Despite headline growth, Immutable's DAUWs are stuck at 230,000

Only 9% of wallets are active

It wasn’t something I planned for this week, but it seems I’m continuing to churn through various of the user numbers arising from blockchain games.

Today’s missive has been inspired by the latest tweet from Immutable co-founder Robbie Ferguson, which highlights the growth of the Immutable zkEVM blockchain, particularly since May — as shown below.

Of course, this immediately got me interested, because I’d already been tracking activity on Immutable zkEVM, in part to check whether I could cross-reference any activity from two of my favorite projects — Guild of Guardians and Boomland — which also happen to be running on the blockchain.

Now I should point out that I’m using a different data source; but it is the official Immutable block explorer which shows much the same growth trajectory as above.

However, it’s worth noting that Ferguson’s graph is measuring monthly active users (presumably unique wallets), whereas the block explorer is throwing out unique daily wallets.

Notably, Ferguson’s graph peaks around 1.8 million active wallets in the past month, whereas the block explorer records 2.7 million lifetime accounts and 3.3 million lifetime addresses.

The key issue, however, is activity on a daily basis.

For while overall activity on Immutable is certainly growing fast, daily activity is not.

This can clearly be seen in the following graph in which I’ve plotted the lifetime growth in Immutable accounts on a daily basis (blue) as well as the number of daily active unique wallets (red).

NB it’s a log graph to highlight the differences.

So — as with Ferguson’s graph — we see a strongly growing blue line, especially from the start of April, up from 1,000 lifetime wallets to 100,000 lifetime wallets at the start of May and then around 2 million wallets at the start of June.

However, when we compare the number of active wallets, May is the point where although lifetime growth continues apace, the number of daily active wallets plateaus around the 220,000 mark.

Simply put, despite growing from 1 million to 2.6 million lifetime wallets in the past four weeks, the number of daily active wallets on Immutable still hasn’t surpassed 230,000.

This trend can be more clearly seen in the following graph which plots the number of daily active wallets against the total number of lifetime wallets as a percent.

Back in ‘tens of thousands of wallets’ period of late April, there were days in which 75% of the total number of wallets were active, but as wallet growth exploded, the percentage of active wallets has continued to drop.

Presently it’s about 9%.

Actually this doesn’t surprise me too much, as I know Boomland has been doing a lot of UA experimentation with web2 gamers, which I’d expect to drive a lot of wallet signups that likely wouldn’t be retained.

Similarly Guild of Guardians launched through the app stores and although we don’t have any official download figures, it would make sense that it would be another input that’s high in wallet creation volume, but very low in activity, in part because it’s not a highly onchain game.

Interestingly Ferguson tweets that Guild of Guardians has 250,000 MAUs (not sure how that converts to wallets?), while Boomland has done more than 100,000 onchain DAUs. Actually, the DappRadar’s data say it’s much higher.

Of course, this isn’t to say that Immutable zkEVM is a failure. It’s early days for a chain that as Immutable never tires of telling us has over 320 games on the books and “more than 60 games launching over next 5 months”.

Yet considering it’s also currently running a daily giveaway program that encourages people to sign into their wallet to collect gems that will eventually convert into what’s expected to be the IMX token, and has its first games going live, I find it’s a bit weird that Immutable has been stuck for the past month below 230,000 daily active unique wallets.

I guess it simply reveals that its current growth is not directed towards anything specific. People sign up for Passport and then don’t do anything else. Obviously, this is because people aren’t interested in using blockchains per se. They can be interested in playing games and other blockchain applications, though.

Immutable needs to get such things launched sooner rather than later.

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Calendar

• Hunters On-Chain launches its play-to-airdrop — 19th June

• Shrapnel launches STX3.1 test — 24th June

• Decentraland Game Jam starts — 26th June

• Space-based MMOG Influence launches — 27th June

• Moki Genesis Collection launches on Ronin — 9th July

• Champions Tactics mints in-game NFTs — 15th July

• Illuvium goes live — 25th July

Funding news

• Mirror World Labs, the developer of Solana-based gaming-focused L2 Sonic, has announced its Series A funding, which takes total funding to $16 million. The $12 million round on a reported $100 million valuation for its forthcoming token was led by Bitkraft, Big Brain and existing investor Galaxy Interactive, with participation from Sanctor and other existing investors such as OKX, Sky9 and Mirana, plus a bunch of unnamed angels.

Sonic combines its SVM game engine with its Hypergrid parallel processing framework to allow each game to run its own zk-based chain on top of the Solana mainnet. It has a number of existing partnerships including with ActozSoft. It's also launched its Odyssey points project on its testnet to build community.

Mirror World originally closed its $4 million seed round in the boom days of 2022, when it was building its own AI-based gaming ecosystem. Don’t times change!

Talking Saga news

• It’s Wednesday so another episode of Blockchain Gaming World is out. In #173, I talk to Saga CEO Rebecca Liao about her vision of a “L1 for launching L1s”, which is focused on enabling game developers to spin up their own blockchains at the cost of $500 a month. She hopes to have 100 titles live by the end of 2024.

We also discuss how Saga negotiated its mainnet and token launch earlier in 2024, and what Liao thinks about building community through airdrops and rewards; something Saga has been notably successful in doing. Its SAGA token is currently ranked as the 335th crypto with a market cap of $135 million.

Wen MapleStory Universe news

• Nexon has released the first teaser video on X for its highly anticipated MapleStory Universe web3 project. In conjunction, its Discord has gone live — already over 22,000 members — and next up the the website will be revamped to support pre-launch phase, which will include a points-based quest system as shown below.