Metaverse trading volume plummeted 80% but hype hasn’t decreased

cointelegraph.com:

Third-quarter trading volume for the top 10 Metaverse projects may have fallen 80% compared to the second quarter, but analytics firm Dappradar suggests that interest in virtual worlds still remains.

The Metaverse sector has been hit with a fair amount of negative press as of late, particularly around suggested low user activity across certain platforms, such as Decentraland and Meta — reports which they have refuted.

DappRadar noted in an Oct. 20 report that while trading volumes have taken a sharp hit during Q3, the average number of NFT sales for these 10 projects only decreased by 11.55% compared to Q2.

DappRadar explains that lower trading volumes could merely reflect decreasing asset prices and not necessarily lack of interest, noting that:

A caveat to these sentiments however, is that eight of the top 10 Metaverse projects saw significant decreases in their NFT sales counts during Q3, with Yuga Labs’ Otherside seeing a 74% decrease for the quarter.

The positive action was primarily driven by The Sandbox and former Minecraft-based platform NFT Worlds V2, which saw NFT sale count increases of 190% and 79% apiece.

DappRadar attributed this to the hype surrounding The Sandbox’s Alpha Season 3 which offers a host of new gaming experiences and collectibles. While NFT Worlds V2 being booted off of Minecraft may have been seen as a “buying opportunity” as the value of its NFTs dropped by 90% in Q3.

Meanwhile, DappRadar’s report indicated that the floor prices for NFT land plots had decreased by 75% on average, which may have been one of the reasons why trading volumes had decreased by so much.

While the value of any piece of real estate, virtual or otherwise, is subject to swings, “Metaverse real estate is currently very