The Metaverse is currently in its early stages, which means the land rush is still open. While Ethereum-based metaverse games like The Sandbox have exploded in popularity, investors are also interested in developing applications on secure PoS networks like Cardano. One of the distinctive triggers for ADA’s recent climb is its inclusion in this trend, which is interesting: the coin best known as a slow, careful research network suddenly had a metaverse story.
Pavia, a Cardano-based metaverse project, is identical to Decentraland but for one major difference: it is based on Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Everything that makes Decentraland interesting, virtual land, avatars, digital events, moves to a network that does not burn a small power plant’s worth of electricity per day.
🗺️ The Land Rush on Cardano
Pavia’s admission into the Cardano ecosystem comes at a time when its own crypto-asset, ADA, has been under constant negative pressure as a result of the market-wide downturn.
However, the NFT activity on top of the network gave the token a much-needed boost, and it now trades at $1.55, up over 14 percent in the previous 24 hours. When a metaverse project makes a coin move 14 percent in a day, it is hard to call the sector a fad.
Pavia, the Cardano blockchain’s freshly released gaming application, has huge aspirations for this year. At least 100,000 “land parcels” have been released so far, each of which is minted as a unique numbered Cardano NFT (CNFT) based on coordinates. In October and November of last year, more than 60% of the land lots were pre-sold. The remainder will be available in the current quarter.
Those numbers are the first real proof that Cardano collectors and metaverse seekers are the same crowd: 60,000 parcels gone before the current quarter even started.
🏡 What Owners Can Do Today
Pavia has around 8,300 landowners, according to the official website. They cannot, however, visit or install any material into their separate land parcels at this time. The staff was working “to offer the in-game Pavia experience,” according to the website. In other words, the deed is real, the neighborhood does not exist yet, and the homeowners are waiting for the builders. That is the typical early metaverse timeline, and the patient landholders are the ones who usually win.
Pavia, like other metaverse projects, includes an in-game currency called PAVIA that is utilized for usefulness inside the metaverse ecosystem. After a blockchain snapshot in December 2021, Pavia NFT landholders received a 25% airdrop of this native coin. Free money for holding land is a classic way to reward early believers and seed the in-game economy at the same time.
🌍 The Roadmap Ahead
Pavia has recently announced a partnership with readyplayer.me, a cross-game avatar platform for the metaverse, to allow users to create their own avatars that are interoperable with over 700 applications and games outside of the Pavia ecosystem.
Pavia plans to bring liquidity to Cardano decentralized exchanges [DEXs] and investigate cross-chain liquidity in the first quarter of 2022. It also intends to investigate on-platform assets, gamification, and other topics. The project’s goals for the next quarter are to collect all comments and “start building for the in-game Pavia.io experience look and feel,” as well as to double down on interoperability, cross-chain, and cross metaverse. Pavia Plaza will host the first live event in the third and fourth quarters, and Pavia portal testing will commence.
In plain terms: avatars that work everywhere, DEX liquidity to fund the economy, and a first real event before the year ends. It is a roadmap, not a promise, but it is a serious one.
🧠 Final Thoughts
Pavia is a reminder that the metaverse is not one platform, it is a land grab playing out in parallel on every major network. Ethereum has Decentraland and The Sandbox, and Cardano now has Pavia, each with its own flavor and its own community.
The coming quarters will separate the projects that ship from the ones that stay a website. Pavia’s team has the land sales, the token airdrop, and the partnerships in place; now the hard part starts, building the world. Thanks for reading.