Virtual real estate is booming, with sales topping $US500 million ($700 million) last year and predicted to double again in 2022.

Within a few years, the market size of the metaverse could be valued in the trillions, according to investment banks like Morgan Stanley.

This week, Christie, a retired school teacher in Perth, paid a bit over $1,000 to buy a virtual penthouse in a place called Uphoria, one of the many metaverse worlds that are being launched this year.

“The vision for this penthouse is rather than me hosting Zoom calls, I can send out my link to people to join me there,” she said.

“If we’re going to do Zoom calls anyway, we might as well do it in style.”

But as the hype goes into overdrive, some are warning that virtual land is just another pyramid scheme, driven by baseless speculation, and when it fails many will lose their money.

So what is virtual land, what are the risks for potential buyers, and who’s actually buying it?

Metaverses like TCG World are designed to be collaborative virtual spaces where users can socialise, play, work, learn, and shop. Think of them like enormous online multiplayer games, such as Fortnite, except they’re not just for shooting each other.

There have been multiple, repeated attempts to build spaces like this over the years, and none have proved that popular.

In the past few years, however, improvements in virtual reality (VR) headsets, the rise of “play-to-earn” games, as well as the relative popularity of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have convinced some tech people that the metaverse’s time has come.