What a downcast Petón Due to the modernization of football, the majority of humanity is witnessing the heyday of culture crypto “sentimental, emotionally” overcome, helpless, overwhelmed. What is an NFT? An inextricable investment object. What is the Metaverse? A bunch of crappy graphics developed by Facebook. What is Cryptoland, the world’s first “physical island” and at the same time “crypto”?
Let’s find out right now.
The project. It dates from the end of last year, when several specialized media announced the creation of Crytpoland, “a large-scale project with the mission of building the world’s first physical island for the crypto community.” On its website, Cryptoland aspires to solve the big problem of crypto culture: “United in the digital, separated in the physical.” Thus, the island aspires to become a meeting point for all those people behind the avatars, the eccentric apes, the stolen works of art and the replication of everything-real.
The video. The interesting thing comes now. Cryptoland has gained notoriety thanks to a long promotional video where they explore the recesses of their island … Digitally. The simulation is preceded by the exalted testimonies of some of the most popular figures in crypto-culture, as Kyle Chassé, who claims to have already invested $ 500,000 in the project. This is followed by an animated recreation that would make the developers of the first Dreamworks cry with emotion.
In the final stretch of the video, the protagonists are, we suppose, those responsible for Crytpland: Max Olivier and Helena López Jurado.
The thread. We will talk about them in a couple of paragraphs. But first, let’s go to the thread that Crytpoland has popularized not so much among the community crypto as among all the people who observe, astonished and confused, everything related to the Metaverse. Sign it Molly white and it is extensive. It functions both as acid criticism and as a warning about what, on the surface, could well be another Fyre Festival: a too-good-to-be-true project headed for disaster.
an up-and-coming crypto scam — er, project — has managed to dunk on cryptobros better than any satirist i’ve seen so far, with one of the most painful-to-watch youtube videos i’ve seen in a while. join me in hell as we watch this together: https://t.co/m6ptLfU1jU
– Molly White (@ molly0xFFF) January 4, 2022
What is Cryptoland. First of all, an island. A piece of land located in the Pacific. Apparently, it is Nananu-i-Cake, a small islet within the territorial waters of Fiji bought several decades ago by a former British politician and put up for sale on various real estate platforms. The price to pay: about $ 12 million. The island is small (240 hectares), has five beaches and has limited infrastructure (a road, electricity and water supply). It has been on the market since at least 2017. That part, at least, is true.
From here, the fantasy shown in the video-simulation: Cryptoland aspires to become a resort-private club-investment hub-luxury residential island. The jewel in the crown of the project are 60 real estate parcels distributed by the “Blockchain Hills”, a kind of Beverly Hills open to auction from 319 ETH ($ 1.3 million). In short, the Great Amusement Park crypto. The place to go if you want to be in the true heart of the community.
The investment. How do you pay for all this? With investors, of course. Cryptoland has released a collection of NFTs (Cryptolanders) based on your own avatar (a coin that speaks) and that right now they are trading at a rate of $ 500 per unit. A lot of money in the real world, a modest amount in the NFT market. All the details of the project can be found in this PDF, the only thing tangible today.
Who is behind. Which brings us back to Max Olivier and Helena López Jurado, the two most visible faces of Cryptoland. If your names are vaguely familiar to you .. Perhaps it is due to an old controversy that both had with the community youtuber. Olivier and López organized the PlayAwards in 2016, an awards gala favored in their day by such relevant figures as El Rubius. In 2017, a year later, the pageant fell out of favor and was boycotted by others like Wismichu.
Why? Because the community youtuber discovered that Olivier and Lopez were also running YouMag, a gossip magazine focused on Internet celebrities. Olivier then focused all the anger of the youtubers, getting to star in an article in El Confidencial. Time buried both his awards and his magazine in oblivion. It is not the best precedent for a project of the scale of Cryptoland.
Parallelisms. Especially since we know how bombastic flirtations like this have ended. The Fyre Festival, a luxury festival promoted to exhaustion on social media, is the best example. When the many people who bought their ticket ($ 12,000) flocked to the Caribbean resort where it was being held … They stumbled upon crappy tents and pre-cooked sandwiches. A documentary shed light on the scam two years later (we talked about it at the time).
Competence. Cryptoland isn’t even the first crypto culture project to take over a private island. Crypto Island has been raising money for some time, or at least trying, to buy one in the Bahamas. Both support a more than plausible suspicion: that the universe crypto and NFTs are nothing more than pyramid fraud schemes deployed on a massive scale.
Time will tell if there is a bubble (and island) or not.