Decentraland's MANA and Shiba uptake surges year-on-year — eToro

Increasing interest in the Metaverse has been seen as a reason for Decentraland native token MANA and memecoin Shiba Inu's (SHIB's) outpaced growth on retail trading platform eToro over the past 12 months.

In an Oct. 7 report shared with Cointelegraph, eToro stated that MANA and SHIB saw the biggest year-on-year surge in hodlers in the most recent quarter, rising 437% and 269% apiece compared to Q3 2021.

Other notable hodler increases on eToro platform included Enjin (ENJ), Polygon (MATIC), and Basic Attention Token (BAT) with increases 229%, 107% and 107%, respectively. 

eToro crypto market analyst Simon Peters said that rise of MANA in particular suggests the Metaverse has become a key theme of the crypto market this year despite the bear market:

“The Metaverse has been a major new frontier and that is reflected in the exponential growth in open positions of MANA. Although crypto markets have been difficult in recent months, the fastest risers indicate real interest in some of the most innovative projects in the past year.”

It is also worth noting that while the beloved SHIB is primarily a memecoin, the dog-inspired cryptocurrency gained a new use-case in May 2022, allowing hodlers to use the crypto to purchase land in the Shiba metaverse.

The crypto is also involved in an upcoming mobile NFT game called Shiba Eternity, which will be available on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, and will be compatible with its Shiboshi NFTs.

However, while the two Metaverse-linked tokens saw gains, eToro’s report noted that the top 10 most-held assets on the platform remain unchanged over the last 12 months.

Bitcoin (BTC), Cardano (ADA) and Ether (ETH) take the top three spots, while SHIB is ranked sixth and MANA is ranked tenth.

Related: The feds are coming for the metaverse, from Axie Infinity to Bored Apes

The uptick in Decentraland’s MANA token comes despite Decentraland catalyst nodes monitor on Github showing only 467 people online using the platform at the time of writing, while people in the crypto community on Twitter noted there were around 500 yesterday also.

The figures seem low considering MANA has a market cap of $1.2 billion.

Just fyi dappradar tracks the interactions with DCL contracts not the users online (around ~500 atm)https://t.co/9lbpALw0oC https://t.co/6AJPJiex3y

— jin (@dankvr) October 6, 2022

Data from DCL Metrics lists the number of unique visitors to Decentraland at 7,871 as of Oct. 6, which is the highest number so far this month. However this figure pales in comparison to the 18,000 daily users Decentraland co-founder Ari Meilich reported back in December 2021.

MANA is currently the forty-sixth largest crypto asset in terms of market cap according to CoinGecko, and Its price is down 88.1% to $0.69 since its all time high of $5.85 on Nov. 25 2021. Over the past 24 hours, $115.3 million worth of MANA has changed hands.