Shiba Inu has a new use case — Buying land in SHIB: The Metaverse

Holders of the popular memecoin Shiba Inu (SHIB), will now be able to use the cryptocurrency to purchase land in the Shiba metaverse. 

On Wednesday, the Shiba Inu team took to Twitter to reveal that the SHIB token could now be used to mint parcels of land in the recently unveiled virtual reality project “SHIB: The Metaverse.”

New minting option has been released on https://t.co/f2oLn05qWk!

Mint lands with $SHIB!

Minting with $SHIB Details:
0.2 ETH equivalents in $SHIB
0.3 ETH equivalents in $SHIB
0.5 ETH equivalents in $SHIB
1 ETH equivalents in $SHIB#ShibTheMetaverse#ShibMVpic.twitter.com/mOrpwDSkDK

— SHIB: The Metaverse (@ShibTheMV) May 4, 2022

There are 100,595 different pieces of land on offer in the SHIB: The Metaverse. Initially, it was only possible to purchase land using Ether (ETH). Now, SHIB’s integration into the metaverse project makes it possible to not only purchase land but grants users added customization options for their virtual land as well.

Landowners in the SHIB: The Metaverse will be able to generate passive income, gather in-game resources and generate rewards, although these are yet to be revealed.

Land plots in the SHIB metaverse are set to be released in phases. The introductory stage saw 36,431 plots become unlocked on April 13 with the land being divided into four categories: Silver Fur, Gold Tail, Platinum Paw and Diamond Teeth, priced between 0.2 ETH to 1 ETH.

Despite the popular narrative that paints SHIB out to be a simple memecoin solely driven by hype and Elon Musk’s tweets, the SHIB ecosystem has grown to support nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform ShibaSwap.

The SHIB ecosystem is additionally comprised of subsidiary tokens, including LEASH and BONE, which developers say will play more of a significant role as the metaverse project is developed. At present, holders that lock in their LEASH are given priority access to land bids, while BONE is a governance token that allows holders to vote on decisions concerning the development of the metaverse.

According to a recent Medium post from the Unification Foundation, SHIB: The Metaverse will be developed in Shibarium, a forthcoming layer-2 scaling solution for SHIB. A public test for Shibarium is set to go live over the next few months, with a public beta to follow soon afterward.

At the time of writing, SHIB has experienced a brief recovery gaining roughly 6% in the last 12 hours. Overall, price action concerning the token remains sluggish, with SHIB currently down 12.3% over the past two weeks. The token is now trading at $0.0000218, down over 74% from its all-time high on October 28 last year.

On April 23, developers launched SHIB burning portal, ShibBurn, which has seen more than 22.5 billion SHIB, or $500,000 at the time of writing, removed from circulation. Since SHIB’s inception, approximately 410.32 trillion SHIB — 41% of the total supply — have now been burned.