Present & Future of CryptoVoxels Metaverse
Author: DawnXue（@dawnx666）
Translation: Chyn Chiou-Yeu（@C_Chyn）
Forewords
On Twitter, the CryptoVoxels team said that user data hasn’t met their expectation, on which they held a public discussion. This article is both informed and inspired by that discussion.
How’s CryptoVoxels (CV) performing in parcel ownership, traffic, and wearable? Behind data, what are the problems and their possible solutions?
First, we will discuss the data and contributing factors in the following aspects:
1. Number of parcel owners.
2. Monthly traffic.
3. Data on CV wearables.
Number of Parcel Owners
The number of parcel owners has risen far less than the number of newly-minted parcels. Up to 15 October 2021, a total of 5,996 parcels has been minted on CV. Among them, 5,603 have been sold. However, there are only 1576 owners. The following figure tracks the cumulative number of parcels and number of owners at the end of each month. It’s obvious that the owner base has expanded much slower than the parcels.
The slow rise in the number of parcel owners may be mainly attributed to the following reasons:
Parcels are relatively expensive. Price tags such as US$ 6,000 are relatively common. Although significantly cheaper than real world physical parcels, it is still a financial barrier to many users.
Institutions and certain individuals own a lot of parcels, making less parcel available for sale to newcomers. For example, on 15 October 2021, MVB (an outdoor media display company on CV) owns 148 parcels, while justlike.eth (an individual) owns 40 parcels.
The buying process is relatively complicated. For someone new to CV, let alone those new to crypto, the process to buy a parcel is not intuitive, and there’s no readily available information or customer support.
Monthly Traffic.
The number of parcel owners, however slowly, keeps rising. However, monthly traffic sees a lot of fluctuations, rising to the historical high of 1.59mil in April 2021 before gradually dropping to only 0.83mil in September, a little more than half of the high point. The good news is that traffic for the first half of October has already reached 0.64mil, anticipating a probably rebound.
The dramatic fluctuation may be caused by the following:
The CV team is more geared towards technology and product, not operations. Ben, the founder of CV, seems to focus on the tech side of the product, and only occasionally interact with users via twitter, lacking systematic operations.
Builders are more geared towards short-time gratification of creation, not clear goals, user interactivity, and long-term value. One example is the MetaCat bookstore, where you can party but you can’t read, so it wasn’t often used after construction completed.
Traffic is dependent on events. For example, the following figures shows the daily traffic at imnotArt Chicago, one of the most visited parcel in September 2021. The columns in orange indicate days with events, significantly beating days without events.
Data on CV wearables.
Up to 15 October 2021, there are 8,634 CV wearables created by 536 parcel owners. On average, each of them created 16 wearables, but the record-holder has created 455 wearables. These wearables are owned by 11,532 individuals. Owners significantly outnumber creators because every wearable can have multiple copies.
Here are some problems facing CV wearables:
You can’t mint wearables unless you own a parcel on CV. Everyone can make a wearable, but only parcel owners can mint them on CV. Such barrier might discourage creation of high quality.
Putting on a wearable is difficult unless you’ve done it before. Just like the user in the following figure, oftentimes “newbies” have to consult others in order to put on their wearables.
Now, we’ll discuss the problems raised above from the perspective of different stakeholders:
1. CV Team
2. Parcel Owners
3. All Other Users
CV Team
The CV Team has recently made some efforts in traffic and interactions and achieved some progress.
To facilitate interaction between parcel owners and visitors, CV added the guestbook functions on 5 October 2021. Parcel owners can send gifts to all visitors who’ve signed on the guestbook, or copy all of their addresses.
CV is also hiring in marketing. On 12 October 2021, Kasey, from CV, tweeted a hiring notice for social media, press releases, and marketing.
CV is also considering to enable log in from Facebook and Twitter to boost user growth. Of course, some CV users object to such moves because these are centralized platforms.
At this time, users’ avatar presentations consist of CV’s default figure and users’ wearable, not allowing replacing the default figure with a user-uploaded 3D file. However, according to CV’s official twitter, this is under consideration. If realized, dressing up the avatar will be more playable.
In addition to the issues above, which are already under consideration by the CV team, the following points also deserve notice:
The CV free space is not only accessible through URL, not from CV itself. but free space users might be as creative as parcel owners. Should CV allow the free space to be accessible from the official site? Should we set up an incentive system that connects the free space and the parcels? Perhaps this can encourage high quality construction projects.
Should we provide a systematic guide for users, prominently displayed on CV’s official website? For example, the guide can cover how to buy a parcel, and how to put on wearables.
Parcel price in the primary market seems to face a tricky balance. Higher prices lead to slow growth in owner number, while lower prices directly hurt the interests of the developers. Currently, parcels sold at less than 1ETH is very rare. Lower prices in the primary market also hurts both the financial interests and confidence of the existing parcel owners.
Parcel Owners.
Parcel owners should think more about long-term when building: more on what the building can be used for, instead of what the building will look like on the outside.
Interactivity between visitors and the building contributes to traffic. Some buildings are very playable even without a guide. For example, in the Halloween-themed venue created by @uttermelone in CV’s free spaces, there is a watermelon-searching game where you follow a guiding arrow. Another building called solar, also in space, is a programmed interactive game, imitating the galaxy.
play(space) https://www.cryptovoxels.com/spaces/dfee9c8d-6256-469f-896b-8a76ab1be45c
solar(space) https://www.cryptovoxels.com/spaces/5f439817-8122-4dbf-8330-913e84600d74
Stronger interactions between visitors inside a building lead to longer stays and even more visitors. Even players inside a building cannot form meaningful interactions, they tend to leave. However, if they interact, such as the 5-minute question time at LEPEMPIRE — Beach building on 13 October 2021, visitors stay. The daily traffic at the site reached 360.
For events, organized tours seem to be better than scattered individual visits. Here, we compare two venues that have just held events. In AILY gallery, for 10 Oct evening event, the host organized a tour with multi-person interactive voice call with guests. The result was quite dramatic with 305 visitors. In contrast, BCA metaopus called for visitors to take photos and leave messages on its official twitter account. Data suggests that, at least in this case, the former approach is better. Of course, event organizers are still exploring different possibilities, and it’s too early to tell what is the definite best practice.
All Other Players
These are what everyone can do:
If there isn’t an official how-to guide, users can create one. We plan to publish a set of guides based on Will Lang’s summaries on topics such as: how to buy a parcel, how to fly and sit, how to put on wearables, how to rename parcels and users, how to mint wearables.
Create a navigation chart for CV parcels. Now it’s hard to locate your favorite artists, friends, venues, and so on. A what’s where chart will certainly help. A regularly-updated sight recommendation list will be even better. There might be hidden gems: interesting venue with little traffic.
Summary for news in constructions and event. In addition to exploring existing venues, users are often interested in what’s new. There is already monthly updates in data (by CV Analytics). If information on new constructions and new events can be collected and published, people will read them.
Interactive scripts that are readily available and easily modified. Scripts always strengthen interactivity, but not everyone can write a script. A library of readily available script (or even better, modifiable scripts with demonstrations) can help parcels owners build more interactive venues.
Integration in the production process of CV wearables. Only parcel owners can mint CV wearables but they might not know how to make vox objects. Those who know how to make vox objects might not own parcels. Connecting parcel owners and “vox makers” will boost creation of creation of high quality wearables.
Last thoughts
@AndrewSteinwold said:
15 years ago, if I were to tell you that we would spend most of our waking hours staring at screens, it would have sounded dystopian Today, we spend ~7 hours per day on TVs, smartphones, computers, and nobody bats an eye.
It sounds dystopian today, but In ~15 years we will spend most of our time in the metaverse and nobody will bat and eye. Human behavior changes and evolves in ways that we hardly even notice
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