• Decentraland made investors euphoric
• Cryptocurrency MANA with a market capitalization in the billions
• Users don’t seem impressed
Facebook’s rebranding to Meta created real hype around the Metaverse, a three-dimensional interactive and immersive environment that Mark Zuckerberg envisioned would be accessible to people from all over the world on a variety of devices. For example, the Boston Consulting Group estimates that the global metaverse market could reach $400 billion in volume in the next two years, according to Yahoo Finance. But in the meantime disillusionment has set in. This is clearly reflected in the number of users of the 3D platform Decentraland.
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What is Decentraland?
Decentraland is a decentralized virtual world that anyone can explore for free. By interacting with the game world, buying virtual properties or designing your own digital assets, you can also earn your own cryptocurrency MANA Coin. The virtual properties in Decentraland are NFTs that can be purchased with the cryptocurrency MANA, which is based on the Ethereum blockchain. Decentraland’s cryptocurrency MANA currently has a market cap of $1.24 billion (as of October 31, 2022).
Numerous companies present
Decentraland was one of the early pioneers of the Metaverse, and for a while it felt like the virtual world was becoming a cultural, consumer, and social hub. Even Times Square can already be found in the virtual world.
It is therefore not surprising that a whole series of important companies bought virtual land at an early stage and established their own shops and places of interest on it. Well-known investors who wanted to gain a digital foothold in the virtual 3D world are JPMorgan, Samsung and adidas. The Caribbean state of Barbados also made headlines, opening an embassy in Decentraland and becoming the first country in the world to have its own embassy in the Metaverse.
Huge sums of money have been invested for this purpose. One transaction in mid-2021 stands out: a digital real estate investment company acquired a total of 259 plots – the size of ten football fields – from Decentraland for more than $ 913,000 to build a virtual shopping area there.
Users stay away
But their stake could now become a billion-dollar hole for investors. Because, as “BTC-Echo” reported in mid-October, Decentraland is far from entering the mainstream. There is still a yawning void in the virtual world of Decentraland, you have to search for other avatars for a long time. According to DappRadar, only 516 users have been in the virtual world in the past 30 days, which equates to an average of just 17 per day. Even counting only those users who also transact with the smart contract – trading items, for example – the numbers are way below expectations and don’t seem to justify the market value.
The fact that Decentraland is so poorly received by users may be due to the fact that neither its appearance nor the activities you can do in it are particularly impressive: “Graphically, they just come close to the Metaverse pioneer “Second Life “, that in the beginning in 2003 – they can’t even keep up with the current, popular game hits. That gamers are not enthusiastic about this becomes clear when you look at the extinct virtual spaces,” says “Trending Topics” about the digital worlds of Decentraland.
But maybe it’s also because the idea of a virtual world, in which you can explore the limits of your imagination, according to Decentraland, was particularly tempting in times of the corona pandemic. But now the time of the lockdowns is over and people can frolic in the real world again.
Editorial finanzen.net
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