Decentraland, still king of the metaverse?

When we were talking about the difference between Crypto and Blockchain gaming, we had drawn a table between the market leaders and their challengers. Among the “Metaverse” classification, Decentraland was unmistakably the market leader and its biggest competitor at that time was Voxels. Mor recently, Somnium Space came to round off the horizon of projects offering a universe accessible in high-end virtual reality.

Nowadays, is Decentraland still king, both in terms of active wallets and volume traded?

Evolution of Sales USD through time

Before going into detail, here is the evolution of the sales USD volume of each of the projects since their launch. This includes land (LAND, Parcel, Estate…) but also collectible objects (clothes, color…) and decentralized names (Name) within the metaverse.

The cumulative dollar total for these three projects represents a sales volume of $28,553,799. The chart excludes Decentraland’s initial LAND sales for the month of December 2018 valued at $5,815,255. 

Separately, this corresponds to:

• Decentraland, since March 2018: $24,756,378
• CryptoVoxels, since June 2018: $2,108,521
• Somnium Space, since October 2019: $1,688,898

If we take a closer look at these numbers, let’s separate the land sales numbers (LAND, EST, PARCEL and CVPA) from the rest:

• Decentraland (LAND and EST): $24,210,750 
• CryptoVoxels (CVPA): $2,086,971
• Somnium Space (PARCEL): $1,586,743

It is interesting to note that during the first half of 2020 is when the volumes of the two “challengers” have increased to similar levels as Decentraland.

While Decentraland’s dominance continues to be visible, the appearances of “flippening” by the two challengers are milestones in the history of these projects.

Evolution of Sales volume through time

Although more than 95% of the dollar volume traded is represented by the sale of LAND, this is not the case for the volume of sales over time. Therefore, we have separated the land sales from the rest of the NFTs of the projects for the following charts.

LAND

In total, there were 28,693 sales for the LAND of the three projects combined. In this chart, 9,826 sales in December 2018 have been removed.

Separately, this represents for the three projects:

• Decentraland, since March 2018: 20,855 sales
• CryptoVoxels, since June 2018: 5,638 sales
• Somnium Space, since October 2019: 2,200 sales

This time, the “flippening” between CryptoVoxels and Decentraland happened during the year 2019 and the trend has gradually continued during the year 2020.

Collectibles

Regarding collectibles, out of all 45,595 sales that have existed since April 2019, 44,799 are attributed to Decentraland. And among all these sales, 44,172 were made from February to August 2020.

Decentraland therefore completely crushes competition with “derivative” metaverse sales.

Evolution of Active wallets through time

Similar to the sales volume, we have separated the number of LAND wallets and “collectibles”. As a reminder, the wallets whom we consider to be active are those who have interacted over the week with the dedicated smart contract.

NFT Virtual worlds (LAND)

As of March 2018, there have been a total of 14,437 active wallets for the three projects. This corresponds, separately to:

• Decentraland: 10,245 Active wallets
• CryptoVoxels: 3,181 Active wallets
• Somnium Space: 1,011 Active wallets

Once again, Decentraland seems to be the clear leader during 2018 and 2019 but the trend seems to be changing in 2020.

NFT Collectibles

As with sales volume, the number of active wallets of collectibles was dominated primarily by Decentraland. With 17,670 wallets compared to 7,232 for CryptoVoxels and 2,126 for Somnium Space, Decentraland’s dominance is still overwhelming.

In total, we have counted 37,273 unique wallets per week since March 2018 on all three projects.

Decentraland stays king

Marked by a strong dominance of Decentraland for two years, the two challengers went to great lengths to develop projects that could compete with the leader.

In the first half of 2020, these efforts seem to have started to bear fruit, thanks to more affordable LAND prices on the one hand and more accessible creation possibilities on the other.

Other than the sales USD volume traded, the two challengers combined manage to outperform Decentraland in terms of active wallets and number of sales.

Perhaps it is only a matter of time before a real balance is found between the three platforms, in the meantime, Decentraland still remains the strong leader.