Nearly $2 billion metaverse project has only 38 users

Decentraland, a metaverse project valued at nearly $2 billion AUD, only has 38 active users according to a new report.

A dire new report shows that Metaverse project “Decentraland”, a project that is worth nearly $2 billion AUD in market capital, only has 38 active users. Decentraland states that the number reflected as “active user” isn’t entirely true, however, as it only counts people who interact with the metaverse’s “contracts.”

In a new report by CoinDesk, (thanks, Futurism) Decentraland, an Ethereum-based metaverse project valued at nearly $2 billion AUD, is supposedly only seeing 38 ‘active users’ over the span of 24 hours, at least according to tracker website DappRadar1. To clarify, Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, and the ‘metaverse’ is a vague description for virtual or mixed reality projects, usually involving VR headsets.

Decentraland stated that its ‘active users’ metric only counts users that interact with its “contracts”, while the platform sees around 8,000 users on average daily. However, 8,000 daily users on a platform that is worth approximately $2 billion AUD, with only 38 of them interacting with the financial bedrock of said platform over the span of a 24-hour period, is not great for something that is supposed to be the foundation of the future — and digital industry veterans were not particularly impressed.

What's amazing is the owners of this project dispute the measurement metric and say 'ACTUALLY, it's 8000 users'. I'm sorry?? 8000? So that's... $150k per user for your market cap? Lads. Come now

— Alex Donaldson (@APZonerunner) October 13, 2022

Creative Director of Decentraland Sam Hamilton disagreed with how the numbers from DappRadar were pulled. Even though the peak attendance has fallen since March, he states that the “core community of people returning every day is growing.”

Another metaverse project, The Sandbox, also disagreed with DappRadar’s findings. CEO Arthur Madrid explained the distinction between active users and spectators: “An ‘active user’ is a user that connects over a period of time. A daily ‘active user’ is someone that connects at least once a day.”

“Imagine you only track the number of people paying for something at a cashier at a shopping mall,” he continued. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of passer-bys.” Despite this statement, however, it’s worth noting that each of these projects is valued similarly, at nearly $2 billion AUD, which no matter how many visitors you get, doesn’t equal the required amount of sales interactions to make that investment worth it..

Mass adoption of the metaverse, cryptocurrency, and Web3 is slow and may never take off. We spoke with content creators and talent agencies who surmised that there’s not “one shred of evidence” that Web3 is the way to go. Existing Web3 projects have often failed from the jump — and the idea for them to succeed in the future apparently involves labour abuse.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.