The last time I looked Bankman-Fried's FTX auditors were still anchor tenants in their virtual building.
From the Wall Street Journal, March 29:
The Metaverse Is Quickly Turning Into the Meh-taverse
Disney and Microsoft both closed projects tied to the digital realm this
month
The metaverse, the virtual world that was the hot thing in tech less than two years ago, is facing a harsher reality.
Walt Disney Co. has shut down the division that was developing its metaverse strategies, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. Microsoft Corp. recently shut down a social virtual-reality platform it acquired in 2017. And Mark Zuckerberg, who renamed Facebook as Meta Platforms Inc. to signal his seriousness about the metaverse, focused more on artificial intelligence on an earnings call last month.
Meanwhile, the price for virtual real estate in some online worlds, where users can hang out as avatars, has cratered. The median sale price for land in Decentraland has declined almost 90% from a year ago, according to WeMeta, a site that tracks land sales in the metaverse.
Meta’s name change in October 2021 spurred excitement about metaverse experiences, products and platforms. But slow user adoption, driven in part by expensive hardware requirements and glitchy tech, and deteriorating economic conditions have put a damper on expectations the metaverse will drive meaningful revenue soon........Smaller companies such as Decentraland and the Sandbox where users have been able to buy virtual land and build their own worlds have seen some of the most success so far. But even so, land sales are down. The median price per square meter in Decentraland has dropped from about $45 a year ago to $5, according to data from WeMeta, the firm that tracks the sales.
A spokesperson for the Decentraland Foundation, which oversees the platform, said land sales aren’t indicative of user growth. A spokesperson for the Sandbox said all of the new land they have put up for sale over the past six months has sold out....
....MUCH MORE
Related, March 12:
"Who Killed Silicon Valley Bank?" (SIVB)
Well, after all, it was you and me.
If only we had bought into Web3, those wannabe unicorns would have had revenue that SIVB would loan against (profits? pshaw) thus generating fees enough to buy some interest rate swaps. But no, you didn't buy an AR/VR headset did you.
Don't like that explanation? Here's one: King Charles III heard from Christopher Steele that Meghan and Harry had deposited all the proceeds from "Spare" at the depository his erstwhile employer, BetterUp—where the young Duke is Chief Impact Officer—uses.
No? I guess that's the last time I use Twitter for my sources, here's the Wall Street Journal, March 12...
