The Metaverse Bubble Has Popped and We've Got the Charts to Prove It

The metaverse was meant to herald a bright new future for humanity. With none other than Mark Zuckerberg at the helm, it was supposed to welcome five billion users and grow to $13 trillion, according to researchers at Citi.

Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse division at Meta (formerly Facebook) lost $4.5 billion last quarter alone, adding to its lifetime metaverse losses of $46 billion. His flagship metaverse game for adults, Horizon Worlds, is embarrassingly popular with children.

Meanwhile, the crypto metaverse industry appears to be fizzling out, at least when measured using the prices of assets like land parcels, metaverse currencies, and in-world characters.

The Sandbox, once valued at over $7 billion, has seen its transaction volumes on DappRadar plummet 99.9% from its 2022 highs of $117 million to less than $8,000 as of August 8.

Zooming in on The Sandbox's non-fungible token (NFT) sales doesn't provide any redemption. Its NFTs traded $10.2 million on November 24, 2021 alone. On any average day this August, NFTs from those collections traded less than $10,000 — a decline of over 99.9%.

Decentraland, one of the oldest crypto metaverses, has also seen its daily transactions decline 99.9% from $2.5 million on November 29, 2021, to less than $5,000 on an average day this month.

Other metaverse lands have suffered a similar fate. Axie Infinity trading volumes are down 99% from nearly $1 billion on September 30, 2021, to less than $2 million today. Metaverse transactions are down 99% from 672 on April 6, 2022, to less than five on an average day this month. League of Kingdoms transactions are an outlier, down a "mere" 90% from their March 19, 2022, all-time highs.

By almost any measure — whether by unique active wallets, NFT floor price, land parcel resales, skin values, or in-game actions — crypto metaverses are less popular, almost without exception, than in 2021 and 2022.

Many crypto metaverses, following the ICO model that began with MasterCoin and NextCoin in 2013, sold a proprietary token to serve as an in-game currency and governance token. Almost all of these metaverse tokens are down at least 90% from their highs, like user engagement statistics within digital worlds.

A chart of various metaverse currencies from mid-November 2021 to today shows declines of over 90%. Decentraland's MANA, Axie Infinity's AXS and SLP, The Sandbox's SAND, Yield Guild Games' YGG, Vulcan Forged's PYR, Metahero's HERO, GensoKishi Metaverse's MV, DeFi Land's DFL, and NFT World's WRLD have all declined over 90% since mid-November 2021.

Despite two years of decay, there are still believers in the metaverse — especially Bloomberg's #3 ranked billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg. With 10X more wealth personally than the combined market capitalization of all CoinMarketCap-categorized metaverse tokens, Zuckerberg and his Reality Labs division at Meta are seemingly undeterred in their commitment to making Horizon Worlds a success.

As with any bubble-popped industry, there will be rare survivors. Even eBay and Amazon emerged from the dot-com bubble as victors. Generally speaking, the combined market capitalization of over 100 CoinMarketCap-categorized metaverse assets has declined from $50 billion on November 25, 2021, to $16 billion.

If this crypto sector is to stage a comeback, it will certainly be a long journey.