The first virtual millionaire
The cover of the May 1st 2006 issue of Businessweek was groundbreaking.
It featured a black-haired Asian woman donning a red qipao on a yellow background. Yet, it wasn’t groundbreaking because of the individual’s gender or ethnicity, rather because the cover star wasn’t “real”—she was an avatar. Anshe Chung is known as the first “virtual millionaire”, the metaverse’s John Jacob Astor, if you will. Chung, the avatar, was born in 1999 in a game called “Asheron’s Call” where she quickly amassed a substantial fortune, however there existed no way to exchange in-game dollars for fiat currencies or real-world dollars at the time. She saw an opportunity when Second Life (SL) launched in 2003, along with LindeX 1, their proprietary exchange where players can trade US Dollars for Linden Dollars, Second Life’s currency. Anshe Chung was born again in Second Life on March 26, 2004 and launched her real estate business a few months later.
The business model was simple: buy plots of land in SL, develop them by creating beautiful architectural spaces and rent them to other players. At its peak, the Anshe Chung Studios, Chung’s company, employed more than 80 people in Wuhan and generated over 670 million Linden$ in yearly revenue, roughly 2.5M US dollars at the time.