If you ever owned a Tamagotchi or loved playing Nintendogs, the odds are that you are going to love this project.
According to new study, the number of individuals looking for a companion animal to keep them company soared at its peak during COVID-19 — not just physically, but also in the metaverse.
The issue is: Is tokenized pets a passing fad or a long-term trend?
The metaverse is a virtual world that is thought to be the next step in the internet. This world is made possible by virtual reality and augmented reality.
There are a variety of options for acquiring or adopting a pet in the metaverse, and each has its own set of benefits. You may purchase a puppy and go for a stroll in Decentraland‘s virtual open world, or buy a fish and put it in a glass on your dresser.
Simply by purchasing a nonfungible token (NFT) image on a marketplace such as OpenSea, you may acquire a pet in the metaverse. What these cases have in common is that they exist solely in the digital world. If you buy an Axie on Axie Infinity, it does not exist in the real world either.
There are, however, initiatives that attempt to blend the virtual and real worlds. ClassicDoge, for example, was founded in November 2021 and allows you to scan and tokenize a 3D representation of your pet in the real world so that they may accompany you into the metaverse.
Although the pandemic may have been a catalyst for the creation of pet NFTs, they were nevertheless a logical progression of the metaverse: Saylor Howell, CEO of ClassicDoge, told Cointelegraph that while the epidemic was an inspiration to create pet NFTs, it was only a matter of time before they emerged.
Despite the fact that the project is still in its early stages, marketing director Kade Cooper told Cointelegraph that the team’s long-term goal is to “become a portal for bringing your real pet into the metaverse. You may walk your dog again, have her sit down next to you even though she’s passed away down the road,” he stated.
According to data from cybersecurity firm Similarweb, the total number of unique visitors to OpenSea’s NFT marketplace for the term “pet” or keywords relating to dogs and cats reached 636,000 in October 2021. However, by December, this figure had decreased to 246,000.
The popularity of NFT pets was reflected in online searches for NFT pets and related terms. Searches peaked at around 206,000 during October before declining to about 93,800 searches in December.
Even if virtual pets have never been this lifelike, the concept of having a digital pet has not been new. The notion of possessing a digital pet was popularized in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Tamagotchi. In fact, Tamagotchi’s website attracted over 125,000 visits in December 2021, up almost 750% from December 2019.
