Despite the bearish market sentiment around crypto and NFTs, an upcoming Ethereum-based role-playing game “Illuvium” has defied the odds to close a virtual land sale worth over $72M.

Investors and potential players were able to purchase approximately 20,000 digital parcels in an auction Dutch-style between June 2-5, with about 282 plots being sold every hour.

Illuvium’s land NFTs run on Ethereum’s layer-2 scaling protocol Immutable X, which facilitates cheaper, faster, and more energy-efficient transactions. The plots supply the fuel and elements that power Illuvium’s gameplay and are tiered from level 1 to 4 according to their rarity and the volume of in-game resources they can generate. The company hopes to increase the number of land plots in its game by 100,000.

In-game benefits for landowners include fuel extraction, which can then be sold to players to make a profit. The plots also give landowners 5% of the in-game revenue.

For future giveaways, 29 of the initial plots were kept by developers. The remaining two Tier 5 plots will go up for auction in a regular auction. The prices for Tier 1 plots start at $2,700 (currently $3,000.00), Tier 2 plots are $6,100, Tier 3 and Tier 4 respectively, while Tier 5 plots will be auctioned off via a standard auction format. Tier 4 plots go for 80 ETH ($148,000).

In a tweet, the creators of this project said that approximately 4,018ETH ($7.4 million) will be distributed to ILV token holders that hold it. 239,388 of the game’s sILV2 tokens (about $22 million worth) will be burned or permanently destroyed in order to reduce the total supply.

The Illuvium-Land Sale has officially ended!