Metaverse is the shiny new toy that everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to marketers have been going gaga over for many months. It’s the land of Web3 that promises deep engagement with consumers and users in a virtual world. However, it seems like the craze and curiosity around the metaverse is silently fading. The new toy might be losing its shine.
Famous metaverse project Decentraland that serves as a virtual home to many celebrities including Asian singer JJ Lin hasn’t exactly had a lot of crowd traffic recently. Decentraland is Ethereum-based sandbox environment that allows you to buy and sell virtual real estate.
As per a story in Futurism, a study conducted by DappRadar found that Decentraland had only 38 active users over a period of 24 hours; “a confoundingly low number, especially considering the company has a market cap of a whopping $1.2 billion.”
On being asked about the low turnout, Decentraland countered by saying that ‘active users’ are simply unique blockchain wallet addresses that interact with its system. In simpler words, CoinDesk explained that users who just log in to chat and interact with others aren’t being counted.
“DappRadar doesn’t track our users, only people interacting with our contracts,” said Sam Hamilton, creative director at Decentraland to CoinDesk. He further added that Decentraland averages around 8000 users in a day.
8000 users however, is still a pretty meagre figure for a platform that is supposed to revolutionize everything from online engagements to communities.
“It’s outright embarrassing if only a few dozen transactions are happening per day.” As mentioned in the story by Futurism.
The metaverse, though extremely popular as a new and comprehensive product offering for the foreseeable future, is still vexed by the disproportionality between large market values and a low number of actual users. This may result in a massive decline in the keenness and demand for owning and selling virtual real estate along with other blockchain related digital assets.
There is still a lot of confusion around the reliability and usability of Web3 and blockchain that discourages consumers from exploring the vast potential it has to offer. Until companies develop trustful relationships with their target consumers, having large market valuations will be of no good use.