Decentraland Launches Service for Virtual Landowners to Rent Out Assets for Extra Income

Decentraland (MANA) has officially rolled out a new feature allowing virtual landowners to lease their assets and generate passive income.

The new feature from Decentraland will enable users who own virtual land within the project's metaverse to effectively become real-world landlords. Owners can now officially rent out their properties on the platform for predefined periods, providing a new avenue for earning passive income from their metaverse assets.

Much like traditional property rental agreements, Decentraland landlords cannot sell their land or receive purchase offers until the lease term expires. Overall, the community response to this development has been positive.

This move aims to boost Decentraland's user engagement amid a broader metaverse downturn that has followed the initial hype driven by Meta in October 2021. Trading volumes and virtual land prices have plummeted across major metaverse platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox, with no signs of recovery since August 2022.

Even Meta, the industry giant, has struggled to revive the sector. Meta’s Metaverse division, Reality Labs, faced substantial losses in Q1 and Q2 of 2022, reporting $3 billion and $2.8 billion in losses, respectively. The trend continued in Q3, with Reality Labs posting a $3.7 billion loss, prompting Meta to plan mass layoffs in early November 2022.

For Decentraland, the situation appears even worse than anticipated. Despite being one of the most prominent metaverse platforms in the crypto space, with a valuation in the billions, an analysis by DappRadar in October 2022 revealed alarmingly low daily active user numbers for Decentraland.

This has led many investors to question the reality behind Decentraland's seemingly robust financial portrait and vibrant business activity often showcased through metaverse events on the project's homepage. Concerns are growing that if the current trend continues, Decentraland may struggle to survive the ongoing "crypto winter" challenging the market at present.