Riding The Wave News Summary 84
It's Lonely in the Metaverse: Decentraland’s 38 Daily Active Users in a $1.3B Ecosystem, BNB Smart Chain Resumes Operations After $100M Exploit, & more
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It's Lonely in the Metaverse: Decentraland’s 38 Daily Active Users in a $1.3B Ecosystem
Is Bitcoin an inflation hedge? Why BTC hasn’t faired well with peak inflation
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It's Lonely in the Metaverse: Decentraland’s 38 Daily Active Users in a $1.3B Ecosystem
What’s going on in the metaverse these days, you might ask. Looking at two of the biggest companies with over $1 billion valuations, the answer is surprising: Not much, or at least not enough to bring users back every day. According to data from DappRadar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland had 38 active users in the past 24 hours, while competitor The Sandbox boasted 522 active users in that same time.
An active user, according to DappRadar, is defined as a unique wallet address’ interaction with the platform’s smart contract. For example, logging onto The Sandbox or Decentraland to make a purchase with SAND or MANA, each platform’s respective native utility token, is counted as an “active use.”
This means that DappRadar’s compilation of daily active users doesn’t account for people who log in and mosey around a metaverse platform or drop in briefly for an event, such as a virtual fashion week. It also likely means that these spaces are not where people are making transactions such as buying non-fungible tokens (NFT).
Despite low user metrics, Decentraland and The Sandbox have high valuations. According to data from Messari, Decentraland and The Sandbox both have market caps of around $1.3 billion each. While the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity has a $1.16 billion market cap, its nearly 22,000 daily users reported on DappRadar suggest that open-ended metaverses that don't provide incentives to stay, such as gaming or trading, may not see regular returning users at this point.
In July, skater Tony Hawk announced his virtual skatepark paired with an avatar collection in The Sandbox, which aims to bring fans from his $1.4 billion “Tony Hawk Pro Skater” video game to a new, more interactive platform. Set to run from October 19 to 23, the turnout of virtual skaters may be larger than the users purchasing Hawk’s NFTs in SAND.
It’s definitely extremely early for the Metaverse space, and while the focus is currently on directed or undirected metaverse experiences at the moment, I think both will be overshadowed in the long term. I think long term, there may be a project (token or coin that could be one of the current major players or a new project) that functions as a backend to connect different games that may be developed by large groups or indie developers. It also may act as a meeting point between the different game universes should they decide to do a combined event which would be facilitated by their game assets being stored on the same network. This would allow the individual games creator to have more control while getting access to a larger community.
BNB Smart Chain Resumes Operations After $100M Exploit
The BNB Smart Chain (BSC) resumed operations at around 06:40 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as chain validators adopted a software update that would close the exploit used by hackers to drain funds off-chain.
The BNB Chain was halted earlier after an exploit was discovered that drained $100 million in crypto from the platform; $7 million of the total crypto has already been frozen.
Centralized chains like BNB’s are a weird situation for crypto as they allow for network freezes and other actions that both governments and banks can currently do, defeating a lot of the purposes of crypto but also providing convenience and safety features that the majority of people want.
Is Bitcoin an inflation hedge? Why BTC hasn’t faired well with peak inflation
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