Decentraland, the virtual real estate platform once valued at a billion dollars, is now in a free fall. The company’s revenues have plummeted over the past year, with only a handful of users trading virtual real estate. In Decentraland’s virtual world, slices of land are sold as NFTs, which are bought and sold in the platform. However, only between 20 and 30 people are buying and selling property on a weekly basis, amounting to roughly $50,000, according to The Block.

The numbers paint a grim picture for the future of virtual real estate. Trading volumes in millions of dollars between late 2021 and early 2022 have now reduced to almost nothing. Decentraland’s woes are indicative of a much bigger decline in interest in owning virtual real estate. Even other platforms like The Sandbox are struggling to attract serious numbers of users.

Last year, DappRadar, a data aggregator, found that Decentraland only had 38 “active users” over a 24-hour period, despite the company’s lofty billion-dollar market cap. In a recent Fashion Week event, Decentraland had only 26,000 users attend, compared to over 100,000 users last year. Many users expressed disappointment, with one attendee noting, “the world didn’t feel very alive.”

Metaverse architect Hunter Swihart believes that Decentraland’s failure to attract users will result in the platform going under in the near future. He called out the big businesses that bought land for millions of dollars, which he now considers a terrible mistake.

YouTuber Dan Olson was even more scathing, describing the platform as a “bad video game made up of smaller, worse video games wrapped in real-estate scheme cosplaying as The Matrix” in a 109-minute takedown.

The decline in virtual real estate trading volumes points to the virtual metaverse real estate market being a bubble ready to burst. It remains to be seen if other platforms can turn the tide and reignite interest in virtual real estate, or if this trend is irreversible.