Metaverse has the potential to revolutionize business of all kinds. Although this is a growing industry, the best metauniverse platforms including Decentraland, Sandbox, Upland, Somnium Space and Voxels offer many opportunities to generate passive income in the metauniverse.
Innovators are already taking advantage of these opportunities. Landlords making a living from rent in Somnium Space, Sandbox game makers, businesses selling billboard space in Decentraland, and players capturing idle gameplay in gamified metauniverses are among the first.
Let’s look at their stories through the lens of generating passive income in the meta universe and explore the approaches being used today.
How to get passive income in the Metaverse
#1 BECOME A LESSOR OF METAVSESSUITE
Chris Bell, who owns approximately 100 plots of land in the Somnium Space metauniverse, says he earned $18,000 renting out property in 2021. His strategy involves determining the current value of the property by studying recent sales on the secondary market on OpenSea and leasing the property to tenants for an annual fee that is 10% of the current value of the property, targeting a 10% annual return on the current value of the property.
Becoming a metauniverse landlord is a popular way to generate passive income in the metauniverse, as it creates a win-win situation by allowing tenants to create their own experiences on rented properties, which in turn provides them with new income.
All popular metauniverse projects allow you to rent land. That being said, one common drawback is having to leave the metauniverse market to close deals, which can cause security issues. Therefore, new business models are being built that improve the process. Consider as an example the partnership between LandWorks and the Voxels metauniverse (formerly known as Cryptovoxels ).
LandWorks is it lending protocol without permission, which connects landlords with tenants through a decentralized marketplace so that tenants can securely search for Voxels land. The marketplace is also currently integrated with Decentraland Lands.
The metauniverse giant Decentraland has also launched built-in land lease, to enable rentals without leaving the Decentraland market. Landlords can list properties directly on-chain by approving a rent smart contract to allow a tenant to use the land on their behalf and signing listing requests.
#2 CREATE YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE FROM THE METAVSE WORLD
Whether you’re a landowner or renter, another way to generate passive income in the metaverse is to create experiences on land and collect entry fees from visitors. Some ideas you can try are running mini-games, putting on shows, building art galleries, dioramas, interactive tours, and building shops. You don’t have to create this experience yourself – hiring developers and designers will pave the way for the passive path.
The Sandbox ecosystem is especially rich in such experiences, as the metauniverse equips developers with a set of tools that simplify the process of creating unique experiences in virtual lands. In this way, game publishers can charge players to visit their sites and play their games.
Additionally, Sandbox provides two funding programs: one for game developers and the other — for developers game resources. As a result, there are many talented and experienced game artists, designers, and agencies creating siled software experiences, and you can hire them to create a personalized experience for you.
Other metaverse projects offer similar opportunities that you can take advantage of, such as Blake Hotz, who organizes exciting activities at Somnium Space which range from haunted houses to trial shopping.
As Sam Huber has demonstrated, expanding metauniverse lands with experience also benefits landowners by increasing the value of the base lot. Huber’s company Admix, which recently merged with Landvault , builds buildings on the land before renting them out to customers. To give you an idea, in collaboration with L’oreal, his company created an exhibition of large perfume bottles in Decentraland. As he noted in interview is a business model with profits that can reach 70%.
#3 CREATE METAWESSIVE BOARDS TO EARN PASSIVE INCOME ON METAWESSIVE
Just like in the real world, companies want to advertise their services in the high-traffic metaverse to increase brand awareness and attract potential customers. So, getting paid to advertise on metauniverse billboards is another way to make money while you sleep.
Next-generation virtual real estate businesses demonstrate the enormous potential of metauniverse billboards. They invest in attractive plots of land and create advertising spaces on them.
Decentraland Architects offers three types billboards in Decentraland with a minimum booking period of one month, while Metaverse Billboards focuses on Voxels with over 250 billboards . Some companies, like large-format advertising provider Lemma, are developing billboard solutions that combine the physical and virtual worlds .
Billboards are easy to create. Individual investors, regardless of whether they are owners or tenants of metauniverse property can raise their investments by following a similar path as these companies.
Using metauniverse land assets for passive income expands your options. However, you are not limited to them; here are two more options.
#4 TAKE ADVANTAGE OF RATE AND OTHER INTEREST EARNINGS
All major metauniverse projects issue their own cryptocurrencies. While Decentraland has MANA, Sandbox has SAND for example. Since users must spend these currencies to participate in the metaverse, the cryptocurrencies of popular metaverse projects are in constant demand.
Hence, they open interest earning opportunities through DeFi such as staking and yield farming. So you can first invest in the native cryptocurrency of the metauniverse and then lock the tokens in a liquidity pool for a fixed time to receive interest at the end of the period.
Such programs sometimes offer metauniverses directly. For example, before sandbox allowed you to bet SAND on the range without having to combine it with another currency. Tracking announcements from the official channels of the metaverse you’re interested in is a way to stay up-to-date on opportunities. Popular central exchanges also launch staking programs. Binance currently offers a locked staking program for SAND with a reward rate of up to 14.50%.
Similar programs are constantly launched in the crypto space. They are also not tied to cryptocurrencies; there are also opportunities for rate NFT . To illustrate: Owners of in-game assets of Axie Infinity, a very popular play-to-earn game with metauniverse features, can do bets on your NFT assets and take loans up to 30% of their value.
Another interesting case is Upland, a Monopoly-like metauniverse that reflected in the real world . Newly developed Upland property owners can earn up to 17% annual return on that property. However, these revenues are paid out in UPX, the primary currency of the metauniverse. You have to level up in the game to convert Upland’s earnings into US dollars .
#5 COLLECT GAME TOKENS TO UNLOCK REWARDS
Gamified metauniverses allow users to collect in-game tokens, both fungible and non-fungible, opening up entirely new ways to generate passive income.
Alien Worlds has a built-in token mining process inspired by the concept of cryptocurrency mining. This requires playing the game, but once you set up the necessary tools, it turns into idle gameplay with players waiting between sessions to accumulate the game’s native currency, Trillium (TLM), which can be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies for real money is important.
You can also benefit from common play-to-earn mechanisms that require very little effort, such as pooling or breeding, where you create new and improved in-game NFT items by merging two other assets. Many game metaverses, including Axie Infinity, have built similar mechanisms into their gameplay; they also allow players to sell newly created NFTs on secondary markets.
Another interesting option for passive income is this NFT collateral, offered by My Neighbor Alice. Here, a percentage of the price of the NFT that a user buys goes into that user’s escrow account. When the user sells it back to the system to destroy this NFT, the amount previously locked as collateral is returned to the user.
The desire to play for money is never limited to inventing unique ways to reward its players. You just need to take enough time to do your research thoroughly.
The Future of Passive Income in the Metaverse
The metauniverse of the future will be an exciting base environment AI, AR, VR and hologram technologies . On the one hand, we will have a virtual experience that is completely separated from the physical world, and on the other hand, we will have smooth transitions between multiple realities.
This convergence provides significant opportunities for all kinds of businesses, including new sources of income generated through passive income strategies. While unexpected monetization methods brought about by new metaverse concepts like teleportation may be on the horizon, it is also very likely that typical Web2 business models will also gradually adapt to the metaverse.
Creating an online course once and selling it multiple times is, for example, a proven way to make money in the current version of the Internet. Dropshipping is another business model that does not require direct involvement in operations. Merging with the metaverse will lead to new forms of income in e-commerce.
Other low-effort income strategies include advertising and product recommendations on social media posts. Once the metaverse merges with decentralized social networking applications, we will see variations of these revenue models adapted to the new Internet.
However, keep in mind that living off passive income requires hard work, no matter what the future may bring.
