Metahood raises $3M to build a platform for trading metaverse real estate

Even as digital worlds and the metaverse have become more popular in the past few years, it turns out it is not easy to buy, sell and trade digital land in Web3 decentralized apps. With an eye to become a sort of real estate finder and trading platform, Metahood Inc. launched Wednesday into open beta and announced $3 million in funds to help make that easier.

Crypto venture fund 1confirmation led the seed funding round, with participation from Volt Capital, Flamingo DAO and Neon DAO. The company also attracted notable angel investors including metaverse company The Sandbox co-founder Sébastien Borget, NFT marketplace SuperRare co-founder John Crain and digital collectible card game company Sorare growth lead Brian O’Hagan.

“Our vision is to make the open metaverse more accessible, interoperable, and easy to navigate,” said Metahood founder Gwendall Esnault. “Our first goal is to build the go-to platform for trading digital real estate. Trading real estate is different from trading other types of digital assets. When it comes to real estate, context is important.”

Web3 metaverse real estate uses nonfungible tokens, a type of crypto asset that uses blockchain technology to allow users to have provable ownership of virtual land inside of virtual worlds. The tokens themselves represent ownership of land plots inside different virtual worlds.

That means they can be bought and sold on NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea and LooksRare. However, Ensault argued that these websites lack context when it comes to land plots. When users are buying a piece of digital land, they don’t know what they’re getting when they look at a listing on a traditional trading platform.

“We believe that people should be able to make more informed decisions when trading land, rather than just considering the floor price or rarity of the asset,” said Ensault. “It is currently difficult to obtain information such as the location, surroundings, and nearby landmarks of digital land. We have made it easy.”

Using the Metahood platform, users will see a virtual map that displays the location of the digital real estate in popular metaverses, providing a contextual idea of where the land is in relation to other neighborhoods for users to get an idea of where their land will be. This is similar to getting a Google Map or looking at a listing on Zillow before making a purchase.

The platform currently supports NFT land in popular metaverses such as The Sandbox, Decentraland and the Bored Ape’s Yacht Club’s Otherside. Ensault added that the company is focusing on bringing even more metaverses onto the marketplace soon.

Metahood will support individual listings from users, as well as aggregates listings from marketplaces such as OpenSea, LooksRare and OpenSwap. That means users will have a wide variety of ways to buy, sell and trade their virtual land, with the ability to know where it will be in their virtual worlds and what neighborhoods it will be in.