Upland has raised $18 million

  Upland has raised $18 million and has a $300 million valuation for its nonfungible token (NFT) virtual real estate game, which is kind of like a real-world version of Monopoly.

  Upland, California based (whose official name is Uplandme.Inc.) describes itself as having one of the fastest growing metaverses on the blockchain that is mapped to the real world. It overlays virtual digital ownership on the real world, so you could own your house in the physical world or own it in the virtual world. Better yet, you could own San Francisco City Hall in the virtual world. NFTs use the transparency and security of the digital ledger of blockchain to authenticate digital items, and in this case, the NFTs authenticate ownership of a property, like the digital version of the Empire State Building. The company has a $300 million valuation even though it is only available in 13 cities in the U.S. so far.

  This year NFTs have been on the mind of top companies and that explains the strong valuation for Upland. Upland, which has started with a small 60,000 daily active users and now has grown to hundreds of thousands of daily active users! 

  Idan Zuckerman, cofounder of Upland, said in an interview with that the company is profitable and it will use the money to hire people and invest in user acquisition. “This is basically a way for us to be speed up the way we deliver new features and innovations for our roadmap,” said Zuckerman. “We also had our first major brand partnership in Upland now, and we will be able to bring more corporations into Upland.”

  Looking at Google Trends, you’ll see that NFTs started picking up in February and skyrocketed after related NFT sales like digital art and NBA Top Shot took off. In March, the artist Beeple sold an NFT piece at Christie’s for $69.3 million. It sounds so dumb. The popularity of NFTs have exposed some serious drawbacks too in some unfair and unjust scams where people steal art and sell it as their own NFTs.

  DappRadar, measuring the broader NFT market beyond just Ethereum, reported that NFT sales hit $1.2 billion in the first quarter, $1.3 billion in the second quarter, and a whopping $10.7 billion in the third quarter as games such as Axie Infinity took off.

  Enthusiasts also believe NFTs will be on the front fort in the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Ready Player One and Snow Crash. Since NFTs can authenticate digital ownership, you could take the assets and avatars you buy in one world and take them to another.