JPMorgan opens a Decentraland lounge featuring a tiger as the bank seeks to capitalize on $1 trillion revenue opportunity from the metaverse

• JPMorgan Chase opened its Onyx lounge in Decentraland as it seeks to capitalize on the metaverse.
• In a report, the bank said opportunities in the virtual world seem “limitless.”
• JPMorgan sees a new workforce and expanded virtual real-estate ownership financed by DAOs.

JPMorgan Chase has opened a lounge in Decentraland, as the biggest bank in the US looks to capitalize on what it says is “limitless” opportunity in the virtual world known as the metaverse.

In Decentraland, one of the most popular metaverses, the bank’s Onyx lounge resides in Metajuku, a virtual version of Tokyo’s Harajuku shopping district. A tiger wanders the first floor, and a picture of the bank’s boss Jamie Dimon hangs on the wall. A winding staircase leads to the second floor, where a person’s avatar can watch experts talk about the crypto market.

JPMorgan’s new footprint in virtual real estate coincided with the bank’s release of a white paper on opportunities in the metaverse — a market which it said could eventually generate $1 trillion in annual revenues.

While the definition of the metaverse is loose, it’s generally considered to be a virtual world where people can interact, attend events, and explore, as digital avatars of themselves.

In a tweet, Christine Moy, the global head of Liink, Crypto & the Metaverse for JPMorgan, said the bank wrote the paper to “help clients cut through the noise and highlight what we would love to see built or scaled next in commercial infrastructure, tech, privacy & identity, workforce, and social governance,” in the metaverse.

For example, the bank sees expanded virtual real estate ownership and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) eventually being the financial arm for those purchases.

In just six months in 2021, the average price of a parcel of virtual land doubled to $12,000 from $6,000, the report noted. JPMorgan also sees a new workforce and more virtual concerts like Ariana Grande’s.

“We are now at an inflection point, where it seems that not a day goes by without a company or celebrity announcing that they are building a presence in a virtual universe,” the report said. 

Hype around the metaverse jumped after the company formerly known as Facebook rebranded to Meta as a sign of its push into virtual worlds, JPMorgan said, noting the price of tokens backing metaverses like Decentraland, the Sandbox, and Somnium Space surged following the announcement. Other companies, such as Microsoft and Nike, have also sought to capitalize on metaverse potential.