Meet Ertha: Metaverse You Can Own a Piece of Today

In 2021, the idea of the metaverse – a fully-realized, self-contained virtual world that anyone can visit – entered the public consciousness in a big way. But not very many people can explain what it is. And big companies like Facebook – now Meta – are already trying to capitalize by claiming the metaverse as their own.

The trouble with that is the fact that they’re already too late. As anyone in the crypto world can tell you, the idea of the metaverse is neither new nor unknown. And a plethora of crypto projects are already hard at work trying to bring their vision of the metaverse into being. But one of them is further along than the competition. It’s called Ertha, and its goal is to build a metaverse that people can buy a piece of today and reap tangible benefits from in perpetuity. Here’s a bit about the project and why it stands out from the pack.

The Ertha Metaverse

The designers of Ertha are building a metaverse rich with its own history and lore while retaining enough real-world parallels to make it feel familiar. It has roughly the same geographic features as the Earth, complete with the same landmasses and continents. The differences lay in how the history of Ertha unfolded and how those differences shaped its reality.

In Ertha, climate change accelerated unchecked, leading to a catastrophic societal breakdown. The people who survived now live in a world plagued by wildfires, droughts, and flooding – and competition for what resources remain is fierce.

And that’s where participants in Ertha enter the picture. They have the power to purchase land in the Ertha metaverse and then to administer it as they see fit. And they can take on the personas of businessmen, scholars, or fighters to take a hands-on approach and change the future of Ertha.

Real-World Rewards

What’s most interesting about the Ertha metaverse, though, is the fact that it’s built to offer some serious real-world rewards to participants. Landowners, for example, can claim a cut of all in-game transactions that occur in their territory. That means owning land in Ertha can translate into significant real-world income.

They may also rent out their land to other metaverse inhabitants. And those inhabitants can take on in-metaverse jobs and earn a real income, too. Or, they can choose to become a thief and set up a black market to trade in illicit goods. In other words, Ertha’s inhabitants have the same choices as they would in the real world. And that means Ertha will be a dynamic and ever-changing metaverse that evolves according to the will of its inhabitants.

Buying Land in Ertha

To facilitate land ownership in the Ertha metaverse, its developers have created a novel NFT-based map system that splits up the territory into 350,000 plots of land. They call the plots HEXs, owing to their hexagonal shape. Each HEX has unique properties, including things like natural resources, airports, portals, and more. Those properties govern the value of the HEX, as well as its ability to generate in-game revenue.

Over 20,000 HEXs have already been sold to individual buyers all over the world. And the developers continue to offer HEXs for sale through an on-platform marketplace. Interest in the HEXs is already so high that the developers increased the price by 20%, which already meant an ROI for early land owners, as their respective lands went up in price as well.

A New Staking Opportunity

It’s also worth noting that as of today, Ertha’s community members don’t even have to wait for the full launch of the metaverse to start earning money from it. That’s because the developers announced the launch of the metaverse’s official staking platform. There, owners of the metaverse’s native ERTHA token can leverage their holdings in exchange for APYs up to 75%. The staking pools filled up in less than 24 hours due to the high demand and there will be new options opening soon.

But they won’t even have to wait much longer to get access to the metaverse itself. According to Ertha’s development roadmap, the project expects to go live with a metaverse beta this March. The metaverse is already under heavy development, with the Ertha team having commenced work on it over three years ago. That’s one of the big reasons they have such a head start on the competition, and it’s a lead they seem intent on holding on to.

The Bottom Line

The major takeaway from all of this is the fact that Ertha is a metaverse that’s not only real – but is one that people can own a piece of right now. That alone sets Ertha apart from the pack. But Ertha’s value proposition goes much further than being first. It also leverages a unique mix of play-to-learn and play-to-earn mechanics that make it one of the most complex and in-depth metaverse projects going.

That means once its beta launches, there’s every reason to believe that it’ll draw plenty of interest from gamers both inside and outside the crypto world. And if it does, Ertha could become the first major crossover metaverse success the world’s ever seen.

That could propel the project to new heights – seizing back the metaverse narrative from the firms that are trying so hard to dominate it – and defining the term in the public imagination in a way that’ll be difficult for anyone to alter. So, keep your eye on Ertha, because it’s clear that it’s going to be making some big waves in the weeks and months to come.

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