According to DappRadar data, four blockchain-based Metaverse projects obtained over $100 million in virtual land NFT sales last week
As per a Nov. 30 post from the decentralised application (DApp) analytics firm, activity on The Sandbox, Decentraland, CryptoVoxels, and Somnium Space was "booming" from Nov. 22 to Nov. 28 with a total of $105.8 million in trading volume from more than 6,000 traders:
“Undoubtedly, Metaverse land is the next big hit in the NFT space. Outputting record sales numbers and constantly increasing NFT prices, virtual worlds are the new top commodity in the crypto space.”
The Sandbox created the most volume for the week, with $86.56 million, followed by Decentraland, which generated $15.53 million, and CryptoVoxels and Somnium Space, which generated $2.68 million and $1.1 million, respectively. Although projects on other chains, such as Solana, are gathering pace, all four of these Metaverse projects are developed on the Ethereum blockchain.
“The wave of attention towards virtual worlds like The Sandbox and Decentraland started with Facebook’s rebranding to Meta,” DappRader said.
“However, this is only the tip of the iceberg that pushed the term Metaverse into the mainstream. Virtual worlds carry such enormous potential, and we’re just beginning to see the full array of use cases for metaverse land,” according to the blog post.
In response to The Sandbox's significant rise in NFT land sales volume, Yat Siu, chairman and co-founder of Sandbox's parent company Animoca Brands, stated: “Facebook in their attempt to usurp the narrative of the Metaverse caused a chain reaction of other companies not in Web3 (such as Microsoft) to also announce their Metaverse strategies and created mass interest and awareness.”
Siu compared Meta's approach to The Sandbox's more organic, user-created environment.
“While not everyone understands what digital property rights really mean, enough of them are interested in this now and this has created more net awareness. The Sandbox has captured the narrative of a real Metaverse one where you can really own a piece of it, and this is also reflected somewhat in the token price,” Siu added.
Decentraland has witnessed the most NFT land sale in the previous 30 days, with a plot consisting of 116 parcels of land in the virtual world's Fashion Street District selling for 618,000 MANA tokens ($2.7 million at current pricing) on Nov. 23.
The Sandbox also offered a tokenized ultra-luxury mega-yacht for 149 Ether (ETH), which was valued at more than $666,000 recently.
