Cardano jumps on the metaverse bandwagon with Pavia — here’s everything you need to know about ADA’s entry into play-to-earn

• The Pavia metaverse platform and its native in-game currency are built upon the Cardano blockchain.
• Pavia expects to be a play-to-earn game, with its native token already trading on certain decentralised exchanges (DEXs).
• Two-thirds of land parcels have already been sold, the rest will be auctioned by March 2022.
• The game is a work in progress for now – player avatars can be customised, but owned land cannot be ‘developed’ yet.

Pavia, a metaverse game in development since September 2021, is one of the reasons Cardano has been rising in value even in a week that saw most cryptocurrencies trending downwards.

With asking prices for plots of land in Pavia going for more than $1,000 apiece, this metaverse platform is being touted on Twitter to be the next Decentraland but with a twist – it uses Cardano, an eco-friendly cryptocurrency instead of Ethereum.

Funded by sales of virtual land, the Pavia project takes aim at a number of buzzwords – metaverse, a virtual world built by players, play to earn (P2E), and land sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Pavia is one of the first Cardano-based metaverse projects to be opened to the public, although it is not the only one – other projects in the space include Cardania, Cornucopias and Cardano Village.

What is Cardano’ metaverse, Pavia?

Pavia is a virtual world, a decentralised metaverse game which will be built by and for players. It is based on the P2E concept, meaning players will be able to explore it while they earn and spend using in-game money, called PAVIA tokens.

The project’s website explains that it was named Pavia, after the namesake Italian town in which Gerolamo Cardano, an influential historical person of the 16th century Renaissance used to live. That name is significant, for the reason that Pavia uses the Cardano cryptocurrency blockchain.

Metaverse refers to a virtual world where people use digital ‘avatars’ to interact with each other. Such a change in communication methods is expected to change society as much as the advent of the Internet.

How are people buying digital land, and earning from it?

In-game land plots were sold in two phases so far, with a third phase to take place by March 2022 in an auction, according to Pavia’s roadmap. That accounts for at least 100,000 ‘land parcels’, with a claimed 8,300 land owners. These owners are entitled to earn revenue from financial activity on their land, such as income from a rented museum’s ticket collections.

Since these plots of land are selling as NFTs, secondary sale at a profit can be seen at the Cardano NFT market place. The marketplace notes that Pavia land has royalties associated. This means that 2.5% of the price would reach the project each time a land NFT changes hands.

At the time of writing, the minimum listed price for the cheapest land had increased by 100 ADA coins — which is approximately $150 or ₹11,100 — while other owners had listed land to be sold at $1 million or ₹7.5 crore.

For now, this is still cheaper than land prices on other metaverse platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox.

You can’t really do much within the Pavia universe, yet

As of January 19, the ‘in-game Pavia experience’ is a work in progress. While NFT owners can see where their land parcel is located on a map, they cannot not visit, develop, or otherwise build anything on it yet.

Although the game itself is in development, players can customise their avatars using the ReadyPlayer platform, and use the avatar outside of Pavia as well. Pavia’s roadmap mentions that its first live event, which could help with driving up a platform’s visibility, will be held sometime between July and September, later this year.

Pavia’s native cryptocurrency

Owners of land parcels received PAVIA tokens in December 2021, intended for use within the game for transactions. Being a P2E game, this is the in-game money in which items would be denominated. Players would accumulate assets, to eventually trade for other in-game items or sell the tokens to others to redeem cash — or other cryptocurrencies — instead.

PAVIA tokens reside on the Cardano blockchain and are traded only on select decentralised exchanges for now, at an effective exchange rate of $0.25 or ₹19 per PAVIA token.

According to Messari research, the Cardano blockchain was among the top three cryptocurrencies by activity this week. Cardano secures its blockchain with a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism, that is easy on the environment compared to the energy-guzzling Ethereum network. It supports smart contracts, non-fungible tokens, DApps for decentralised finance (DeFi), and a planned upgrade to improve scaling.

SEE ALSO:
EXCLUSIVE: CoinDCX plans to hire more than 2,000 people this year — and they are not just looking at coders
Spain joins countries like India to keep crypto companies from promising wild returns in ads
One of the largest cryptocurrency swapping platforms just lost $1.3 million as users failed to update approvals