The Metaverse: $2 Billion Bet on a Ghost Town

On 23 November 2021 a Canadian company called Tokens.com, through its subsidiary Metaverse Group, paid 618,000 MANA tokens, about $2.43 million at the time, for 116 plots of land on a street that did not exist. The street was Fashion Street in Decentraland, a virtual world that ran in a web browser. A week later a company called Republic Realm paid $4.3 million for a plot in a rival world, The Sandbox. Each sale was a record.

Four weeks before that, on 28 October 2021, Facebook had renamed itself Meta and told the world that the "metaverse", an online 3D world where people would work, shop and socialise through digital avatars, was the next internet. Crypto investors had a version of it ready to sell. In the twelve months to November 2022 buyers spent about $1.93 billion of cryptocurrency on virtual land, according to research by the analytics firm DappRadar reported by BBC News.

The land rush

Decentraland and The Sandbox worked the same way. The worlds were divided into a fixed number of square plots. Each plot was an NFT, a digital ownership certificate recorded on a blockchain, the shared public ledger behind cryptocurrencies, so it could be bought and sold like a deed. Each world had its own currency, MANA for Decentraland and SAND for The Sandbox, used to pay for land and items and traded on exchanges like shares. Owning land meant owning a spot on the map where, in theory, crowds would one day walk past a shop, a gallery or a concert stage.

The pitch borrowed the oldest line in property: they are not making any more of it. In the week after Meta's rename, investors poured into both tokens. MANA reached $5.85 and SAND $8.40 in late November 2021, according to CoinGecko. In one week that month, DappRadar counted more than $100 million of land sales across four virtual worlds, $86.6 million of it in The Sandbox.

Brands followed the buyers. PwC's Hong Kong arm bought land in The Sandbox. Adidas built a space there. Samsung opened a virtual store in Decentraland, and in February 2022 JPMorgan opened a lounge there, with a tiger wandering around inside. Someone paid about $450,000 for the plot next to the rapper Snoop Dogg's virtual mansion in The Sandbox.

Thirty-eight users, or eight thousand

In October 2022 CoinDesk reported that, according to DappRadar, Decentraland had 38 daily active users. The world's tokens were then worth about $1.3 billion. The number spread across the internet as proof that the metaverse was empty.

It was not quite that. DappRadar counts a user only when a crypto wallet sends a transaction to the platform's smart contracts, the pieces of code that handle land and item sales. A visitor who logged in, walked around, chatted or went to a concert without buying anything was invisible to it. A fairer comparison is a shopping centre that counts only customers who buy a sofa. Decentraland's creative director, Sam Hamilton, said DappRadar "doesn't track our users, only people interacting with our contracts", and put the true figure at about 8,000 users a day, with 56,697 monthly active users in September 2022. The Sandbox showed 522 daily users on DappRadar's count the same day.

So the 38 was a misreading. But the correction did not help much, and the money was already leaving. DappRadar's own report for the third quarter of 2022 showed trading in virtual-world tokens and land down 91.6% from the previous quarter, to about $90 million. Eight thousand people a day is a small crowd for a world whose land had sold for billions, and even Decentraland's own number was far below what the prices implied.

Meta's bill

Meta's metaverse was never built on crypto. It ran on Meta's own Quest headsets and an app called Horizon Worlds, but its spending set the mood. Reality Labs, the division behind it, lost more than $60 billion from 2020 onwards, according to Reuters, with Bloomberg putting the total above $70 billion. In December 2025 Bloomberg reported that Meta planned to cut its metaverse budget by up to 30%, and in early 2026 Meta cut about 10% of Reality Labs staff, moving money to artificial intelligence and smart glasses. Mark Zuckerberg had renamed his company after an idea he was now quietly shrinking. The low point in public came in August 2022, when he posted a picture of his cartoon avatar in front of a computer-drawn Eiffel Tower in Horizon Worlds to mark the app's launch in France and Spain. Its dead-eyed, legless look was mocked around the world, and he answered by posting better-looking versions, saying the first had been made in a hurry.

Where it stands

On 16 October 2026 one MANA traded at about $0.09, 98% below its peak, and one SAND at about $0.06, down 99%, according to CoinGecko. The two tokens together were worth roughly $340 million. Land in both worlds can still be bought, for a small fraction of what it cost in 2021.

Decentraland and The Sandbox are still running. Each has released new versions and held concerts, fashion weeks and game events, and both still have a core of players and builders. Neither has come close to the crowds its land prices assumed. Meanwhile games such as Roblox and Fortnite, which never needed a token or a land deed, kept hundreds of millions of players.

The metaverse land rush rested on a property idea without the thing that makes property valuable: people who want to be there.