Metaverse Market Analysis: August 22-28, 2022

Welcome to Metaverse Market Analysis! Every Monday we bring you the latest stats and data on the overall state of the metaverse market. This column is in partnership with the incredible team from OneLand, a financial platform for virtual lands in the metaverse.

Highlights:

• The Sandbox kicks off Alpha Season 3, its most jam-packed, most accessible and longest season yet; but will LANDS get sold?
• NFT Worlds releases dev update on Minecraft-less Worlds – could the project see brighter days?
• Decentraland holds Metaverse Art Week, amid a slight turnaround in sales count and land cap.

Market Data & Analysis

OneLand 7-day data shows aggregate land caps in ETH for the 7 metaverse projects down (-1.53%) for a 13th consecutive week, with trading volumes down 22.5% and holders steady. All projects’ land caps were down for the week, except for Decentraland and Worldwide Webb.

Interestingly, The Sandbox’s launch of the new Alpha Season 3 on Wednesday is yet to elicit a rally, the project’s land cap is in fact in free-fall across all 7 days of the week. Meanwhile, in a week in which NFT Worlds released its first formal dev update on the now Minecraft-less product, some renewed trading activity did surface, albeit no turnaround in a cascading land market cap and average price. 

This all happened in spite of a second consecutive weekly downturn in the price of ETH (-11.66%).

The Sandbox

The Sandbox kicked off its new Alpha Season 3 Wednesday which, though deep in a bear market, is its most extensive, longest and most accessible yet. Nevertheless, the Season launch failed to elicit any rally in the LANDs trade, the week witnessing significant decreases in volume (-32%) and sales (-22%), putting downward pressure on prices (-12.6%).

The Sandbox’s land cap continued to slide through the week, even after Wednesday’s launch, to end it down 4.1%, this despite a 3×3 Estate selling nearby Snoop Dogg and Steve Aoki for 19.9 ETH, and as the price of $ETH (and $SAND, -13.1%) began falling Friday. However, numbers of unique holders at least remained steady for a second consecutive week.

The 10-week season, a full 7 weeks longer than the previous two seasons, appears part of a strategy to attract more players and, therefore, potential landowners. In line with this, taking into consideration the context and performance of the previous two seasons provides a useful reference. The Sandbox’s Alpha Season 1 (Nov 29 – Dec 20, 2021) kicked off on the heels of a massive bull run, its land cap booming 47% over the 3 weeks.

On the contrary, Season 2, launched just following the peak of that rally and at the start of a 2-month crash; 3 weeks later, The Sandbox’s land cap had fallen 14%. It is going to be very interesting to see what happens this time round.

Decentraland

A top sale of 11,500 MANA (approx. 6 ETH) did little to rescue Decentraland’s recent market decline, but at least it helped see its market cap enjoy a marginal recovery from the previous week’s 7% dive, up 2.77% for the week.

Two more sales than the week before is by no stretch of the imagination a recovery; in fact, and no matter the lower prices of $ETH or $MANA, Decentraland’s sales numbers have been dwindling around the 30-mark for over 2 months now. The average price of a parcel ended the week sunk to a shockingly low 1.87 ETH. Furthermore, with trading volume (-17.3%) also reversing its very temporary swing-around, some may have hoped for a better performance from Decentraland’s third edition of Art Week. 

Mirroring $ETH and $SAND, Decentraland’s native token $MANA also ended a second week in the red, down 11.76%.

Voxels

Although Voxels this week announced plans to restructure and rejuvenate its marketplace, neither listing 6 new parcels (on Chronos Island) for 0.41 ETH each, nor a Burn Party on Andromeda Island in which 6 other parcels were extinguished, had much of a discernible effect. 

Weekly land sales in Voxels were up by 8 to 26, reversing much of the previous week’s 40% drop. But the average price of a parcel continues to collapse, regardless of last week’s short-lived increase, this week descending to a dismal 0.497 ETH, just enough to evoke a doleful increase of 1 sale. With a top sale of just 1.36 ETH on Wednesday, prior to ETH’s downturn, 7-day increases in trading volume and sales count were enough to see Voxels end the week with its land cap down only marginally, -0.23%.

Somnium Space

It was a relatively quiet week for Somnium Space on the news front, albeit with a good selection of live events to keep the community active. There was no recovery in sales from the previous week’s poor showing, with only one additional sale lifting the tally to 4, and a 30% drop in average price to 1.51 ETH leading to a 2.9% fall in land market cap.

The price of its native token $CUBE started to fall in line with $ETH, $SAND and $MANA on Friday, but quickly rallied to end the week down just over 1%.

NFT Worlds

Just one day after mentioning that the Minecraft-inspired virtual worlds project appeared nowhere to be seen save for a few lonely Twitter Spaces, NFT Worlds surprised the community this week with a new #dev-updates channel in its Discord, listing various updates on the now Minecraft-less project. It seems to have led to some revival in trading activity, with volumes and sales numbers up 20.4% and 27.7% respectively for the week. 

Nevertheless, a lot more positive results than these will need to be seen at NFT Worlds before the market is inspired to jump on board the project’s next instalment. Holder numbers continue to fall (down for both the week and the month), suggesting that few, if any, new investors are coming on board just yet. The average price of one World continues to drop, down 5.4% more for the week to a miniscule 0.716 ETH (just over $1,000), while land cap slid for a 9th consecutive week, down 2.45% to 34,374 ETH.

Reversing the weekly trend of ETH and other metaverse tokens, the price of the $WRLD token witnessed an ever-so-slight though discernible rally over the weekend. 

Top Sales by Metaverse (7D)

Metaverse Tokens (7D)

For comprehensive market and metaverse project data, find out more on oneland.world and follow for the latest updates on Twitter.

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*All investment/financial opinions expressed by NFT Plazas are from the personal research and experience of our site moderators and are intended as educational material only. Individuals are required to fully research any product prior to making any kind of investment.

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