Decentraland’s MANA Token Jumps as Metaverse Tokens Outperform Crypto Markets

The native token of metaverse project Decentraland (MANA) surged early Friday as metaverse tokens became the best-performing digital assets since the start of this year.

MANA’s price increased 12% in the past 24 hours and was trading at 44 cents at press time. The token is up nearly 38% in a week, although it is still down 92% from its all-time high of $5.85 in November 2021, according to crypto price tracker CoinGecko.

The price jump came as Decentraland introduced new features for users on Thursday. The update introduces new profile features and avatar functions, Decentraland shared in a tweet. The update didn't directly increase Decentraland user numbers or change the MANA token’s value proposition.

Decentraland is a virtual-reality platform where users can buy land and create virtual structures such as concert halls and poker rooms and charge visitors for the experience. The project recently drew scrutiny for its unimpressive user numbers.

Cryptocurrencies with smaller market capitalizations have been outperforming bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) recently as sentiment has improved in the broader crypto markets because of positive macroeconomic data.

The CoinDesk Culture and Entertainment (CNE) sector index, which includes metaverse tokens such as MANA, has gained 37% since the start of the year, becoming the best-performing asset class among CoinDesk’s sector indexes. The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI), which tracks the performance of the broad crypto market, is up 18% during the same period.

Other major metaverse tokens have put up impressive gains in the past week. The Sandbox’s native SAND jumped 31.3%, while Gala Games’s GALA more than doubled, CoinDesk data shows.

UPDATE (Jan. 13, 16:20 UTC): Updates chart and crypto sector returns.