Kraken Intelligence's report underlines "how the crypto metaverse will change the way we communicate."
According to statistics from Kraken Intelligence and CoinGecko's May 2022 market analysis, the data revealed that Sandbox (SAND) is up 470%, STEPN (GMT) is up 746%, Decentraland (MANA) is up 41%, and Infinity (AXS) is up 511%.
When investigating 1-year performance, Metaverse space has topped every other crypto category with a return of 395%. On top of that, the second-biggest category for year-on-year growth was exchange tokens, which increased by 6%.
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On the other hand, all other sectors revealed negative performance last month. For instance, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) saw a decrease of 13% and 25%, respectively, whereas decentralized finance (DeFi) was down 72% in the past year.
According to the report, “NFT volume saw a large decrease with daily volume dropping over 87%,” while losses in decentralized finance (DeFi) ranged from -3% to -53% among the sector's biggest assets.
In fact, according to DappRadar, blockchain-orientated games employing NFTs and Metaverse platforms have been quite popular this year, with roughly 1 million users per day participating in such projects.
On top of that, a significant amount of funds were allocated to the gaming sector. For instance, more than $2 billion was collected to explore and assist various Metaverse-related projects and blockchain-based games in Q1 of 2022. According to DappRadar’s first-quarter games issue, 52% of all blockchain activity originated from game decentralized applications.
“In the first three months of 2022, VCs and investors have raked at least $2.5 billion into blockchain games and their underlying infrastructure. At this pace, play-to-earn and metaverse-related projects will add $10 billion this year to keep building the future of this industry.”
For instance, back in May, Kevin Lin, the co-founder of the technology-driven entertainment company Metatheory raised $24M to continue creating high-quality games while implementing non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Likewise, in the same month, America's private VC firm dubbed Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) initiated a $600M fund to aid Web3-based gaming startups while providing a better future for the gaming industry.
Interestingly enough, every sector resulted in negative returns over the past 30 and 90 days, according to Kraken’s report. Metaverse was one of the sectors that saw the most significant price fall as it plummeted 42% over the past 30 days, following Layer-1 tokens, such as Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL), which dropped 43% over the past month.
On the contrary, while looking at the three timeframes tracked by Kraken, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) suffered comparatively minor losses in comparison to other altcoins.