start speculating on price, first we should clear up exactly how price is even determined. For those that don’t know already: Price = Marketcap / Circulating Supply The marketcap is the key factor here, this is how we rank cryptocurrencies. Marketcap is essentially the total amount of $ invested into a project The circulating supply is the amount of $BLOK tokens currently circulating throughout the market. Price is then the dependent variable and will change depending on the marketcap & circulating supply.
Price Speculation
At the time of writing Bloktopia ($BLOK) has a marketcap of around $800M & price of $0.10. Being one of, if not the, strongest metaverse projects currently on the crypto markets its not unreasonable to assume that in time it can climb to the top of the ranking & its fundamental value can equate to its market value.
What sort of prices are possible? In order to not be too speculative & avoid just pulling numbers out of thin air, the method I use the speculate price is simply project comparison. The current market leader for metaverse based projects in Decentraland. Fundamentally Bloktopia has a huge advantage over Decentraland. The gameplay, game economy, income opportunities & collaborations put Bloktopia in another league. If Bloktopia is so much better, why is it marketcap only a 10th of Decentralands? The advantage of being first - $MANA has been trading for a lot longer, this metaverse has had time develop & grow its player base. Decentraland, and a lot of the other big name metaverse projects, have the advantage of being first on their side.
The advantage of being early won’t be enough to keep them at the top forever, ultimately the better project is going to end at the top. Especially in the gaming / metaverse sector. $BLOK having an equal, or greater, marketcap than $MANA does not seem unreasonable. The time frame in which this gain could happen is not something that can be accurately predicted.