A recent article, widely shared in the cryptosphere, questioned the number of active users on metaverse projects like Decentraland or The Sandbox. But the figures are actually distorted. We take a look at what’s really going on in the metaverse
Decentraland doesn’t just have 38 active users
Our colleagues at CoinDesk published an article against the metaverse over the weekend, arguing that the active users on the two major projects Decentraland and The Sandbox were paltry. This has raised the ire of the communities concerned, who have sought to clarify matters in recent days.
The article quoted data from dAppRadar to arrive at a figure of 38 users for Decentraland. That is, the addresses of wallets that interact with the project’s smart contract. But according to Decentraland, the data is skewed, as only certain transactions are taken into account:
Lately, there has been a lot of misinformation on the number of active users of Decentraland. Some websites are tracking only specific smart contract transactions but reporting them as daily active users DAU, which is inaccurate.
– Decentraland (@decentraland) October 7, 2022
Decentraland’s Twitter account detailed the number of monthly active users (56,697), but also the number of users who would interact with the various smart contracts each day: 1,074. The project also points out that during the month of September, 161 events were created by the community, and 148 proposals were made within the DAO. The DCL Metrics website tends to confirm these figures, with 7,039 unique daily visitors for the past week.
Decentraland’s lead developer, Juan Cazala, confirmed that the data was wrong, and provided an alternative access point to verify the figures:
Nice journalisim @camlearnscrypto checking @DappRadar which tracks deprecated addresses and not even in the right network there are +500 users concurrently right now (https://t.co/VIHS7SQXA4) and these are the addresses per network: https://t.co/MMd8NrjgjV Coindesk quality https://t.co/JFslut1aVX
– cazala (@juancazala) October 7, 2022
The Sandbox would also attract more users
For The Sandbox, the gap seems to be even wider. The CoinDesk article reported that The Sandbox would only have 522 daily active users.
But according to Sébastien Borget, the project’s co-founder, there were in fact 20,000 to 30,000 active users during the special events offered in the virtual universe. This is what he explained last July, following another article:
Thanks Sebastien. Was quoting this article:https://t.co/L6V8NFmiaO
– Justin Taylor (@TheSmarmyBum) July 11, 2022
In addition, the monthly active users of The Sandbox would be more like 350,000 for season 2. This brings the number of daily active users to over 10,000.
How to explain this discrepancy
So how do we explain such data discrepancies? There are several reasons. On the one hand, it seems that CoinDesk teams focused on data from the wrong network for Decentraland, as noted by Juan Cazala. On the other hand, the article is based on users interacting with the smart contracts of The Sandbox or Decentraland.
This does not take into account users who visit virtual worlds but do not carry out transactions. A point raised in the CoinDesk article:
“The daily active users compiled by DappRadar do not take into account people who log in and browse a metaverse platform, or those who log in briefly for an event, such as a virtual fashion week. “
Should we then judge that only users who use their wallets “count”? This is of course open to debate. We must therefore be very careful when it comes to numbers and blockchain.
