The 16-story office building has no physical form, but rather demonstrates the value that today’s technologies can create with just a click of a mouse. Even though it exists only in the digital space, its new owner can still rent it out to tenants.
The world’s first NFT office building even has a ‘real’ address: 44 West 37th Street, towering over New York’s hip Midtown, just a few blocks from the Empire State Building—or rather, it doesn’t. The 16-story digital building was designed by a company called Integrated Projects and bought by a New York real estate investment firm for ETH 1. The owner can now not only view and share it but also rent it out virtually to tenants.
The NFT (non-fungible token) has been around since 2017 and is based on the Ethereum cryptocurrency’s blockchain technology. An NFT is a string of codes attached to an image, animation, video, or sound file that verifies its authenticity. As a seller, we can limit the number of items by assigning a serial number to the NFT, and the buyer can bid for the content with Ethereum. Blockchains have made it possible to create something unique and unrepeatable in the digital space as digital units record the print, the time of the transaction, the owner, the contract, and all this in a public and traceable way.
In real estate, there are two ways of creating an NFT: in the first case, a digital copy of an existing building is created and sold; while an NFT property that exists only in virtual form is only found in Metaverse, like the featured office building. One of the reasons why investors prefer to buy NFTs is that they can get their hands on a high-valued asset in a matter of seconds, freeing them from the time-consuming paperwork involved in buying physical objects or securities.
Source: Integrated Projects
Cover Photo: Unsplash/Thomas Habr
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