Hi everyone, it’s Marco, filling in for Jeff on this summer Friday. Fortune Crypto recently published a feature on the scuffling metaverse world that explores how a bid from Snoop Dogg to create a virtual empire is looking more and more like a house of cards.
You may recall the 51-year-old rapper partnered with the Web3 outfit the Sandbox during the height of the metaverse craze in September 2021, putting his name on a giant estate called the “Snoopverse.” For its part, the Sandbox touted the prospect of being Snoop’s “neighbor” and sold off hundreds of virtual parcels of land at eyebrow-raising prices—someone even paid nearly half-a-million dollars for the privilege.
Two years later, all bets are off. Investors have moved onto generative A.I. and other tech and the prices for a plot of land in the metaverse have plummeted, even for those once highly coveted plots near the rapper’s virtual dominion.
Whereas a “regular” plot of land in Snoop’s world once cost $6,773, at today’s price of 42 cents for the Sandbox’s native cryptocurrency, each of those plots is now worth just $424, a whopping 94% decrease. What the platform advertised as a “premium” parcel, which included some free Snoop NFTs, is now worth about $2,000, down from the original $31,300 in 2021.
Snoop’s personal NFT holdings aren’t looking great either. The rapper owns about $540,000 worth of crypto and NFTs, but that’s only half of the $1.2 million it was worth just six months ago. He’s lost an average of 81% on dozens of flailing NFT collections that he holds in his crypto wallet, according to data from DappRadar.
Despite Snoop’s obvious mastery of marketing and leveraging his onstage persona, the metaverse increasingly looks like one of his worst bets. Not everyone, though, has lost hope.
Some, like Ruben Santa, a senior UX designer at YouTube who bought a parcel of land near Snoop last year, care more about the potential of the metaverse. Santa said he doesn’t worry about the current value of his land, even though it has depreciated by tens of thousands of dollars.
“I didn’t invest because I said, ‘I want to buy this land, and then I want to sell it next week and make a buck,'” he said. “I invested because I saw a long-term vision of what this platform can become.”
The Sandbox has said it is opening up its platform to land owners later this year, which could stir up some excitement, but I think it’s safe to say we won’t experience another metaverse land grab anytime soon.
For now, Snoop fans might want to throw their support behind the rapper’s infinitely cheaper (and tastier) business venture: Dr. Bombay Ice Cream.
Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
marco.quiroz-gutierrez@fortune.com
@marcoquiroz10
