I just saw a set of data about the metaverse land for 2024 in the WeChat group, and I only have one feeling after reading it, four words: utterly miserable!!! Everyone in the group was lamenting, not knowing what was going on in their heads at that time, still rushing in.
Let me show you, according to CoinGecko's data: the average price of metaverse plots in 2024 has pulled back about 72% from its peak. Among them, the well-known The Sandbox has dropped about 95%, Decentraland has dropped about 89%, and Otherdeed has dropped about 85%.
The most eye-catching are those lands that were sold at high prices back in the day relying on 'celebrity neighbors.' In 2021, a virtual estate next to Snoop Dogg in The Sandbox was pushed up to about $450,000; now, at the base price, it’s only about $1,000, basically dropping back to a fraction.
I think this matter has actually given all retail investors in Web3 an extremely expensive but also very realistic lesson: without real users, sustained consumption, and a cash flow closed loop, 'scarce assets' can be valued highly during a bull market but will also drop quickly after the tide recedes.
The land in the metaverse ultimately did not turn into new real estate; it resembles a purely NFT speculation experiment packaged as a real estate story. Bought a pixel piece of land, and then? No one is opening stores on it, no one is living on it, it doesn't generate any real cash flow every day.
After being educated by these 'air infrastructure' and 'false prosperity', let's take a look back at what capital is really buying now.
Recently, I have been completing creator tasks for Binance Square, spending a lot of time digging deep into the underlying finance and business logic of @SignOfficial . If you analyze SIGN with that set of 'soul three questions'—real users, sustained consumption, cash flow closed loop—you will find that its fundamentals are two completely different worlds from those 'ghost towns'.
Say goodbye to 'celebrity neighbors' and go after 'national-level real users'.
The metaverse tries to create a sense of scarcity by attracting a few stars to endorse it, but stars won't wander in virtual plots every day. What is SIGN's S.I.G.N. dual-track sovereignty system doing? They are connecting with Sierra Leone's SignPass, Kyrgyzstan's CBDC system, and Abu Dhabi's public records transformation.#Sign地缘政治基建
These are not ethereal Web3 natives; these are real citizens at the level of millions who need to apply for visas, receive benefits, and settle accounts every day. Once integrated, this becomes the underlying infrastructure for the operation of the national machine, with extremely high user stickiness and switching costs.
Refuse 'one-time transactions', create a 'sustained consumption' model.
Once the land in the metaverse is sold out, it's finished, with no further empowerment. And $SIGN is the fuel for the entire verification network. In this programmable distribution system based on identity interconnections, every issuance of government benefits, every zero-knowledge proof verification of empty investment qualifications, and every automatic withdrawal of illegal funds all require resource consumption.
As long as the business and government operations in the real world are functioning, this consumption of credential verification is continuous and never stops.
The core: real cash flow 'cash flow closed loop'.
Compared to those ghost chains valued in the billions but only earning dozens of dollars a day, TokenTable under SIGN is genuinely making money. It has distributed over $4 billion in assets to more than 200 projects, and just in 2024, it achieved a real revenue of $15 million through token distribution fees and OTC business.
What did they do with this money? Buy Bitcoin (BTC) as reserves and repurchase tokens. This is a typical positive business cycle—earning money from real businesses and reinvesting it into ecological assets.
Do you think only we retail investors are awakening? Top institutions are much more realistic than us!
Many people think that YZi Labs invested in SIGN because they saw some grand narrative, wrong! I checked the financing timeline, YZi Labs led a $16 million Series A round in January 2025. What does this mean? It means top VCs don't care about your PPT dreams; they only decisively invested after seeing SIGN earn a solid $15 million in real cash in 2024! They even added more investment in October.
This is a typical positive business cycle—earning money from real businesses, top institutions being impressed by cash flow and adding more firepower, ultimately reinvesting into the entire country's physical sovereign network.
Conclusion and thoughts:
In web3, we can pay, but we can no longer pay for mere 'narratives' and 'PPTs'.
$SIGN The current market value is around 70M. Of course, there are risks like slow government project implementations and short-term selling pressure due to the large unlock on April 28. However, looking at the longer cycle, when Web3 moves towards large-scale applications, the market will certainly give reasonable valuations to infrastructure that can solve real trust pain points and has self-sustaining cash flow capabilities.
From buying 'virtual ghost towns' to buying 'national operating systems', this is the essential path for Web3 to mature.