The fall in cryptocurrency prices presented Aditya Saxena with an investment opportunity he couldn’t pass up: a plot of land in the metaverse.

A software engineer at Microsoft Corp., the 25-year-old bought the land for about $3,000 in August. A few months earlier he saw similar properties that sold for three or four times that price.

Saxena has long been fascinated by the metaverse: the hotchpotch of immersive online worlds that blend technologies like gaming, social media, and live streaming. She said that she is too young to buy a real house and considers the metaverse land grab worth it.

“They were in …