Cherre's CEO on the Metaverse: 'Tell Me How I Would Use It'

LD Salmanson, CEO of real estate data firm Cherre, has nothing against the virtual world and what it could offer.

“I’m a gamer,” he tells GlobeSt.com. “I was a professional gamer for a little while. I’m appreciable of the fact that there can be meaningful social interactions on some of these platforms. I can buy into that looking at the longer horizon. But I feel that most of the people talking about the metaverse are trying to make money off it.”

And not money the old-fashioned way, by offering something people want and need. More like a sales pitch that’s a little too fast and loose. Often it expands beyond the metaverse concept and into something called Web3, in which everything is supposed to be decentralized and running on the blockchain technology that is beyond cryptocurrencies, among other applications.

“I have this discussion every other week,” Salmanson says. “Somebody will approach and say, ‘Why aren’t you doing something on blockchain technology/?’” His answer? “Tell me how I would use it.”

“Then they’ll say something along the lines of, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get shared liquidity in an asset?’ I say to what purpose?”

There are already technical approaches to fractionalized ownership of real estate assets. Some use tools like blockchain and tokens to tie partial ownership to a mechanism that offers potential liquidity—although only when the buyers and sellers are on the same platform. 

The problem is something that has already begun to appear in the market: an attempt to create derivatives that try to follow asset prices without any claim on the properties themselves or their rental incomes.

“If I’m pretending a value, then it’s just a betting market. It has nothing to do with crypto,” Salmanson says. “I’m not getting anything as a user that I’m not getting right now.”

There are promises, like virtual reality headsets, but Salmanson says that, for now, they’re wanting because they don’t interact, which means the software likely won’t either.

“Whatever hardware you have, it matters,” he says. “That’s the headset I’m getting and that’s the app store I’m getting. More likely, if an Apple provides goggles with a level of augmented reality, if the hardware is strong enough, maybe I see different ads than you see. Now we’re going back to either gaming or business use cases. The gaming I get, but it’s not an asset market compared to other assets.”

What could make it work, especially for commercial real estate? A combination of hardware and software that allows users to do something they couldn’t before. “I need to be able to do something today that I couldn’t fundamentally do before. It can’t be a little better.” And currently, that’s not the case.