By day, you sell data capacity on a virtual network circuit provisioned on a rainbow emulated by lasers inside a large undersea cable. By night, you are a pirate, crisscrossing the virtual Caribbean and sacking virtual merchant ships.

The first job is “real” in the real world. You sell stuff you can’t touch or smell, but you go to an office and meet customers. The second job is not “real.” You are an avatar in the world that doesn’t exist. You capture stuff that you can’t touch or smell just the same, but you don’t get to go sailing. You sit in front of a computer for hours at end.

Some days are better than others. Sometimes – in the real world -- you sell out the data capacity and get a bonus. Your paycheck, paid in virtualized national currency, shows as a bigger—greater – number on the computer screen. You can trek to an ATM to get paper money.

There are some great moments in the virtual world as well. Sometimes you mastermind a brilliant raid and fill your ship with gold bullion and silver coin. You make a windfall in the game currency. The numbers that you see cross your screen would make Sir Francis Drake blush. You can’t make a withdrawal though – it’s just a game.

There are days when you wake up and say –which job is real? You talk about MPLS-enabled TCP/IP packets like they are real – but these are abstractions, bytes and bits. How is this different than selling virtual gold bullion to other virtual pirates?

But as your Sunday morning sensibility kicks in with the morning coffee you see what’s real and what’s not right away. Your bits selling job pays you the kind of money that covers your coffee beans from the corner supermarket, your mortgage, and the occasional bar hop. Your pirate gig is more lucrative on the face value of total income but in reality you can’t swap even a ton of virtual gold bullion for a single real world cup of coffee.

But what if you could?

Then suddenly, you could raid galleons by night and use the loot to buy a quad espresso in the morning. Pay off your real world house by laying waste to virtual Spanish fortresses. Drive your real world car payments to zero by negotiating down your virtual clipper’s virtualdocking fees.

This is the kind of a future that Virt-U, an ambitious U.K. company aiming to inject economic reality into virtual worlds, is attempting to help enable.

Virt-U is building a virtual world trading platform for game developers and gamers where all participants can securely register, track and transfer virtual assets.

“The foundation of our civilization’s progress came from the concept of private property,” said Daniel Doll-Steinberg, Virt-U co-founder. “We believe that introducing blockchain-based concept of private property to virtual worlds would set off a real economy during the age of exploration.”

Virt-U is using blockchain to register virtual world assets. Its tokens, which help identify their owner, are required to register ownership, as well as to list or sell assets.

Jumping off this premise, Virt-U is aimed at developers of video games, offering them an opportunity that is a cross between AWS partnership program and iTunes storefront. The opportunity is in joining an open protocol, decentralized community where developers get tools that can be used to create assets that can be introduced into virtual worlds as revenue generating opportunities, the very opportunities that then could be monetized via trades done in this very community.

This is not going to be a community of ISVs and startup shops.

The team behind Virt-U, and its advisors, are a phenomenal group of seasoned executives who all share a similar trait: they are pioneers from the global platform and digital asset management industry, veterans of the games world, and blockchain whizzes.

Virt-U believes that the thousands of developers starting to build fully immersive virtual worlds have the most to gain from joining with Virt-U and not surrendering all of their in-game revenue development to their platform partners. With advisors such as Ian Livingston, co-founder of Games Workshop and ex-executive chairman of Eidos and Jez San, founder of ARC, Argonaut, PKR, Origin8, Ninja Theory, and now Funfair Technologies, Virt-U has some of the world’s leading games’ minds creating and delivering their strategy.

“Using virtual reality to augment real-life experiences, especially in the gaming industry, is a powerful resource and something that Virt-U founders have exceptionally leveraged for the opportunity to make money,” said David Drake, of his family office LDJ Capital. “The fiduciary responsibility is clearly outlined by the leadership and I'm trusting their future with my money.”

Some of the titles that Virt-U leadership has worked on during their long and illustrious careers include game changing products such as Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, Lara Croft the Tomb Raider, The World of Tanks, Luxor, and Starglider for the Atari ST among others. And some of the licensing deals involved companies like Disney, Wal-Mart, Nickelodeon, Tesco, Microsoft, Sony among others.

The end game of all this activity is to give the virtual you a choice one day to stop living a dual life but pick one vocation.

Like you could quit being a pirate and start offering telecom services in the virtual Caribbean, to use the example above. Architects could offer to build real and virtual houses. Writers could publish their books in real and virtual worlds. Executives could open up affiliates of their firms in virtual worlds.

But it will all start with you being able to take a virtual Spanish dollar, exchange it for some of Virt-U’s VRT tokens, cash those into your fiat of choice, and buying that cup of coffee around the corner from your house.

The Virt-U (virt-u.io) early adopters stage (i.e. early funds token sale starts in 20 days.