

Every week, Metaland presents you 3 Metaverse news not to be missed for brands!


Don't miss the latest Metaverse news of the week!
🚇 The Test of the Week
A Subway in The Sandbox! Hong Kong-based mass transit company MTR (Mass Transit Railway) is deploying an experience in the metaverse to enhance its employer brand.
Why is this important?
February 08, 2023 Edition: The Subway in the Metaverse, 425M Wallets, and Smart Wearables!

Why is this important?
At first glance, one might wonder why a public transportation company would be interested in setting up in a virtual world where one travels effortlessly and by teleportation. However, this experience demonstrates that an immersive media like The Sandbox can be part of the company's communication strategy.
Metaland has tested the experience for you and shares our impressions!
🟢 Pros
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Time Travel: The highlight of this experience is the ability to pass through a station poster to find oneself in 1980 at the Choi Hung (Hong Kong) neighborhood station. This highlights the company's heritage and evolution through the past, present, and future.
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Employer Brand: From a commercial perspective, we found it interesting to use the metaverse to communicate the benefits and opportunities offered by MTR to its employees.
🔴 Cons
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Quests: The experience is rather short, and the quests (besides time travel) remain fairly simple and out of context. We would have appreciated a more coherent and worked story-telling.
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Level design: The station is fairly well designed, but the edges of the plot are open in some places and some streets stop at the edge of the void, which breaks the immersion and degrades the user experience.
👨🎓 Metaland's Rating: 5/10
MTR Corporation Limited cleverly uses this immersive media to take us on a time-travel journey and project us into its vision of the future subway station. We see a desire to attract future employees by showing its innovative side and highlighting the benefits for employees (bonuses, insurance, free transportation, etc.).
👉 See the experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Koqdc6Ykht8
🎬 Take action to go further:
Test the experience: https://www.sandbox.game/en/season/?x=-1&y=0
🌍 The eco-system news

Crypto.com reports an increase in the number of cryptocurrency holders. According to the report, 425 million people worldwide now own cryptocurrencies, which represents a 39% increase from the year 2022.
Other notable facts:
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119 million people own neither ETH nor BTC but own other cryptocurrencies.
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The number of Ethereum (ETH) holders has increased from 24 to 87 million, a 263% increase.
Why is this important?
From a social perspective:
In addition to the growing number of people entering the Web3, the report also highlights the importance of decentralization.
Cryptocurrencies are often associated with speculation and financial gains, but for many, they are a means of protecting against loss of freedoms and weaknesses in the current financial system. This is something we often forget as citizens of a country like France.
In the ranking of countries where residents are most interested in buying Bitcoin (according to Google Trends), several African countries are at the top, as well as territories like Cyprus, Australia and Canada.
Regarding Cyprus, citizens are still reeling from the "haircut" of 2013 that saw 60% of their savings above 100,000 euros disappear after the collapse of the second largest bank in the country.
As for Canada and Australia, strong adoption of Bitcoin is probably due to the restrictions imposed on freedoms during the Covid-19 health crisis. For example, Canadian banks blocked credit cards of truck drivers who were protesting against lockdowns.
From a commercial perspective:
425 million people represent a significant portion of the global population. What's interesting from a commercial perspective is the number of wallets created. Wallets are often considered the number 1 barrier by brands when designing Web3 activations.
The process is not complicated, but it adds steps to the customer journey. It's like if you were asked to create a Gmail account before joining a sweepstakes. Fun fact: creating a Metamask wallet is faster than creating a Gmail account today.
We will review the existing solutions to make creating wallets easier for your customers in a future edition.
👉 For more information:
Refer to Crypto.com's 2022 crypto market sizing report: https://crypto.com/research/2022-crypto-market-sizing-report
🎬 Action to take:
Download and read the report (less than 18 pages).
🔩 Technical news:
Decentraland Manifesto: The Year of the Creators.

In this manifesto, Decentraland continues its momentum by adding new features to enable creators to go even further and improve the user experience.
The decentralized metaverse sets itself three goals:
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Liberate the creativity of creators and become the most popular space (3D) creation platform by significantly improving their development kit (SDK), publishing experiences (through Worlds, mentioned in our previous edition) and monetizing UGC (user-generated content) such as wearables and emotes.
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Make Decentraland more fun by adding more gamification: badge system, quest system, and an integrated screenshot system to take photos and videos of your visits!
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Improve performance: have a smooth gaming experience even with low-cost devices.
🔎 Metaland's view
In our opinion, Decentraland is clearly moving in the right direction and directly addresses its friction points. Creating quest or badge systems is technically achievable at present, but requires development time (and money) that could be used more wisely during the experience creation process. For example, The Sandbox game engine (Game Maker) allows you to easily (without code) create quests and objectives for your users.
The feature that particularly caught our attention is the Smart wearables.
These allow creators to make content available to visitors that only wearers of these wearables can see or have access to, like a kind of magic power. For example, by wearing glasses, you will suddenly be able to see zombies or other objects, doors or passages that allow you to gamify and monetize your creations in a new way.
For brands and creators, Smart wearables represent an opportunity to attract and offer more added value to their creations. These Smart wearables could allow users who have acquired them to unlock quests, NFTs, and other content only accessible to them and recreate a classic free-to-play game mechanic with pay-to-win options, where the experience is accessible for free but people with a Smart wearable will be able to access more quests, points, and content, etc.
Metaland will keep you informed of the first cases of use of this new feature.
👉 To learn more:
Read the manifesto: https://decentraland.org/blog/announcements/decentraland-2023-manifesto-year-of-the-creators/
Have a great day,
Charles from Metaland