With a value of BRL 6.2 billion, metaverse has only 38 active users

The term Metaverse has become hugely popular this year, dubbed the future of the internet and the great fever of the moment. But figures from one of the most famous Metaverses show that the population of these virtual universes may not be that large.

A recent study of active users in the metaverse Decentraland – one of the most well-known metaverse projects, left researchers horrified.

According to data aggregator DappRadar, aimed at tracking decentralized applications, Ethereum-based Decentraland, only had 38 “active users” in a 24 hour period – an incredibly low number, even for forgotten online games.

The problem is even bigger for Decentraland, especially given that the company has a market value of $1.2 billion.

Decentraland claims are higher than shown

Having such a low number of active users in 24 hours is a failure for any project, Web3, 2 or even 1.

To keep the negative publicity in check, the team behind Decentraland justified that the numbers are not as low as claimed. According to the creative director of DecentralandSam Hamiltonthe problem is with DappRadar.

“DappRadar doesn’t track our users, just people interacting with our contracts.”

Hamilton told CoinDesk that “active users” are defined as unique blockchain wallet addresses that interact with his system. That is, this means that users who simply log in to chat or communicate with others will not be counted by DappRadar.

Also according to Hamilton, the actual number of users of the platform is about 8 thousand active people per day. Even Decentraland’s Twitter account tried to correct the numbers, stating that only users who interact with smart contracts are 1,074 per day.

Let’s take a look at some data from September:

56,697 BAD
1,074 users interacting with smart contracts
1,732 minted Emotes
6,315 wearables sold
300 creators received royalties
161 community events created
148 DAO proposals

— Decentraland (@decentraland) October 7, 2022

“Anyone who says there is a metaverse that worked is lying”

When you consider that Decentraland is valued at $1.2 billion and has up to 8,000 active users per day, that number isn’t too surprising, in fact Decentraland can be considered a failure.

Just out of curiosity and without any scientific or statistical weight, we can compare Decentraland to CS:GO, a popular game that has been around for almost 10 years and by the way has a market value of US$1 billion. In the past 24 hours, it had 675,000 online users, well above Decentraland’s optimistic 8,000.

to Coindesk, Sasha Fleyshmanportfolio manager at digital asset investment firm Arksaid it’s still not possible to say that the Metaverse worked.

“Anyone who says there’s a metaverse that worked today is lying.”