Decentraland has been upgraded from a hamlet to a village, according to revised numbers from the data platform DappRadar.
DappRadar says there are now 650 daily Unique Active Wallets (UAW) on Decentraland, or users interacting with the dApp, defined as a decentralized application that runs on a blockchain without a central administrator.
New numbers from DappRadar showing the daily active users on Decentraland (DappRadar)
“The DappRadar tooltip describes the UAW or user data as the ‘number of unique wallet addresses interacting with a dApp’s smart contracts.’ So, to be counted by DappRadar, a user needs to make a blockchain transaction,” the data company explained.
New numbers from DappRadar showing Decentraland’s monthly user base (DappRadar)
Over the course of the last 30 days, there were a total of 7,490 unique users on the platform with a total of $110,390 in volume. In total, on-chain data shows that there’s a balance of $28.8 million in assets with the dApp’s smart contracts.
DappRadar’s data shows that the largest number of active users came in late September, when the platform saw just over 1300 online at once.
When CoinDesk reported that were 38 users across Decentraland’s $1.1 billion platform, citing DappRadar’s numbers, there was a considerable amount of pushback from Decentraland, which claimed that there were over 55,000 thousand monthly active users on its platform.
“It’s important to note that data on the blockchain is unchangeable, and therefore it doesn’t lie,” DappRadar said in a blog post. “However, this data doesn’t always mean the same for each dApp. Furthermore, blockchain data doesn’t always paint the entire picture.”
But doing a census of the metaverse is difficult, and Decentraland’s official numbers just don’t add up to other publicly available data especially as they don’t account for bots or idle users.
Decentraland’s numbers from Catalyst Monitor, a tool for tracking the load on each of its servers which it calls catalysts, show that there are 509 active users as of Tuesday afternoon Asia time. Nansen’s Entity Billboard tool, which tracks 72 of Decentraland’s smart contracts, shows there are less than 400 users.
Decentraland’s active userbase according to Nansen (Nansen)
Both of these align with DappRadar’s revised numbers.
To put things into context, the top PC games on the gaming platform Steam have active player counts in the mid-hundreds of thousands during the North American evening according to tracking tool SteamCharts. Dota 2 would have just north of 600,000 during this window, while PUBG: Battlegrounds has almost 400,000.
When compared to a PC game, Decentraland’s numbers would put it in line with the current active monthly players on the fighting game Tekken 7, which launched in 2015, or the critically panned Battlefield 2042, considered to be a disaster by executives.
At the same time, Meta’s Horizon Worlds metaverse is also falling short as the Wall Street Journal reported. Internal company documents, according to the Journal, put its monthly active users at less than 200,000 which is far below its initial goal of 500,000.
The Journal reported that only 9% of worlds built by creators are ever visited by at least 50 people, and most are never visited at all.
Research by CoinDesk suggests that the number could be even lower, perhaps in the tens of thousands. Decentraland’s MANA token is down 1% on-day, and is currently trading at $0.64. The token is down 80% year-to-date.
Exchange data aggregated by Kaiko shows that the trading volume of metaverse tokens is at an all-time low, from a peak in late 2021.
Kaiko exchange volume. (Kaiko)
At the time token trading was evenly distributed between Sandbox and Decentraland, but now what’s left of the trading volume is effectively just SAND with AXS, MANA, and ENJ being virtually eliminated.
The CoinDesk Metaverse Select Index (MTVS), which tracks all of the Metaverse majors including MANA, The Sandbox’s token, as well as Axie Infinity, is down 40% since inception.
