The metaverse has been the hottest trend in tech this past month and tokens attached to metaverse projects are showing that growth with the Sandbox’s SAND and Decentraland’s MANA are both up over 600% in the past month to reach all-time highs of US$8.51 and US$5.90 yesterday, respectively, according to CoinMarketCap.
Fast facts
- The Sandbox is a platform built on the Ethereum blockchain that allows users to explore a virtual world using non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and is one of a suite of games invested in by Hong Kong-based unicorn Animoca Brands, one of the lead investors behind the hit play-to-earn game Axie Infinity. SAND received another shot in the arm recently as sportswear giant Adidas tweeted that it was developing an “adiVerse” with the platform, with its price gaining more than 100% in the few days since the announcement alone.
- Decentraland has seen such growth through this period that its market cap of US$8.9 billion has even overtaken the governance token of Axie Infinity, AXS, at US$8.2 billion at press time, according to CoinMarketCap. After exploding in popularity earlier in the year as the break-out model of play-to-earn games, Axie Infinity’s user growth has slowed as concerns have grown over the long-term profitability of its in-game token, SLP.
- “We’re getting a lot of attention from the media around the metaverse,” said Blake Cassidy, CEO of Australian microinvestments firm, Bamboo, told Forkast.News, explaining why there has been such growth in the market for metaverse tokens recently. “Facebook and Zuckerberg, they’re wanting to launch their own metaverse, they’ve rebranded to Meta, and that’s just bringing more attention to the space and people starting to say, ‘Well, maybe this is the future.’ And then of course, you get the speculators coming in looking at what’s already in existence and participating in those ecosystems.”
- Adidas has also announced another crypto-related partnership recently, by sarcastically tweeting the new partnership with Coinbase, the largest exchange in the U.S., was “probably nothing.” While it is still light on the details, some have speculated this could be a step towards Adidas accepting cryptocurrency for its goods and further integration with NFTs. But while Adidas’s involvement helped boost SAND’s price even further, the same cannot be said of Coinbase’s share price, which has been in a downward most of this month. After a strong performance coming into November, Coinbase’s shares — trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker COIN — have lost roughly 12% in the past few weeks and were trading at US$314 at after-hours trading on Thursday, according to MarketWatch.
- SAND was trading at US$6.94 and MANA at US$4.89 at press time, according to CoinMarketCap.
- Elsewhere in the market, some industry watchers are expecting Bitcoin’s price volatility may soon rise as major exchanges are due to settle monthly options totaling nearly US$3 billion Friday, with exchange Deribit settling US$2.6 billion of that alone, according to a recent tweet by the firm.