A recent article, widely shared in the cryptosphere, questioned the number of active users on metaverse projects like Decentraland or The Sandbox. But the numbers would actually be skewed.
Decentraland does not have only 38 active users
Our colleagues from 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 derisory. This has raised the ire of the communities concerned, who have wanted to clarify things 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.
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 recalls that during the month of September, 161 events were created by the community, and 148 proposals were made within the DAO. The DCL Metrics site tends to confirm these figures, with 7,039 unique daily visitors for the week that just passed.
Decentraland’s lead developer, Juan Cazala, has confirmed that this data was in error, and provided an alternative access point to verify the numbers.
The Sandbox would also attract more users
For The Sandbox, the gap appears to be even larger. 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.
On the other hand, the number of monthly active users of The Sandbox would amount to 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 a data gap? By several reasons. On the one hand, it seems that CoinDesk teams focused on data from the wrong network for Decentraland, as Juan Cazala noted. 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 perform transactions. A point however raised in the CoinDesk article:
“The daily active users compiled by DappRadar do not take into account people who log in and browse a platform in the metaverse, 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 a matter of debate. We must therefore be very careful when it comes to numbers and blockchain.
