Undoubtedly you’ve heard about the huge boom in investment in the Metaverse, with people spending millions of real dollars on virtual property. The people behind the Metaverse say that investing at this early stage is like buying real land, hundreds of years ago. But that’s not a good comparison.

• The simplest way to understand the potential value of real estate in the Metaverse is as a new form of cryptocurrency, with a standard parcel of virtual property equal to one coin of cryptocurrency.

• You can invest in the limited supply of real estate in different “worlds” in the Metaverse (Sandbox, Decentraland and Horizon World are some of the bigger ones), which are akin to the various forms of cryptocurrency — Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so on.

• To invest in property in one of those worlds is to make a bet that your world will be popular in the future, much as you would want to have purchased Bitcoin five years ago (up 5100% to more than $43,000 today), and not Dogecoin (currently worth $.16).

As an investment opportunity, the Metaverse is very similar to cryptocurrency: highly volatile, super-speculative and based on the idea that you will wish you’d gotten in earlier. But as a cultural phenomenon it’s quite different, as the real estate in the Metaverse is also part of a vast virtual reality video game that we will allegedly all be playing. That’s the future you’re truly betting on.

Watch at WSJ: Investors Buy Up Virtual Real Estate in Virtual Land Boom