Kieran Warwick is one of the co-founders of Illuvium, an open-world blockchain roleplaying game. He is also the brother of Synthetix founder Kain Warwick. From becoming Australia’s youngest Harvey Norman franchisee to founding community-based food review app The Burger Collective, Kieran has proved himself as a serial entrepreneur.
Warwick made a virtual land investment in mid-2020, when use cases for virtual property were limited. Because it didn’t offer advertising or mining, virtual land was lacking in utility at the time. Despite this, Warwick invested in the hopes that Axie Infinity would be the firm that creates the Metaverse while the project was still in its early stages of development. His decision to invest clearly came from a place of sharp insight, as the plots dramatically gained in value later that year.
Kieran announced in July that he achieved a 9200% profit by selling a virtual block of land obtained from the Axie Infinity metaverse. He compares his investment method to physical real estate, stating that when predicting whether property values in a specific suburb will rise, investors look for new developments and other expansion signals. Beyond speculative buy-and-hold strategies, Warwick underlines that virtual real estate investors can put their land to work by hosting advertisements on their plots in Decentraland.
Warwick also joined the first NFT summit held in the Metaverse, in Decentraland in June. He shared that his idea of developing a AAA blockchain game came from his involvement in initiatives like Blueshyft, Australia’s most advanced in-store digital currency payment gateway.
Warwick is one of the advisers of PathDAO, a gaming guild turned fintech, and debuted on the Financial Review Young Rich List in October 2021 with a net worth of $463 million. He showed favor for crypto in December 2021 by tweeting: “In the future, an NFT collection with 100,000 mints will seem extraordinary. Human psychology is fascinating. Do you think the floor price of punks and apes is insane now? Come back when there are 1 billion people who’ve adopted crypto.”
Illuvium — an open-world sci-fi roleplaying game, monster collector and auto battler built on Ethereum — is set to launch in the first quarter of 2022 for Windows and Mac, as announced by Warwick in the Illuvium Discord server on August 30, 2021.
Illuvium’s full release was previously scheduled for Q4 2021, but due the Open Beta’s delay, that timeframe was pushed back to 2022. The mobile launch is planned to follow the PC debut, and Warwick has stated that console versions will be released soon after. Moreover, the release year for the second title is tentatively set for 2023.
Things will kick into gear in 2022, Warwick said in an interview with Stockhead about crypto and blockchain game uptake. He further added: It will herald the beginning of crypto’s mainstream adoption. Right now, on the blockchain, sustainable play-to-earn ecosystems are being pioneered. In the same interview, he shared his views on Metaverse adoption in 2022: GameFi’s attraction, I believe, will continue to draw more individuals into the Metaverse as it evolves.
Metaverse
