Metaverse is the future, said billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, who went so far as to rename his social media empire Meta Platforms (META).
Zuckerberg has put all his weight behind this metaverse, perceived as an immersive virtual world in which we will be able to lead a parallel life.
Thanks to tech hardware such as virtual reality headsets, you could, for example, go to a concert, go to the movie theaters, play your favorite video game, order food or go to the beach.
It is also possible to buy a lot of virtual land or a virtual villa near celebrities. Basically, it is possible to make your avatar live a life of dreams.
This virtual world was to take over fairly quickly, said its fervent defenders. If the covid-19 pandemic, which had forced us to stay at home for two years, allowed the metaverse to become a buzzword, the sharp decline of the virus also seems to have had an impact on the rise of the virtual world.
The Metaverse Is Trending Down
Data aggregator DappRadar recently released data showing that very few people are active in the metaverse based on traffic from two platforms with valuations over $1 billion. Another bad news for the metaverse is that users who have been there once don't tend to come back.
Decentraland, which defines itself as "the first-ever virtual world owned by its users," recorded only 38 "active users" between Oct. 6 and Oct.7. The Sandbox had 522 active users, according to DappRadar study first reported by Coindesk.
The largest number of daily "active users” ever on Decentraland was 675, while The Sandbox' s record is about 4,503, the study found.
Decentraland disputed the DappRadar data. The platform claims in a tweet to have 56,697 monthly active users (MAU).
It seems that DappRadar and Decentraland have a different definition of active users.
"What we are currently tracking at DappRadar is on-chain activity for blockchain applications. This means any smart contract interactions," Pedro Herrera, head of research at DappRadar, told TheStreet.
"What we see is basically 38 different daily users in the last month performing a trade. This is on-chain metric, very different from off-chain activity. Off-chain activity we are currently not tracking and refers to basically all Web2 activity," Herrera said.
To be clear, DappRadar tracks transactions via smart contracts, otherwise known as "payers." Transactions concluded by smart contracts require no human intervention. Everything is managed by mathematical codes.
Decentraland and The Sandbox list all the people who visit their respective platforms. This therefore combines "payers" and "players" to form "active users" because a "payer" can also be a "player" and vice versa.
Arthur Madrid, the co-founder of The Sandbox, has thus indicated on Twitter that the platform had 39,000 daily users and 201,000 monthly users.
There is a sign which shows that interest in the metaverse is in sharp decline. This sign is the drop in value of the native tokens of both platforms.
MANA, Decentraland's coin, has lost more than 88.7% of its value since its all-time high on Nov. 25, 2021, according to data from CoinGecko. SAND, the token of The Sandbox, is down 90.6% from its Nov. 25 all-time high.
Roblox (RBLX), which is considered the group that best symbolizes the metaverse, has seen its shares drop 67% since January. This represents some $36 billion of market valuation that has been wiped out.
'It's Lonely in the Metaverse'
It is in this gloomy context that Mark Cuban, a crypto investor, has just taken a jab at the metaverse. The billionaire commented on the Coindesk article by taking up almost the entire headline.
"It's Lonely in the Metaverse: Decentraland’s 38 Daily Active Users in a $1.3B Ecosystem," the entrepreneur and star of T.V. show "Shark Tank" posted on Oct. 8 with a link to the story.
Cuban said nothing more.
This mockery of the metaverse from the billionaire comes as no surprise as he has never hidden his skepticism of this space of the crypto sphere, despite the fact that he has invested in a metaverse-related project.
"The worst part is people are hooked on real estate in this place [metaverse]," Cuban told Altcoin Daily Youtube Channel in an interview last August. "That's just the dumbest s--- ever. The dumbest, dumbest. Did I say it was dumb. No, that's not strong enough. Super meta immaculately dumb," the Shark Tank's star blasted.
He went on to make a clear distinction between real estate in the real world and real estate in the virtual world. For him, the value of real estate is considerable because of the scarcity. But in the virtual world, we really can't talk about the scarcity of land.
Cuban has invested in Yuga Labs, which owns the famous NFTS Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. BAYC is very involved in real estate in the metaverse since the company has sold bits of virtual land.
"I am an investor with Yuga Labs right (but) I still thought it was dumb to do the real estate," the entrepreneur said when asked about BAYC's decision to sell plots of virtual land. "Maybe it was great money for them. That wasn't based off a utility."
