Animoca Brands: There’s More Than One Way to Measure Success

Active users are not the only way to measure the success of a blockchain game, according to the co-founder of Animoca Brands, as he explains why metaverse metrics are falling.

Recent reports detail the low usership of prominent metaverse platforms, such as the Sandbox and Decentraland. Given the $4 billion and $1 billion valuations of the respective platforms, the daily usership of each seems strikingly low.

Measured as “unique active wallets” on DappRadar, both ranged in the low to mid 600s over the past day.

Animoca Brands: Measuring Active Users a Tricky Task

But representatives of each of the metaverse platforms have spoken out about how misleading this metric is. For instance, creative director at Decentraland Sam Hamilton argued that the metric did not represent active users on the platform. Instead, he said the measure only represented “people interacting with our contracts.” 

Hamilton did acknowledge that the amount of “tourists and spectators” had fallen since peak attendance in March. However, he asserted that the number of users returning on a daily basis continues to increase.

Hamilton said that a dashboard created by the platform’s community provided a more accurate assessment of overall usership. While the dashboard shows that unique visitors have dropped the past week, the figure still amounts to over 6,400.

Regarding the Sandbox, Yat Siu, the co-founder of Animoca Brands, which owns the platform, also disagreed with DappRadar’s metric.

While its calculations include sales of virtual land represented by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Siu said many users hold on to these NFTs rather than sell them. 

According to Siu, there are 200,000 active users on the platform on a monthly basis. However, he added that there are other metrics that more accurately reflect user engagement on the platform.

He cited the number of new employees on the platform, as well as the amount of revenue being generated. Highlighting the high-roller status of landowners on the platform, he said that each had a wallet net worth between $500,000 and $2 million.

Good News Out of Hong Kong Over Axie Infinity

Animoca Brands is responsible for Axie Infinity, far and away the most popular blockchain-based video game. The co-founder noted that blockchain-based games had largely been spared the disaffection affecting cryptocurrency industry over the past year.

Siu said he expects developments in Hong Kong over the coming weeks to provide some stimulation to the sector. The island city announced that web3 and the metaverse would be the focus of its upcoming FinTech week. During the event, organizers said they would also be introducing a new regulatory approach to cryptocurrencies. Siu said that organizers had invited him to speak at the event, which he said made him “optimistic” about the proposed reforms.