Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu rejects a report that The Sandbox has 500 DAUs, saying the virtual world has over 200,000 MAUs
Hannah Miller / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
The dispute lands two weeks after DappRadar's on-chain tally put The Sandbox at roughly 4,500 daily active users — against a ~$1.3B market cap shared with Decentraland — and ten months after the platform's $93M SoftBank Vision Fund 2 raise. Yat Siu, whose Animoca Brands was valued at $5.9B before the crypto winter tightened, is pushing back on the number that most threatens that valuation story.
His counter is definitional: 200,000+ monthly active users versus a 500-DAU claim he rejects outright. It is the same founder-versus-analytics-firm playbook BeReal ran when it disputed Similarweb's decline estimates.
First-order effects
- Siu directly contests Bloomberg's reported figure, shifting the public benchmark for The Sandbox from daily to monthly actives — a move that flatters engagement but leaves the DappRadar on-chain count unrebutted.
- Animoca Brands' fundraising position under crypto-winter conditions now hinges on which user number investors accept.
Second-order effects
- Third-party analytics firms like DappRadar face pressure to defend their methodology, since founders disputing their counts undermines the data layer that metaverse valuations rest on.
- Rival platforms such as Decentraland — whose own 675 peak-DAU figure anchored the same coverage — get pulled into a comparative-engagement argument they did not start.
Third-order effects
- If self-reported MAU figures become the accepted rebuttal to on-chain DAU counts, web3 consumer platforms may escape the engagement scrutiny that traditional apps face, weakening the link between market caps and actual usage.
- A persistent gap between tokenized valuations (~$1.3B per platform) and measured activity points toward either standardized engagement disclosure or a repricing of metaverse assets.
The trend: Web3 platform founders are increasingly disputing third-party analytics with self-reported metrics, turning engagement measurement itself into contested ground as crypto-winter valuations meet thin usage data.