Dear investors,

Ever heard about [earth2.io](https://earth2.io/)? No, I am not talking about that excellent SF movie ["Another Earth"](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1549572/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_11) by and with the awesome Brit Marling, no I mean a new hype around ***virtual real estate*** in the finance and trading space!

![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/stayoutoftherz/HYN0IaDi-image.png)

### What is it?

It is about buying and trading actual land on a digital copy of earth, as a "beginning of our world's future virtual existence", as they say. It is about a virtual, digital world on a 1:1 scale with our real earth. The Earth 2 digital grid system is geographically linked and 100% matched to the world we live in. There are **5.1 trillion uniquely identified virtual land tiles** (each 10x10 meter) on the market and you can smoothly scroll through them by some clever rendering! Amazing, isn´t it? Unfortunately it is NOT blockchain-based, so no NFTs involved.

Apparently you can buy, sell and bid on the virtual land. The basic price of an unclaimed 10x10m tile is 0.1$, but many in some popular areas are now worth a multiple of it!

These are the countries where the most tiles were bought in the last 7 days:

![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/stayoutoftherz/hC43Ecbg-image.png)


#### Why participate?
1. You can profit from a **higher value** of the land, if there are people willing to buy it from you
2. You earn a **Land Income Tax** on the land you own based on future new sales of land in that country
3. There is a **referral system** that gives the purchaser of land 5% credit back on their purchase and 5% credit to the owner of the referral code. 
4. Some land tiles will contain treasures or resources which you will **loot** when buying them (not yet implemented)
5. Advertisments on popular areas you own will generate **Ad income** (not yet implemented)
6. If someone buys e.g. a shopping center on land you own you will get a **share of the income** generated (not yet implemented)

So all in all sounds good. Too good to be true? I tried to check out popular areas in Vienna, the town where I live, and practically all tiles are already taken. It looks like this:

![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/stayoutoftherz/jGpsUN6O-image.png)

Specifically, I checked the area around the OLDEST CHURCH in downtown Vienna (the "Ruprechts church" from the 12<sup>th</sup> century, I described it in my [post](https://peakd.com/deutsch/@stayoutoftherz/geschichte-wiens-2-die-entstehung-einer-stadt-der-berghof) about the early history of Vienna), in the red cirle below:
![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/stayoutoftherz/0SlsFHfw-image.png)

Seems that a tile in this area increased already by 875% in value. Can this be real?

This brings me back to the initial question. Just before thinking about where else to find cheap land, I saw an interesting thread on Reddit [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/kryka3/earth2io_scam_criticism_thread_no_hype/) which is quite negative on the project!

### A scam?

Warning flags for a scam for me are these:

- The business model extremely relies on value generation - from what? Just being the first?
- There is so far no way to cash out profits. Theoretically it is possible, but there were always some hiccups, excuses, server down, etc.
- The fact that the VR pioneer [Dillon Seo](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonseo/?originalSubdomain=kr) is advisor on the project is quite hyped, but that guy is advisor on many projects, on the other hand the dev team is small and the CEO, [Shane Isaac](https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-isaac-89907a51/) has no successful track record whatsoever (do you know [xyz](https://www.id.xyz/), the other company he is involved in?).
- According to the redditor, the communication and faq sucks, the transparency is bad

Not sure, but for now with the limited information I have this looks rather scary and I better let this pass.

But what do you think, can this be an interesting investment opportunity or is it just a scam? By chance anybody here who had tried it out?

<sup>all pics are from https://earth2.io/</sup>


Posted Using [LeoFinance <sup>Beta</sup>](https://leofinance.io/@stayoutoftherz/is-earth2-io-a-scam)