Artur Debat

• Play-to-earn gaming platform Axie Infinity said a plot of virtual land just sold for $2.3 million.
• Axie said in a tweet on Wednesday it was the highest-ever price tag for one of its Genesis Land plots.
• Another plot sold for a record $2.43 million on the Decentraland metaverse this week.

The metaverse may only be in its infancy, but the real-estate wars are heating up. Another plot of digital land sold this week for more than $2 million in a virtual world, highlighting how much investors are willing to pay out to secure space before the metaverse really goes mainstream.

This time, it was a Genesis land plot on Axie Infinity. The play-to-earn platform said inatweeton Wednesday that a piece of land had sold for 550 ether, worth over $2.3 million at current levels. Axie Infinity allows users to create digital pet axolotls to play games, buy land and other asets and win and sell axie-related non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It even has its own cryptocurrency - AXS - which is one of the most traded among metaverse-linked tokens.

"We believe this is the largest sum ever paid for a single plot of digital land," Axie tweeted.

Prior to this latest sale, the project's biggest sale was worth 888.25 ether for nineplotsof land, which amounted to over $1.5 million at the time it was sold in February.

Axie Infinity, which was created by Sky Mavis, a Vietnam-based company, is one of the biggest non-fungible token platforms in the world.

NFTs are unique digital tokens that are a big part of the growing metaverse platform. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta - formerly Facebook - will be focusing on creating thisvirtual reality, as will Gemini exchange founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who recently raised funds to build out their own metaverse.

Another property sold for $2.43 million on rival platformDecentralandon Tuesday. Both these price tags are higher than those for most real-life homes in some of the US'smost expensive cities.

The growing momentum in the metaverse has also fueled steep rises in the value of the cryptocurrencies that are linked to the virtual world. In the last week alone, Decentraland's mana token has gained 38%, Sandbox's sand has risen 74% and Gala Games' gala has risen by 150%, according toCoinmarketcap.