Internet Cackles At Report $1.2 Billion Metaverse Has Grand Total Of 38 Users

While Meta struggles to get its employees excited to use its Metaverse, dubbed Horizon Worlds, another Metaverse, Decentraland, is facing a much graver problem: it's struggling to attract anyone.

According to a report from Dappradar, Decentraland, an $1.3 billion-valued, Ethereum-based metaverse focused on trading virtual real estate, logged a mere 38 active users over a 24-hour period recently.

CoinDesk reports that Decentraland has just 38 daily active users

October 7, 2022https://t.co/0Vwn5oQG76 pic.twitter.com/pP6VygU2rT

— web3 is going just great (@web3isgreat) October 8, 2022

Obviously, 38 active users in one day for any platform is a very, very bad metric. However, it looks particularly bad for Decentraland, a company that's often billed as one of the pioneering Metaverses of Web3.

Decentraland quibbled with Dappradar's methodology, noting that Dappradar qualified an "active user" as "a unique wallet address’ interaction with the platform’s smart contract" — basically, for Dappradar, an "active user" is someone who logs in and makes a purchase. Decentraland argued that Dappradar did not count users who logged in merely to chat. Decentraland argues that counting those users would make their active user total much higher, to the tune of 8,000 users today.

Sam Hamilton, Creative Director at Decentraland, tweeted that their internal data shows 56,697 "monthly active users," though few would argue that that is a great number for any online company.

Let's have a look at some of September's data:

56,697 MAU
1,074 Users interacting with smart contracts
1,732 minted Emotes
6,315 sold Wearables
300 Creators received royalties
161 created Community Events
148 DAO Proposals

— Decentraland (@decentraland) October 7, 2022

The Sandbox, another billion-dollar Metaverse company upset with DappRadar's report, told Coindesk, "Imagine you only track the number of people paying for something at a cashier at a shopping mall," he said. "That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of passerbys."

Despite the Metaverse company's quibbles, things hardly look good in the Metaverse sphere, as doubters find it difficult to see the point of a virtual space that's aesthetically indistinguishable from Second Life, which came out in 2003. Even those game to try a Metaverse have found themselves disappointed by the supposedly "innovative" future offered by places like Decentraland. A review of Decentraland written in March at the peak of the 'verse's popularity found it "empty, boring, and not very different from just another online game a teenager would toss away."