The hyped-up metaverse, which had been the year’s most popular narrative going into it, started to lose steam in 2022. The average drawdown in blockchain’s worst-performing sector was 89%.
Even Facebook’s ambitious intentions to rule the metaverse are in disarray; the company is losing more than $1 billion every month, and its flagship “Horizon Worlds” only draws in less than 200,000 users.
Despite all the doom, 2023 will be significantly more productive because of record-breaking fundraising and signs from The Sandbox, play-to-earn games, and specialized metaverse platforms.
The Sandbox
The Sandbox’s co-founder and chief operating officer, Sébastien Borget, has recently been traveling frequently to the business’s new offices. He spoke before Christmas about how the metaverse platforms will perform in 2022.
Many experts claim that adoption has had a mixed year at best, citing DappRadar numbers that seemed to show that The Sandbox had as few as 500 daily average visitors and that only 50 individuals were walking through Decentraland. Both businesses fiercely disputed these statistics, arguing they only represented the number of daily users who completed a transaction and not the total number of daily visitors.
Borget dismisses the low estimates given and claims that the metaverse site receives around 30,000 visitors per day on average. When the site gets mobile later this year, he anticipates a spike in user numbers. “That will make a big difference. 30,000 is still a small number when compared to Facebook for example,” says Borget. “But when you enter The Sandbox, you see people running around – it is full.”
Since August 24th, 17 million people have visited The Sandbox Alpha Season 3, a threefold increase from Season 2. The fact that the word “Alpha” indicates that it is still in the early phases of development makes that even more astounding.
Therefore, even though “goblin mode” narrowly beat out “metaverse” to become the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2022, there is still hope that it will become more widely used in 2023. Even though financing afterwards fell off a cliff, investors contributed $120 billion to the development of metaverse technology by June. That gives the industry a lot of time to deliver the goods in 2023.
One of the metaverse’s pioneers, The Sandbox was established four years ago. It has hosted outstanding land transactions totaling $530 million and attracted well-known figures like Snoop Dogg.
Borget notes that the project has a financial runway of at least five years and that headcount has increased by two over the previous year. Design firms and builders who utilize their digital properties to produce experiences are making a strong effort to draw in more users.
“On Sandbox, 230 studios are now creating, and that is just the beginning. When many nations have established a home away from home in the metaverse, we also observe a rise in the popularity of cultural events, adds Borget.
Can the metaverse take the place of the real world?
Upland, also launched four years ago, is a virtual property trade game linked to the real world on the EOS blockchain platform and is commonly described as Monopoly on the blockchain. Both the Sandbox and Upland are members of the Open Metaverse Alliance, which is chaired by Dirk Lueth, co-founder and CEO of Upland.
“When we founded Upland in 2018, very few people had even heard of the word ‘metaverse,’” says Lueth, noting that these days, “the future is at least envisioned — I’d call that progress.”
Lueth cites the interest from non-crypto native consumers and brands as a high highlight. In the last year, $2 billion has been spent on virtual land across metaverse platforms as people and businesses scramble to have a foothold in this new virtual area.
“We are happy to have the most unique landowners [more than 290,000] who come to interact, create value, and develop communities,” Lueth says.
A subset of users are creators or meta-entrepreneurs who are developing their own enterprises in the metaverse. Artists can make decor items and sell them to other users, while some have set up stores to sell NFTs secondhand. The developing virtual communities are one of the major elements attracting and retaining consumers. They are referred to as “nodes” in Upland.
“We also find that users who are part of communities tend to stay more, and much of their activity is around building their communities.”
“Some of them have game nights, create charity fundraising events together, make governance decisions about what to build in their neighborhoods, and even elect representatives. Some communities are formed around similar interests — like racing, which is a feature in Upland. They’ve created racing leagues, are building their neighborhood tracks and creating digital assets for rewards,” says Lueth.
Digital ownership in the Metaverse
Along with the interoperability of assets across platforms, digital ownership is frequently hailed as the revolutionary element for mainstream adoption. Kevin Rose, chief marketing officer for Alien Worlds, points out that a lightsaber from one world might not be appropriate for a battle in the middle ages. He says, “It doesn’t always make sense.
In the NFT-based game Alien Worlds, players can collect and exchange one-of-a-kind digital goods that were mostly created on the Wax blockchain. In Alien Worlds, players compete to gain Trilium (TLM), an in-game currency required to manage one of the six competing DAOs.
The Decentraland Foundation’s Marja Konttinen makes a strong argument for digital ownership in a new setting: the fashion industry. Decentraland is a 3D browser-based virtual world platform that became live in February 2020.
Let’s examine a metaverse use case where ownership will be crucial: the fashion industry. You won’t be able to claim any wearables to add to your wardrobe if you don’t have a wallet to log in, which makes it difficult for you to enjoy digital fashion at its best, according to Konttinen.
Others are relying on a blend of social interaction and the allure of novel experiences made available by rapidly evolving technology. Somnium Space is an immersive virtual reality-based metaverse developed on the Ethereum blockchain, in contrast to the majority of other metaverse platforms, which are still accessed via screens. The debut was in 2017. Interviewing Artur Sychov, its founder and CEO, requires chatting with his avatar.
Custom VR headsets are being made by Somnium Space. Sychov is in a good position to comment on comfort and features since he may spend several hours a day in it.
Somnium Space is still expanding in comparison to some of the major names. More than 250,000 downloads have been made to date, which equates to 80–150 daily visitors in virtual reality and an additional 1,000–2,000 users on the screen-based web client.
Somnium Space is all about being “immersive,” and guests can compete in sports, go to discos, and actively participate in whatever is going on.
According to Sychov, “Since it’s VR, if I am kayaking, then I am moving my arms and it is tiring – same as in real life,”
“That’s the power of VR – if I’m dancing, then I’m dancing not just hitting a button that causes my avatar to move. People understand that you are actually present with them – at social events or meetings.”
Sychov believes that the ownership and user base of metaverse platforms like Somnium Space will determine how successful they are in the future. According to him, 90% of the landowners on the platform purchased their parcels with the intention of building on them, making the platform more popular and enticing to future landowners.
The terrain has been improved by Sychov with a brand-new idea of “worlds.” Stargates are required for entry, and there are no restrictions on space, construction, or activity once within these new worlds. He demonstrates to me how his avatar enters a planet through a gate and finds itself in a new location right away.
He adds, echoing Borget’s excitement at the increased activity of design studios over in The Sandbox, “Individuals and companies are buying these worlds – it’s all about building,” The builders come out when it’s still crypto winter, though.
Metaverse built by Play-to-earn
The play-to-earn phenomena, which is being led by the blockchain game Axie Infinity, is the other significant advancement that is pushing us closer to the metaverse. Yield Guild Games (YGG(which )’s experienced enormous growth during the epidemic and a steep decrease after) passion for the market was unaffected.
The Guild brings participants together to study and make money in blockchain-based economies like Axie and provides new players with NFTs to help them get going. More than 80 games are currently included in the sector as a whole.
Beryl Li, a co-founder, is optimistic about the P2E sector’s future and claims that the current bear market is an opportunity to be ready for better times to come.
“Those who recognize the opportunity in Web3 are harnessing the bear market as a time to upskill and further educate themselves, to ensure they are well-positioned to capitalize on the growing skills demand of the decentralized, global digital economy,” says Li.
The guild has created learning possibilities, such as a collaboration with Nas Academy to introduce the Web3 Metaversity, which offers Guild members the chance to master crypto-native skills.
Seattle Software Developers can make your metaverse idea a virtual reality! Contact us today to speak with a metaverse developer.
