Metaverse market collapses, with monthly platform sales falling 96% so far this year

Quick Take

  • Monthly sales on metaverse platforms have fallen 96% this year.
  • The Sandbox reclaimed its market dominance among metaverse platforms, though Decentraland finished the year with the most valued metaverse land parcels.

While Metaverse platforms brought in $49.2 million in monthly trading volume in January, that figure dropped to a mere $2 million in November, a decline of 96% from the start of the year, according to The Block Research's 2023 Digital Asset Outlook report

Metaverse land prices have also fallen 90% from the beginning of the year, according to The Block's data dashboard. 

While metaverse platform The Sandbox lost its dominance in land sales to NFT Worlds during the first few months of 2022, it finished off the year with 54% of market sales in November.

The Sandbox also saw the highest number of unique users among any other virtual world platforms with 17,019 users. The second most populated platform, Decentraland, had 6,529 unique users. 

NFT Worlds led metaverse land values over the first few months of 2022, with the average sale price for a virtual plot hitting a high of of $44,000 in the week of Feb. 26. Decentraland now claims that lead, albeit at a much lower price, with an average of $1,780 per land parcel, according to The Block's Data Dashboard. 


© 2024 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.

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