Wagner James Au / New World Notes

While there's way too much media hype about a putative "real estate boom" in blockchain-based virtual worlds, this isn't to dismiss these worlds out of hand. Recently I've been making some brief forays into market leader Decentraland (that's me, in front of the buff Doge) and it's pretty impressive (if graphically limited) for a web-based world, with smooth performance and a very easy first-time user experience. 

In terms of actual usage, according to Decentraland co-founder Ari Meilich, who I chatted with late last month, Decentraland currently has:

• About 300,000 monthly active users
• 18,000 daily active users
• A maximum concurrency of 2,500.  

What's more, Ari tells me, "Decentraland has only really started working properly a couple of months ago. User growth has been 10x in the last few months." He attributes that to the complex architecture of the project:

"DCL is a very atypical architecture that hasn’t ever been built before," as he puts it. "Peer to peer communications, a distributed network serving the content, and land-based applications that load contiguously. This resulted in a much longer time to build."

Another interesting point that contrasts Decentraland from venture-backed blockchain worlds like The Sandbox:

"Decentraland is public infrastructure, not a private company. There’s a DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] now, controlled by MANA and LAND holders, which sits in top of 210 million MANA [which equals] over $800 million." (MANA is the world's official cryptocurrency, which rides on top of Ethereum, while LAND is, well, land plots in Decentraland, also tracked on the blockchain.)

Ari tells me that 100,000 people verifiably own MANA on-chain. It's likely that this 100K comprise the world's most active users. Which is not bad, for a non-profit virtual world project in its starting phase. The real question now is whether these people who've put a stake in the world can bring in others, growing its content and social ecosystem, and make the place feel like a real (virtual) world. For that to be true, I'd look for that daily active user rate to start growing strongly.