DappRadar figures show The Sandbox has become the second most-traded NFT collection as Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks lose momentum and fall down the rankings.
We've written endless articles on CoinMarketCap Academy in recent weeks — covering the metaverse's explosion in popularity.
The market mania was arguably triggered by news that Facebook was going to rebrand to Meta and shift its attention to virtual worlds.
Of course, Meta is rather late to the party considering a number of blockchain projects have been in this space for years. Decentraland and The Sandbox have both been rewarded handsomely for this, with their tokens surging dramatically over the past month.
But beyond astronomical price growth, it's easy to forget that there's another big battle currently playing out in the metaverse — the quest to snap up coveted plots of virtual land.
New data from DappRadar suggests activity is booming, with land sales worth more than $100 million being recorded in the past week alone.
The Sandbox is streets ahead on $86.5 million, followed by Decentraland on $15.5 million. CryptoVoxels and Somnium Space, two other blockchain projects in the space, clocked up $2.68 million and $1.1 million respectively.
All of this has now propelled these metaverses to the top of the leaderboard, with The Sandbox becoming the second most-traded NFT collection as Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks lose momentum and fall down the rankings.
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A Bustling New Market
DappRadar's figures also reveal that prices for virtual land are surging — and between Nov. 22 and 28, five of the top ten NFT purchases were related to the metaverse. This included $2.4 million spent on 116 land parcels in Decentraland, which has broken records as the most expensive purchase of virtual land ever made. And it doesn't end here — the Axie Infinity Genesis Plot ended up going under the hammer for a cool $2.33 million.
Setting out its findings in a blog post, DappRadar said:
"Virtual worlds carry such enormous potential, and we're just beginning to see the full array of use cases for metaverse land. The potential is almost boundless from simply building a property on top of your parcel as you would in Minecraft to actually monetizing your metaverse land through advertisements."
The site also noted how Barbados is planning to build its very own embassy in the metaverse, too — and how many use cases currently remain untapped.
Adidas and Nike are currently making a concerted push to establish a presence in the metaverse, offering their apparel digitally. And during an interview where he predicted that transaction volumes for sports-related NFTs will double to $2 billion in 2022, a Deloitte executive anticipated that major clubs will embrace the metaverse with "breathtaking" speed when they understand the size of the opportunity in front of them.
