The Final Word on Decentraland ’s Numbers
Decentraland : Counting users in the metaverse is tough. CoinDesk scoured and analyzed multiple data sources to distill an answer.
Key takeaways:
- Determining the population of Decentraland on an average day, or at events like its Music Festival, is a difficult task because the metaverse is fraught with bots.
- CoinDesk worked with data company Atlas Corp. to create a number that reflects what we believe is an accurate count of active players in this metaverse.
- 810: The active population of Decentraland on an average day, according to our research.
- 3,668: Number of active users with a non-fungible token in their wallet at the Metaverse Music Festival.
It’s tough doing a census of the metaverse.
Try as we might, CoinDesk, in the eyes of Decentraland’s fans, just couldn’t get the numbers right.
Metaverse platforms such as The Sandbox and Decentraland present a challenge of sorting bots from real people, and then even real people can be inactive or AFK, short for “away from keyboard” for hours, days, even weeks. One way to filter out bots is to filter users by those with non-fungible tokens (NFT), which also weeds out “tourists” who pop in for a quick look and leave without meaningful interaction. In addition, it can be argued that those users with NFTs matter the most because in a Web3 metaverse like Decentraland, users with NFTs such as ones that denote ownership of real estate in decentraland (LAND) or wearable items that unlock some of the more popular experiences like ICE Poker are the ones who are most active in the platform, and certainly are the most valuable to the ecosystem’s success.
Another challenge in determining how many active users there are in Decentraland, despite there being an abundance of open-source data available on the blockchain, comes down to the fact that Decentraland and MANA token holders have a vested interest to make sure this number appears as large as possible. Certainly, publishers including Electronic Arts or Activision Blizzard want to see a high level of active players on their games such as Battlefield or Call of Duty, but their stocks have other fundamentals behind them and don’t rely on the rise and fall of a single game or platform. These games also don’t have the problem of idle bots that hang out to inflate the player base.
Hop into a session of either of these traditional games and you’ll be greeted with action from the moment you arrive. But log into Decentraland and you’re dropped into an apparent ghost town. There are players on there, and more in certain areas, but are they active?
So in order to figure out just how many active users there are on the platform we used every available tool out there to try and track this down, from DappRadar to Atlas Corp.’s data repository (which powers DCL-Metrics), to the open-source Catalyst Nodes Monitor, DappRadar and Nansen. We even tracked how many players went to the much-hyped Metaverse Music Festival thanks to Atlas Corp.’s data.
It’s important to remember that with one exception, which we’ll address later, these aren’t CoinDesk’s numbers. We’re reporting them directly from the source.
