Building a Passive Income in the Metaverse with Upland

Last Updated on February 21, 2023 by Content Team

I started playing /investing in the Upland game around April 2021, when only 2 cities were live: New York and San Francisco. But what is it? Upland is basically Monopoly on the blockchain with property NFTs. You buy and sell properties, collect sets, receive yields and also have the ability to build on your property. Upland is an early stage metaverse that will expand in many directions over time.

Although the in-game currency, UPX, is not tradable on 3rd party exchanges, you can also sell your property NTFs for USD within the game.

I am investing money into Upland as another ‘digital asset’ in my publishing portfolio. I want to see if I can earn more revenue than one of my affiliate websites with the same investment, investing USD$2000 into the game.

What is a Metaverse

A metaverse is a virtual world online which can contain aspects of a digital and physical world. Many see the metaverse as being virtual reality (VR) driven, but currently, most metaverses can be accessed via a PC or mobile phone.

Another characteristic of a metaverse is its ability to act as a digital economy, which is Upland’s core feature.

What is Upland?

Upland is a property trading game with NFTs (non-fungible tokens) on the EOS blockchain. You buy and sell property NFTs for a profit and collect yields to buy more properties.  Upland does not stop there though.  The idea of a metaverse comes into play with the ability to build structures on your property, open businesses and visit different cities via train and aeroplane.

Upland has renamed the crypto gaming model from ‘play-to-earn’ to ‘play-to-own’ and recently secured $18M in funding to value the company at $300 million, with big investors like Block.one, Alumni Ventures and Global Founders Capital.

>>Get a UPX bonus when you sign up to play Upland through my referral links – Play Upland Now<<

How to Make Money in Upland

The main way to make money in Upland is by ‘flipping’ properties and collecting monthly yields or ‘rent’.  When new cities are launched, you can be the first to mint new properties, which will be the lowest price that property will be sold for, then sell the property on the secondary market.

You can also hold unique properties over the long term for capital gain.

How to Earn Passive Income in Upland with Property Yields

All newly-minted properties in Upland pay a yield of 17.3% (this is currently being reduced). If you mint a property for 100,000 UPX ($100), it will pay you 17, 300 UPX per year or $173 in dollar terms. Unlike the real world, you don’t have to wait a month to collect your rent. Yields are calculated in real-time and paid hourly.

If you mint new properties and they are in a collection, you will get boosted earnings. Below are some of the boosted earnings for exclusive and rare collections in Manhatten.

You have to get lucky to mint some of these properties, but you could buy them from other players on the secondary market within the game.  These properties will sell for x2 or x3+ the mint price so your actual yield as a yearly percentage will be reduced – but you are hopefully holding properties that will go up in value.

You need to be continually optimizing your yields, making sure they get the maximum yield across your portfolio by moving properties around in collections.  The trick to earning high yields is minting large properties in areas that could be in a collection. Here’s one of my high-yielding properties:

The property above pays a yield of 31.65%. It is a large property and part of the ‘Pelham Bay Limited Collection’ with a yield boost of x 1.6.

How to Extract USD as Passive Income from Upland

Once you have levelled up in the game, you can apply to sell your properties in USD.

The idea is to use your passive monthly yield to mint new properties when new locations are launched and flip them for profit in USD. USD properties sell quickly if priced just under an area’s current UPX floor price. Below is an example of Manhatten, when you search for properties for sale, the first listed are in USD.

>>Get a UPX bonus when you sign up to play Upland through my referral links – Play Upland Now<<

My Upland Net Worth

At the time of writing, my upland net worth is 4,225,752  UPX, equating to $4225.00 in dollar terms.

Note,  property valuations are based on your purchase price. I bought a lot of properties in Manhattan at the start, so my portfolio is undervalued by around 2,000000 UPX.   If I sold all my properties in USD, I should get around $6K after a $2k investment…but I’m holding for the long term and looking for monthly passive income.

I’m still debating whether to sell these and buy them back at the floor price to increase my Net Worth – I need to get to the next milestone of 10M UPX to get more Spark (the building utility token).

My current rental yield is around 8% because of buying properties in exclusive collections on the secondary market for asset appreciation.

Upland Strategy to Maximize Profit

Upland has many different strategies, but mine is a mix of maximizing my monthly yields and holding rare and exclusive properties for the long term. You generally need to buy these properties on the secondary market from another player for an inflated price, reducing your yield in percentage terms.

You could go for a 100% yield strategy and never buy on the secondary market, only minting properties to maximize your yield – I’ve seen a couple of players with a 20%+ yield on their total portfolio.

I am also creating a node with the members of my Facebook group – Upland Game Pros, which now has over 1000 members. An Upland node is an area that gets built up with many structures and businesses, you then have the potential to receive boosted yields if your area gets acknowledged by the Upland team. Here’s a look at City Island in the Bronx, which is getting developed quickly:

Upland Other Ways to Earn Money

There will be other ways to earn money in Upland as the game develops. Here’s a quick look at a couple:

Spark Rental – Spark is the game utility-building token that can be gained from levelling up and participating in treasure hunts. You use ‘spark hours’ to build structures on your properties, similar to man-hours in the real world. You can buy spark at certain times and 1 spark cost $460 (at the time of writing). Spark is scarce in the Upland metaverse and can be easily rented to other players.  1 spark can be rented for $1/day (what I am currently paying), which equates to a 78.26% yearly return on your money if you invest in spark.

It’s thought that buildings structures on your NFT properties will give you boosted monthly earnings, when this happens the price of spark rentals will likely increase,  so I see the spark token as a good long-term investment that could yield more passive income than the actual properties.

Construction businesses – There are a few guys in Discord groups that build properties for you. They basically rent spark and charge you a percentage for the build.

Upland is still in the very early stages and constantly evolving; cars will likely be introduced sometime this year which will add new business ventures to the game and ways to make passive income.

Upland Businesses

Upland has recently introduced businesses into the game called metaventures,  currently in beta. You can basically open a shop to sell in-game items like block explorers on your property once you have acquired a business license NFT. This will be expanded out into many different areas over time – I can easily see people displaying digital artwork in galleries, car rentals, interior property design etc.

Upland Whales

Many of Upland’s rare and ultra-rare properties are gobbled up by game ‘whales’ – it’s very unlikely you will be able to buy an ultra-rare property without investing serious amounts of money. You can still try and get hold of rare properties and exclusive collections.

I’ve just looked at rare properties in Manhattan, the 57 st rare collection properties are selling for around $2,500 USD.

A recent auction for ultra-rare properties was won by someone called abdullah86sa, who spent $73K USD just in a single auction event.

abdullah86sa current net worth is 3,163,696,249 UPX Net worth, his account will easily be worth over $3M USD if you wanted to buy all his properties.

Upland’s Future

I think Upland has a great future. I can see people earning a full-time living just in Upland alone, and I’m very excited to see what Upland will look like in 5 years’ time.

Upland 3rd Party Tools

UPX Land – this tool lets you look at other players’ account and areas.

Upland Analytics – This is Upland’s analytics tool run on Google Data Studio. The tool lets you filter all the properties on the market by price, city and collections etc.

Upland Further reading

Upland white paper

Best Upland Youtube Channels

Loyldoyl – He has some great insight on his channel with over $40K invested into the game. You will see him bidding on some of the ultra-rare properties in the Upland auctions.